In some ways Djibouti is changing. There is no longer a cacophony outside the central mosque and market, where until recently local Somali, Afar and French accents merged with traders’ Arabic and Hindi. Nearby, the city’s first high-rise office block has sprung from a lagoon by the Route de Venice. Gazing to the west, new container cranes and cargo ports punctuate views across the Gulf of Tadjourah. Beneath, trucks ferry materials to the Chinese working on new road, rail and duty-free projects that will service Ethiopia’s fast-growing economy.
Yet in other ways Djibouti remains what it always was, a vibrant, cosmopolitan entrepôt, wedged between Arabia, the Indian Ocean and Ethiopia. Today, military money talks loudest and the country’s geo-strategic location is a lucrative affair. The private beaches and jetty of a vast new five-star hotel lunge into the Gulf of Aden, extending the promontory where France first built a port and railway in the 1880s.
