Holidays in Hell*

What’s not to like about Hargeysa, Somalia?

I was reading a wonderful travel stack called

Caravanserai with Samantha Childress

, where she asked if people ever traveled without itineraries, which I almost always ended up doing because on almost every trip, almost nothing went according to plan, which is why my motto is the now famous “in my job, I must be like the mudflap on a truck: flexible and willing to travel.”

Because Samantha’s prompt brought back so many strange and wonderful memories of trips gone haywire, I thought I would share my responses, and I’ve include her responses to me that sent me ever deeper down the rabbit hole.

Because I left out some details from my initial responses to her prompt for brevity, I decided to add a few more details in brackets to reveal how deep the rabbit holes were.

Switter: During my travels, I preferred going to a new country without anything other than whatever I knew about the place “ambiently.” I enjoyed seeing and exploring a place with a fresh perspective.

I was in Prague once, and with a friend, decided to rent a car and drive to Poland, just because. The car was a Wartburg or some such for $12 a day, the rental agency was in the heart of old Prague, but I had a gps we used to record the location so we knew how to get back.

We went everywhere except Poland. There were ripe cherries on old trees alongside country roads. There were lovely farms. Then we saw a grass airfield where small airplanes were gathered, so we stopped and made a little local air show suddenly international. (My friend was Australian and working in Sudan.) We had a great day with the our fellow airmen and we met a new friend, which led to more aerial adventures later in the week at Pilsner.

On the way back, we followed the signs to Praha and late in the evening, delivered the Wartburg safely to the car agency, and paid the well-spent $12. Our trip to Poland had to wait for another time.

Samantha: But did you ever make it to Poland?! (I love Poland and think it's one of the most underrated countries in Europe.)

Switter: Not yet, but I’m still not dead. I deeply admire the Poles for their courage and steadfastness. What a history! The Austrians owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Without the Poles coming to the rescue of Vienna, the Viennese would now be speaking Turkish.

But if it counts, I’ve been to Djibouti a couple of times.

Samantha: Haha, having been to Djibouti is a distinction few can claim! I say it counts.

Switter: My first trip there was also accidental. I spent two weeks in Hargeysa, Somalia, in a $3 per night hotel. (I reviewed it on Yelp. It’s a solid avoid, especially the room subdivided by a cardboard wall over any weekend when the guest on the other side of the wall is enduring a long, difficult childbirth.)

[Shortly after my Ghanaian colleague and I settled into the hotel, we decided to enjoy dinner across the rubble from the hotel. It was outdoor establishment, lighting provided by burning timbers from ruined buildings and tables made from giant wooden cable spools where herds of cats paraded. The menu for the evening was spaghetti (I don’t recall if there was sauce or side dishes) and orange Fanta, an artifact from years of colonization under Mussolini. When our orders arrived, I checked my cutlery for the tell-tell grit from improper washing, which I found, mostly scraped away with a fingernail, and followed with a generous rinse with Purrel. My colleague snorted that I was too fastidious, as we swatted away the stray cats swarming our spool table.

[We finished dinner, returned to our rooms, fell into a miserable sleep until I heard my colleague wrenching into the little open all-purpose gutter that flowed outside our rooms in the open courtyard created when the building was bombed at some point. We knew a flight was scheduled back to Nairobi for the next morning. When it arrived, I made sure my food poisoned colleague was on it. “I can tough it out until the next flight,” I told him. I resigned myself to a few more meditative days listening to Cape vultures hopefully scratching around on the corrugated roofing above my ceilingless room. They had time; I hoped I had more time.]

One morning a week or so later, I rushed half-packed to the airport(ish) when I heard an aircraft landing. There, next to the wrecked MIG fighters and the crumbling control tower was a lovely CARE International turboprop Cessna flown by an American pilot who was happy for a passenger on the Djibouti leg of his trip.

As we departed, he asked me if I was okay with low level, which duh!, so off we flew at 50’ above the shark infested shore at 160 knots. We buzzed occasional camel riders who didn’t hear our approach, only the instant roar when we past them, and every one of them tried to shoulder their ancient, filigreed Enfield rifles to take a shot at us, but alas, we were too fast for them.

Once in Djibouti, I refreshed myself with a warm $5 Coke, found a taxi, and asked the driver to take me to a hotel with a) hot running water, b) cold air conditioning, and c) no cardboard partitions.

After three or four no vacancies, because it was apparently prime tourist season in the world’s hottest country, the driver shrugged and suggested the Intercontinental.

As an aid worker, I’m more accustomed to $3 a night hotels than $500 a night Intercontinentals, so I asked myself what our CEO would do in that situation. As soon as I reached my room, I immediately turned the a/c on to the lowest setting and took a long shower, a very long shower, to compensate for two weeks of BabyWipes.

The next day, I managed to catch a ride back to Nairobi on a milk run down through Somalia on an Angola-registered, Philippine-crewed C-130 loaded with a well drilling rig and maybe 40 Somali refugees who were being deported. The deer in the headlight look on the faces of my fellow passengers brought out my inner flight attendant, so I did the whole “seat backs locked in the upright position and laptops stowed” as I helped them fasten their seatbelts on the sling seats hung from the aircraft walls. I then settled in and amused myself thinking about the original Star Wars bar room scene on the planet Alderaan, which I felt pretty close to.

I did survive that trip, but I’m not sure how many of my nine lives I spent on it.

Samantha: This is a wild story. If you’re writing a memoir about these experiences, I will be first in line to buy it.

And in fairness to your hotel in Somalia: literally ALL hotels there would be a solid avoid for me, lol! I’m glad the world has aid workers like you who are willing to do that sort of stuff. You’re a better man than I.

Switter: Wild? Wild was when we flew into Hargeysa and were supposed to be picked up by our host who didn’t show, so there we stood on the runway, luggage next to us. Under a nearby acacia tree, a bunch of gunmen sat under an acacia tree eyeing us as they chewed qat in the shade next to their technical.

The longer we stood there trying to look purposely nonchalant, the more intensely they eyed us with a predator-prey kind of interest. After an hour or so, as our purposeful nonchalance look a little wilted, the commander or bwana akulu or whatever his rank stood up, walked over and told us we owed them a security fee.

“How much?” I asked.

“$20,” he replied.

It was an odd world I lived in where I feared the accountants back at the office who checked receipts on my expense report more than I feared a bunch of mildly intoxicated Somali gunmen with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted in the back of a battered Toyota pickup. (We called them Klingon Kruisers because there was always a bunch of warriors, “skinnies,” hanging off the back.)

“I’ll need a receipt for the security services before I can pay you,” I said. Without a word, he turned and walk over to the ruined control tower, entered it, and after about 20 minutes, returned with a piece of paper with a Hargeysa Airport date stamp, “for security serves $20,” scrawled under the stamp and an illegible signature. I handed him $20 and he gave me the receipt. He smiled for the first time, shook my hand, and went back to the acacia shade.

In the last several decades, Hargeysa has rebuilt after the civil war. I see pictures of proper hotels and restaurants now. The streets are mostly free from rubble, but it’s not the Hargeysa I knew. Timing is everything.

*Thanks to P.J.O’Rourke for the title and for inspiring me to seek out all the fun one can find in misery tourism.