Somaliland Musings (one of a few more to come)

Various stories out of chronological order will be added pending my access to computers. Here's the first one:

Las Geel

Not satisfied with their own Lascaux cave paintings, some French archaeologists came to Somaliland a few years ago to check out some ancient cows on rocks they heard rumors about exisiting in Las Geel (pompously translated "The dromedaries' watering hole" by whoever wrote the poster in the guard house/museum). They immediately recognized the awesomeness of these pictures (cows and men, men and cows, cows and calves, and some cow pornography) and stayed to study them. Now the area has become Somaliland's primary tourist destination, which is to say that when we drove off the paved-ish road through the desert for about twenty minutes, we finally found a tiny house with a couple of guides hanging out who were almost as surprised to see us as we were to see them. We then embarked on a lovely hike made awkward by stupid long dresses up the rocky hill/mountain to get to the first paintings marked off by barbed wire which was already broken down. We climbed around to get a better look.

The paintings were colorful and primitive looking, and I tried to get more information from the guide-a charming older gentleman with a wooden cane that he used for hiking and pointing out important details on the paintings. He didn't speak English so we communicated through broken Somali, a bit of Arabic, and some hand gestures. Interestingly, for your future reference, the Somali hand sign for knife is similar to the gesture other people use for "I'm going to kill you." I can see how this could potentially cause problems for future tourists who might misunderstand him.

Since I was small, I always loved ruins, the older the better, even going through a brief "I'm going to be an archeaologist when I grow up" phase. I like to walk on ancient under-water roads and climb up old crumbly staircases, and I generally ignore signs telling me not to go beyond a certain point or not to touch certain objects. Naturally, I touched one of the paintings to see how the paint felt and was immediately gasped at and ordered never to do that again. Not because I might mess up the paintings (I didn't touch it enough to do take of any of the paint and I didn't scratch at it and I didn't write "Amanda was here 2011" either) but because they were unsure what the people used for paint and how that might affect my health and/or state of pureness. I thought that was a good call by the French, letting that rumor spread because I think that many people share my same desire to ignore "don't touch" signs, but if you make people afraid to touch something, they are more likely to leave it alone. Personally, I think all museums should be like the Egyptian museum where you can shake hands with a statue of Ra or tweak the nose of a sphinx. You can pretty much do anything except try on Queen Nefertiti's jewelry, which I think would be an awesome exhibit even though it would probably only last a few hours until all of the Queen's old treasures had found new owners. Anyway, I of course touched another painting, and I am happy to report that as yet none of my fingers have turned black and fallen off.