The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [3]
Abdi and I proceeded to a customs office, a largely empty building containing a few uniformed officials milling around behind bare wood and glass partitions. One of the bored agents looked me over and demanded twenty dollars for an “airport tax” and another twenty dollars for a visa, which he impressed onto my passport with a stamp that looked to be left over from the days of the collapsed Somali Republic.1 Asking how long I wished to remain in the country, he scribbled my answer into the allotted field on the still-drying stamp—apparently the twenty-dollar visa was a flat rate.
Abdi led me to a gleaming white-and-chrome Land Cruiser. Perched at either end of the back seat were two UN-trained bodyguards, Said and Abdirashid, who would accompany me like another heartbeat for the next six weeks. They cradled their worn AK-47s between the pant legs of their beige uniforms; crudely sewn on their sleeves were patches with the letters “SPU”—Special Police Unit—superimposed on a blue stag’s head, the emblem of the Puntland police.
In Somalia, 4×4s are needed to get around even in urban areas; with the exception of the main thoroughfare, Galkayo’s unpaved streets were worn down to their bare bones, the dirt eaten away by tire treads to the uneven rock beneath. The surfaces of the buildings, some whitewashed, some matching the dull brown of the road, were chipped and worn, and occasionally bullet-marked. The more upscale houses were covered with geometric patterns of vibrant blues, greens, and yellows, like the colours of a Van Gogh canvas. Similarly vivid paintings on the facades of shops—bags of flour, cans of oil, generic bottles of pills—advertised what was sold within. The Land Cruiser rocked to a stop in front of one of these; the listing English letters above the entrance read “General Store,” and one of the SPU guards dashed inside and returned with some cream-filled biscuits and a number of bottles of water. In the mid-afternoon heat, the streets were largely deserted except for a few children, who skipped around me cautiously.
The one-lane highway connecting Galkayo to Garowe and Bossaso is the sole road running through Puntland along its north–south axis, a solitary link stretching across seven hundred kilometres of desert. Its decrepit state was symbolic of the neglect the region experienced under former dictator Siad Barre, and from the international community more recently. The three-decade-old Chinese concrete was crumbling and corroded, and craterous potholes turned the 250-kilometre journey from Galkayo to Garowe into a four- or five-hour jolting ordeal. It was January 2009, the onset of the first of Puntland’s two dry seasons, the jiilaal, and parched shrubs dotted the barren landscape; the dust clung to my skin until my shirt felt like fine sandpaper. Piles of bottles, old tires, and the odd stripped chassis lined both sides of the road; discarded plastic bags, struggling in the clutches of spiny bushes, waved at us spasmodically as we drove by. Every so often an impassive camel plodded across the road, slowing us to a near halt.
At irregular intervals, buildings of thatched branches and the occasional panel of corrugated metal clustered into settlements by the side of the highway. The boundaries of these shantytowns were marked by speed bumps built by the inhabitants out of packed dirt and rocks. A few empty gasoline drums blocked the road at the entrance to each village, with two or three listless guards loitering around the makeshift checkpoints.
At one of these pit stops we abruptly turned off the road and pulled into an open-air restaurant, its plastic tables and chairs almost spilling onto the highway. A few words were exchanged, and out came metal plates heaped with sticky rice sopped in goat’s milk, flanked by fist-sized chunks of gristly camel meat. My two guards, sharing one of the plates, used their hands to squish the rice into pasty balls,