Cal Madow is the last cloud forest of Somalia, a limestone escarpment in the Sanaag region of Somaliland rising to 2,400 metres above the Gulf of Aden, whose north-facing wall drinks the fog of the monsoon and grows some two hundred plants found nowhere else, with juniper, tree aloes and the frankincense trees whose resin the Arabian buyers pay most for, and it is walked in the Daallo forest above the town of Erigavo and at a waterfall that drops off the escarpment face. From November the northeast monsoon drives damp air off the gulf against the wall, where it cools into cloud that wraps the juniper through the dry winter, the moisture that keeps the forest alive once the plateau's rains stop; the Daallo forest is gnarled African juniper, boxwood and tree aloes with cloud drifting through the branches, driven into on tracks and walked, and on the northern escarpment stands Aloe eminens, an aloe that grows into a tree of eighteen metres and raises clusters of red flowers above the forest. A trail drops through the juniper to the Lamadaya falls, which plunge off the escarpment face, a rare sight of falling water in one of the driest corners of the Horn of Africa, with the plain and the sea beyond.
The Boswellia frereana trees root straight into the bare limestone of the cliffs, and their resin, maydi, is the king of frankincense, mostly chewed rather than burned, tapped through the dry months by harvesters who cut the bark and return every few weeks over eight to twelve cycles to lift the hardened tears, each tear a wound the tree seals; a guide walks visitors out to the trees with a harvester onto the ledges. Herders bring their camels up onto the plateau for the cooler grazing along the same tracks, and the leopard and the Speke's gazelle survive in the forest. Somaliland is calm and unrecognised, and Erigavo is a long drive from Hargeisa. Cal Madow is a forest that lives on fog, and its trees weep the resin the Arabs buy.