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A hectic, pushing, shoving, heaving, shouting mass of heavily laden Somalis crowds the check-in desks of African Express Airlines in Nairobi. It’s an unusual scene: dozens of people hustling for a space on a plane to Mogadishu, the war-torn capital of Somalia. From there it continues to Berbera, a boiling cauldron of a town, then on to Aden and Dubai.

One-hundred-dollar notes change hands as passengers pay for the inevitable excess baggage. For a formerly nomadic people Somalis don’t travel light.

The stopover in Mogadishu is less than an hour but no one is allowed off the plane. An abandoned plane lies in the bushes near the terminal, African Union peacekeepers man either end of the runway that stretches across the dirt only meters from the edge of the sea.

The next stop, Berbera, is — depending on your point of view — either one of a number of coastal towns in Somalia or the main port in independent Somaliland. The self-declared republic of Somaliland broke away from the rest of Somalia in 1991 but not a single nation in the world has recognized it.

Somaliland is in limbo: It functions and has many of the trappings of the state (unlike it’s southern neighbor Somalia), yet legally it does not exist so has no access to international financial facilities and very limited donor support.

In the first half an hour outside Berbera the bus passes one house — a stick and rag dome in the distance — one woman seeking the scant shade of a thorny acacia tree, four camels and six donkeys.

The rest is a landscape of white sun-bleached rock, brittle thorn bushes and bone-dry riverbeds set against a backdrop of mountains cut by desiccated ravines cut when the rain occasionally comes.

The bus driver slumps sideways as he drives, cigarette in his left hand, mobile phone in his right. Occasionally he clenches the cigarette butt between his protruding brown khat-stained teeth and gives the steering wheel a nudge with his left hand to adjust the direction.

Among the fellow passengers making for the capital Hargeisa are Said, an entrepreneurship graduate from Malaysia on his way back to Bosaaso, the notorious pirate haven, to do "business"; Hassan, the Nairobi-based geology student and shyster claiming to have 10 kilograms of platinum for sale — he avidly reads his book on the world’s wondrous minerals as the bus races along the potholed road; and Rashid, a development studies masters student from Kampala with a transparent bag of duty free chocolates that have proved no match for the 40-degree heat.

All are keen to emphasis that this is Somaliland, emphatically not Somalia. Here, they say, is peace and security. They have a point: Were this south or central Somalia a lone white man on a public bus would not be given good odds to last very long.

Tristan McConnell traveled to Somaliland with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/africa/090611/somaliasomaliland