North Eastern

Bosaso and the Art of the Deal

The commercial capital of the northeast, Bosaso sprawls along a Gulf of Aden waterfront that has hosted merchant vessels for well over a thousand years. Today the port buzzes with livestock shipments bound for the Arabian Peninsula and cargo planes carrying remittances in reverse, while the city's markets display the particular energy of a place that genuinely believes in trade as a way of life. The region is also home to telecommunications infrastructure that has made northern Somalia, improbably, among the better connected parts of East Africa.

Mountains Above the Monsoon

The Karkaar mountain range runs parallel to the Gulf of Aden coast, intercepting moisture from the khareef monsoon and creating pockets of relatively green landscape above the surrounding hot plains. These highlands shelter hamadryas baboons and the gerenuk with its famously elongated neck, while below them the Nugaal and Bari plains roll out in ochre and the dusty silver of thorn scrub. Camel caravans still move through this terrain in patterns that have barely shifted in centuries.

Incense and Verse

North Eastern Somalia sits within one of the great frankincense growing regions of the world, and Boswellia trees clinging to limestone hillsides have produced the resin that perfumed temples and camel convoys from Rome to Oman for more than three thousand years. Alongside this aromatic inheritance, the Somali oral poetry tradition remains a living art, with bards composing verse that functions simultaneously as diplomatic message, love letter, and social record.