Somalia is the final frontier of travel — and Mogadishu will surprise you: the whitewashed Hamarweyne old quarter, the busiest fish market on the Indian Ocean, Lido Beach at sunset, and a city rebuilding itself block by block. Every RJ Travel departure runs with a mandatory armed escort, full security coordination, and drivers who know the city street by street. Further north, Somaliland offers a different Somalia entirely — the 5,000-year-old rock art of Laas Geel and the Ottoman port of Berbera, on some of the least-travelled roads on Earth.
This 7-day private Somalia tour covers Hargeisa market walk, Hargeisa, Laas Geel, Berbera with your own guide, vehicle and security arrangements — no fixed group dates: departures run every day of the year, on your dates and at your pace. You stay in secure vetted hotels on full board in Mogadishu, with the armed escort, permits and invitation letter all included in the price.
From $4,980 USD per person — final price confirmed at booking. The tour is fully customizable: extra days, different hotels, or route changes are always possible.
7-day Somalia itinerary
Met at Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland — which declared independence in 1991, has held peaceful elections, prints its own money and issues its own passports, and which no country on Earth formally recognises. It is safe, it is functioning, and it is one of the strangest political situations in the world. The evening is a walk through the market, where money changers stack bricks of shilling notes on the pavement in the open.
Overnight: secure hotel.
In the middle of Hargeisa stands a Somali Air Force MiG-17 on a plinth — one of the aircraft that bombed this city in 1988, when Siad Barre's government levelled it and killed tens of thousands of its own citizens. Somalilanders keep it there as a statement. The livestock market is the largest in the Horn of Africa, and most of the sheep sold here are on a boat to Saudi Arabia within a week.
Overnight: secure hotel.
Laas Geel is one of the most important rock-art sites in Africa and was not known to the outside world until a French team found it in 2002. The paintings are five thousand years old and the colour is barely faded — cows with lyre-shaped horns and decorated necks, human figures with arms raised, dogs, a giraffe. There is no barrier and no crowd; you stand in the shelter and look at them from a metre away.
Overnight: secure hotel.
Up the Sheikh Pass, a switchback road the British engineered, into a cool mountain town that keeps one of the best schools in the country. Then down the escarpment to the coast — and the temperature climbs about twenty degrees in an hour — to Berbera on the Gulf of Aden.
Overnight: secure hotel.
Berbera was an Ottoman and then a British port, and the old town is coral-stone and lime, decaying beautifully. The lighthouse still works. The beach is white, empty, and on the Gulf of Aden, with the tankers going by on the horizon; the Soviets built a runway here long enough for a space shuttle, which the Americans then used, and the whole town is a lesson in great-power attention.
Overnight: secure hotel.
West to Borama, near the Ethiopian border — greener, cooler, and home to Amoud University, which the community rebuilt itself out of a ruined secondary school in 1998 because nobody else was going to. The Gadabuursi villages around it, and the road back.
Overnight: secure hotel.
A transfer to Hargeisa airport for your flight out. End of our services.
