The drive up to Sheikh from Berbera is one of the more theatrical road journeys on the Horn of Africa. The ascent starts at sea level in blistering Gulf Coast heat and winds through twenty kilometers of switchbacks and eroded ravines before arriving at a plateau where the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees and the vegetation has shifted from dry scrub to juniper woodland. The town appears like a correction — green, cool, settled.
The Colonial Inheritance
Sheikh contains some of the best-preserved British colonial architecture in the former Somaliland Protectorate. The Aden Protectorate administration established a school here in the early twentieth century, and the stone buildings they built — solid, practical, built for permanence — are still standing and still in use. The Sheikh Secondary School educated generations of Somali professionals and politicians, and asking any Somali of a certain age about Sheikh tends to produce a strong reaction, usually connected to someone they knew who went there.
Walking through the school grounds in the morning, I found students in blue uniforms moving between buildings that were built a century ago for exactly this purpose. The continuity struck me more than the architecture did, which is to say it struck me considerably.
Highland Walks and Juniper Forest
The hills around Sheikh are walkable in a way that almost nowhere else in Somalia is — the altitude makes the air cool enough for genuine effort, and the landscape is open enough to navigate by sight. Juniper trees grow along the ridgelines, their trunks twisted by seasonal wind, and in the morning the light through the canopy has a quality that is nothing like the flat white glare of the coast.
I walked for three hours one morning without a guide, following a track that climbed above the town to a ridge with views back down the escarpment toward Berbera and the Gulf. The contrast between where I was standing and where I had come from forty-eight hours earlier was almost absurd — same country, same road, completely different world.
Frankincense trees grow in the highland scrubland here and throughout Somaliland’s interior. Breaking a small piece of resin and holding it produces that specific sharp-sweet smell that I had always associated with incense in cathedrals and now associate with the specific light of a Somali morning.
The Town Itself
Sheikh is not large and its pace reflects that. Tea shops open early and close late, serving the milky shaah that punctuates every day. A weekly market draws people from surrounding highland villages. The guesthouse options are basic but functional — this is not a tourist infrastructure situation, it is a place where you find a room and figure the rest out.
The people I met in Sheikh were, on average, more immediately curious about me than anywhere else I traveled in Somaliland — the town sees very few foreign visitors, and my presence was an occasion for questions that were direct without being rude. Where was I from? What did I think of Somaliland? Did I know about the school? What was my job?
A Useful Base
Sheikh works well as a night stop between Hargeisa and Berbera, or as a deliberate destination for anyone interested in the highland landscape or colonial history. The road between all three points is straightforward in a reliable vehicle.
When to go: Year-round at this altitude, Sheikh is more comfortable than the coast. The highland rains fall in April–May and October, but outside those windows the weather is genuinely pleasant by Somaliland standards. The cooler months of November through February are ideal for walking.