Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
That’s a strange title but I couldn’t think of anything else to describe this recent experience in the Horn of Africa, specifically in Harar which lies in far eastern Ethiopia, near Somaliland. We had heard of the famous Hyena Man of Harar and now that we were in Harar, there was no way we were going to miss meeting him. YouTube has some videos on the ‘Hyena man’, the most popular of them being that of the amazing travel content creator, Drew Binsky. Incredibly enough, this Hyena Man comes out every single night on the outskirts of town to feed these beasts and actually calls them by name.
Hyenas are respected in Harar and even considered sacred to the extent that the residents have made small gaps in the walls of Harar (it’s an ancient walled city) from which the hyenas enter late at night to eat the bones left behind in the central market place that sells meat. They just follow the scent, or some may call it smell, which leads them to the flesh & blood. But before the midnight chomp, these hungry & hairy beasts come out in the evening as well to the calls of the man ‘they’ call the Hyena Man (‘they’ as in the people of Harar since I am not sure what the hyenas call him). It’s become quite a ritual and draw here and we did see a handful of tourists too, since many do make it to Harar nowadays. The city falls in the relatively safe zone as it is around 170 km from the border of Somaliland (at Wajale) and is relatively well policed.
When we reached there, we were not really sure what to expect. It was getting dark and we saw a man in the corner cutting raw meat into rough strips which I assumed would be given to the audience to feed these hyenas one by one. Turned out to be the case except that they would put the meat at one end of a 5-inch stick, with our mouths at the other end of it. I again clarified that they expect us to hold the stick between our teeth while the menacing jaws of the hyena bite off the meat from the other end just 5 inches away? For those who don’t know, this wild animal has one of the strongest bite forces in the animal kingdom (much more than a lion’s bite force) and we were expected to do this and come face to face with these maniacal laughing monsters.
These bone crunching carnivores are more than twice the size of dogs, far more muscular, can scare leopards away and can literally strip a kill down to nothing, since not even the bones are spared. The only comfort we had is that no serious incidents had been reported when it came to silly tourists like us going for a thrill like this although 12 locals had been killed over just a 3-year span between 2010-2012 (as per my Google search). So, we said why not, we had done sillier things in the past and we surely didn’t want to miss out on this silly thing now.
And then the original Hyena Man came (there is the father, Yusuf Mume Salleh, and now there is the son named Abbas Yusuf, so the original since 1960 is naturally the dad). Our amazing guide, Cisay, introduced Richa and me to this famous person from Ethiopia and he seemed glad to meet travellers from India. Cisay told him that we were extreme world travellers (visiting every country amongst other records) and that I was a writer for an Indian newspaper (Garhwal Post, of course). The moment he heard media, the antennas went up and he wanted us to feed hyenas no less than 10 times instead of the usual 3-4 odd chances per person. And I was like, ‘oh my lucky day’. I would have been just as happy with 1 attempt at feeding or perhaps to just be a part of the audience and take some ‘interesting’ images from a distance.
And then the young Hyena Man, Abbas, truly turned half hyena and if I remember correctly, it was a full moon night. And, of course I don’t mean that he went down on all fours and started growing whiskers & claws as Michael Jackson did in his 1983 Thriller music video. In this case he calmly sat on a make shift stool made from the cut bark of a tree and started calling out the hyenas in the only language the hyenas understand – their sinister sound that to us is more like a spooky laugh than a bark.
And slowly we saw the hyenas come out from the woods and into the clearing where all of us were. A few initial feedings were done by the Hyena Man himself, I suppose just to reassure us that it was safe (ish). And then all were eager to do it themselves and capture the act in their mobile phones. We were ready with ours too.
Richa went in first and I held the camera firmly pointed at her to capture the moment. Richa initially closed her eyes since the hyenas were right there. Their face, their eyes, their jaws were literally 5 inches away from her face and I can’t blame her for closing her eyes and hoping this was just a bad dream. We have to also remember that a bite here would not be good news since the quality of medical care in Harar would leave a lot to be desired. But statistics were on our side and we went ahead with it.
The wild ones grabbed the first slice of meat, then another, then another and Richa finally started opening her eyes. She happened to get a female hyena and in the hyena world, the females are much larger than the males and are the dominant leaders of their respective clans. So Richa came face to face with a really huge hyena with large canines and at one point the hyena took the meat along with the stick held in Richa’s mouth. The good Hyena Man had many extra ones for such incidents.
And then my turn came and I went in fearlessly just because I had been introduced as an extreme traveller from India and I didn’t want to give the faintest impression of being lily-livered to a man who earned his bread (or meat) by feeding such wild animals. I felt I pulled off my act well and I locked my eyes with the Hyena’s and fed it from 5 inches away. There really was no way to avoid the foul breath but this was a good way to face the fears. This was, is and will always be (I hope) the closest I will ever come to a large wild carnivore. But, of course I couldn’t say that there since I had the ‘image’ to maintain and acted quite nonchalant about it all and said I was ready to feed a few more, but smartly never came back for more.
In fact, I got interviewed on national TV as well and they asked how thrilling the experience of feeding hyenas from the mouth was? I told them it was truly one-of-a-kind experience in the world so I did my little bit for Ethiopian tourism at a time when this country is recovering from the horrors of the recent civil war in the northern part of this incredible nation.
Having said all good things about Harar, I have to also be very frank in my views on what is going on in Harar today. This city is changing and changing really fast. It is being made ‘tourist ready’ as they are painting the ancient walls around its perimeter, nor sparing the old buildings and have even installed the ‘I love Harar’ selfie point. This is a baffling trend that I have seen in some of the remotest places, including in a town near the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. Somehow, I feel this need to make places ‘tourist ready’ is really taking away the soul (whatever that means) of the place itself. Yes sure do advertise the place, make roads better, get the hotel & hostel infrastructure standing but is it really necessary to ‘beautify’ the place to the point where you have ‘smiling camels’ on the walls and penguins shaped dustbins. The first one is half-true for Harar as the camels weren’t smiling and then second is more of a ‘thing’ in India.
I also fear when a site gets a UNESCO tag, the locals go loco and over the top with their enthusiasm to entice the ever-excitable tourists. Make no mistake, I absolutely loved our tour to the far east of Ethiopia and to the Somali peninsula at large where we visited many villages. But the city of Harar was in my mind this medieval city still in its medieval ways. However, what we saw was a city in transition – a city in one part freshly painted bright, white & green and in the other made of old brown mud & bricks, as it was a thousand years ago. We came here to connect with the past, so I loved the parts that were in the past, without the graffiti and fresh paint. They are well on their way to beautify the beast (if you will) as they have done with ancient marvels such as Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, Nizwa just to name a few that we visited recently. Dare I mention that this is being done to ancient cities in India as well.
It really is getting harder and harder to feel like a traveller unless you take significant risks and go to the really ‘cut off’ places on Earth. And then you question what cut-off even means in the age of the mobile phone or at least routes to trade with the nearest big’ town? Is all this modernisation and mass tourism the price to pay for security as you travel around the world? No easy answers here…
(Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and is an extreme world traveller who has seen the natural world extensively and is often referred to as the ‘Most Travelled Indian’. He is on a quest to become the first person to travel to every major desert, forest, grassland, tundra & ice biome on Earth, besides every country. Nitin has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well.)
