Djibouti-Dire Dawa bus office

Djibouti-Dire Dawa bus office
Originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Once back at our homely hotel in Djibouti City it was time to get organised for our planned journey to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, the next day. We could fly, take the train or the bus. Flying is not much fun, unlike the train, but we had hread very very nasty stories about the train, being impossibly hot and crowded and unsafe, but most of all extremely slow.

So, we followed all the advice we had been given and decided to take the bus and Faisal from the hotel was kind enough to take me to the bus station to buy the two tickets for early the next morning, a good thing he did as we had to go through all the back streets Djibouti had to offer. Fascinating they were too, all corrugated iron colourful houses, wooden huts with colourful ladies selling qat, dusty areas with boys playing football, rubbish heaps home to the dirty ibises, as we call them, bars with men sitting outside listening to the radio, schoolgirls coming back from school, dressed in uniform and so on.

We managed to lay our hands on two tickets for FDJ 2,500 each (E 12, which is very cheap for Djibouti) and we were told to turn up at 5 am, for the bus which'd take until 1 pm to get to Dire Dawa, leaving us plenty of time to make the journey up the mountains to Harar.

Faisal would wake us up at 5 and bring us back to the station. I gave him the Somaliland poster which I was given by the Consul, the owner of the hotel saying he could perhaps best NOT put it up in his hotel, as it would be politically sensitive. Said, from Groningen, who had stayed there for a month had told us that the owner himself had tried to stand for President of Djibouti, but couyldn't find enough support. A pity, as he seemed to be a really good man.