Ethiopia travels
Friends!
It’s been a while since I’ve sent one of these but a recent trip was so full of stories and in such an underappreciated country that I felt compelled to write something down. I also wanted to check I still had everyone’s email addresses as it has been a long while between travel emails! (I hope you remember me?) As per normal, this email is a long one so if you want to skip to the bottom to see where’s next (and where we might meet in 2019), please do! I’ll post some photos on Instagram (@domecon) over the next few days.
As you would expect, things started in the usual way - an old friend sent word of a looming adventure in Africa and a few days later I was drinking in the heady sights, remarkable sounds and unusual smells of the continent's largest market in Addis Ababa. That's in Ethiopia for those of you playing at home. And guess what? That famine you thought was still happening - it ended in the '80s and is largely considered to have been caused by political machinations rather than a lack of food. In its place is a multicultural labyrinth of a country peppered with a plethora of indigenous tribes each more unique than the last, a relentless ceremonial adoration of coffee culture and 1000 year old monolithic churches that rival Petra in scale and ambition. It is to say a nation full of surprises, a defier of expectations and one that I am already yearning to revisit.
Addis Ababa
After three flights spanning 24 hours, excitement was replaced with exhaustion and slight trepidation at the thought of navigating an unknown city. I’m generally wary of help from strangers but a friendly local picked me out and asked who I was waiting for then proceeded to call my ride, arranged a pick-up point and refused any tip (although she did give me her card for future currency exchange enquiries). This welcoming start began to allay my fears and before I knew it I was on an impromptu tour of Addis.
On the way to Merkato, Africa’s largest outdoor market, we passed through a mixture of communist and Italian architecture, at times housing streets of makeshift tailor shops dotted with men labouring over ancient sewing machines on the side of the road or, on more than one occasion, someone carrying 5 mattresses on their back. At some point I wondered if there were more shoe shiners than shoes, and they always seemed to double as taxi drivers, the perfect person to meet if you’re running late for an important meeting.
Stopping at the lights in the never-ending peak hour traffic, sometimes young beggars, who spotted the faranj in the passenger seat, presented babies on their backs and gestured at their mouths for food. Quickly these sad sights made way for the markets - a never-ending stream of smiling vendors and vehicles, any manner of animals and an incredible density of humans, very busy humans, humans everywhere, going about their business. In only a few hours I felt I could write a book about my experiences, perhaps with the assistance of some liquid courage.
Coffee and politics
I did manage to find a drink… of the caffeine variety. Ethiopia is the self-proclaimed birthplace of coffee and they like it stronger than a mauruading bull-ant. Served black and sweet in the country areas (and sometimes flavoured with the leaves of certain plants) and often with milk (but still sweet) in the city, it is incredibly good and so powerful that you can often pinpoint the precise moment its buzz wears off. I frequented Tomoca, an 80 year-old coffee shop that hasn’t changed much since it opened. There’s something so very comforting about drinking an excellent coffee, alone in an unknown city amongst fellow coffee lovers – the yin and the yang of the old and the new opens up a world of possibilities. Locals sip their drug of choice, chatting to friends at stand-up tables or sitting outside on the steps, and it seemed to me as good a place as any to bring up history and politics.
The country is not without its problems. The 3.2 million year-old skeleton of our tiny human ancestor affectionately nicknamed ‘Lucy’ is widely regarded as proof that Ethiopia spawned humanity itself, which of course means it also birthed the internal lament we’ve all been harbouring since we gained enough self-awareness to realise we don’t know what to do with our lives. Quite the legacy. Lucy is housed in the dilapidated charm of the National Museum where I was informed that due to the power being cut off, the generator could only provide enough power for the lights on one floor, thankfully the one I wanted to see addressing the Anthropocene and, of course, our little Lucy. These power shortages and problems are a funny thing because Ethiopia is one of the largest exporters of electricity in Africa, which brings me to one of its problems: corruption. Many locals mentioned that misdirected funds have been a way of life and mean that maintenance and new projects take forever, like bitumen roads that take decades to build. This is a particularly sore spot for me, quite literally, given every day of my trip involved travelling large distances by dirt road where I was treated to a complimentary “African massage”.
But there is hope and optimism on the horizon, right next to those iconic acacia trees. The new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, who came to power in 2018, is on a relentless mission to stamp out corruption, mend old rivalries and set the country on a course for growth and sustained democracy. His approval rating is above 80%, he’s brokered a truce with neighbour (and often battle partner) Eritrea, he’s released all political prisoners including one of his opponents who he promoted to run the electoral committee (bold move!), and there really is a sense that the ship has steadied with this no nonsense captain at the helm. One night, while eating fried tilapia fish by a brown red lake and speaking with a bunch of local drivers, we were told of the arrest earlier in the day of Major General Kinfe. Previously untouchable, Kinfe is suspected of pilfering up to $2 billion and he was allegedly fleeing the country in the wake of the changes of the new prime minister. The winds of change are blowing!
The road to Lake Langoon
To get to the tribal lands in the south, there’s really only one way to do it: a relentless, rocky road trip through fertile farmland populated with people, people everywhere, an inescapable population of humanity ballooning over 110 million. No matter how remote we were, there were always people, often manifesting seemingly out of the landscape itself. But what were they all doing? It’s often hard to tell but one thing was very clear: Ethiopia is agriculturally driven. Nothing epitomises this more than the massive industrial-sized and often incongruously located greenhouses reached by pristine highways built with Chinese money connecting to a dry dock in the middle of nowhere that feeds a freight train out of Ethiopia to the ports of Djibouti and then to the world. The land is big business, my friends.
My naive preconceptions of a land riddled with famine didn’t factor in dense farms spruiking tomatoes, papaya, roses, watermelons and everything in between. I never thought I’d visit a winery in the Rift Valley and enjoy a syrah on a lakeside resort in Ethiopia, after spending a day driving through cities and towns dodging tuk tuks and donkey carts manned by children as young as 5. Most of the population is children and it is very apparent. You see school kids adorned in brightly coloured uniforms going to school, and solitary teenagers in the savannah standing around bored in the middle of a field. There are always people walking, never too quickly, unlike the enormous trucks that speed by them often crossing violently into oncoming traffic to avoid fatal potholes. Wreckages of vehicles make guest appearances every few kilometres breaking up the chaotic monotony of cattle herds crossing roads and goats kidding around. There’s a lot to take in.
We stopped at a fishing village where a cacophony of school kids jumped off the wharf that housed their classroom into the murky river below and old men stripped acacia trees to make into boats, all of this under the watchful eye of these enormous, prehistoric birds that the locals nicknamed ‘big ugly’ who watched the scene unfold perched atop colourful fishing boats. If that sentence was a mouthful you can imagine the sensory overload and it didn’t end there. Pods of pelicans soared overheard looking to scavenge fish scraps as fisherman returned to shore dodging horses who sat almost completely emerged in the reedy water to escape the heat so that only their heads were visible above the water. Occasionally, teenagers standing tall on carts raced their donkeys like chariots past people covered head to toe in soap, washing themselves in the river. We spent the evening in a Lake Langoon resort that had the lustre of a bygone era with a water slide floating incongruously in the lake next to apocalyptically-empty resort-style cabanas and chairs. Before we knew it we were on the road again.
The Omo Valley and the first of the tribes: the industrious Dorze people
It’s hard to capture just how much is going on as you drive through southern Ethiopia. Extreme poverty is tempered with extreme friendliness, an unsettling dichotomy, and the Christianity that dominates the country (so old that a popular Christian symbol includes the Star of David over a cross) is embroiled with Islam and then animism. While waiting for two others to join our small group (Pierre from Montreal and Eddie from Brussels), we sat by the roadside watching women lead donkeys to the river to collect water, goats being loaded onto roof-racks to sell at markets like a kidnapping, herds of various animals chaotically crossing the busy freeway and the thousand-yard stares of kids playing and occasionally begging for money.
One day while driving through a modern town, our van was almost clipped by a bus and our driver sought the help of two nearby female police officers who were so strikingly beautiful it almost hurt to look at them. They quickly laughed off the incident and told us to move on but our path was blocked by a completely naked man crossing the road, his man-hood stopping us like a boomgate. No one in the crowded street blinked an eye. We quickly moved on and through Shashamane, the spiritual homeland of the Rastafari, man, to reach the Dorze tribe in a hilltop village populated by bamboo houses shaped like elephant heads in the Guge Mountains.
The Dorze, all 43,000 of them, were the first of several tribes we visited, each with their own language (not dialect), foods, culture - you name it. For the Dorze, the same false banana leaves that are used to make thatched roofs are crushed into a pulp forming the base of a bread-like pancake. They are industrious, known for their weaving and had set-up a nice little money-maker in the village, ploughing tourists with moonshine, chanting and dancing - touristic but fun all the same. It provided a bit of a false expectation that the remainder of the tribes we were to see would be similarly focussed on tourist dollars. Boy oh boy were we wrong.
After a looong drive dodging Dorze kids dancing in the road for a birr (the Dorze dance is a butt-shake akin to a twerk - very strange to have your car stopped by 6 boys twerking in the middle of the road for cash), we arrived in the aptly named Paradise Lodge set atop the crest of a valley overlooking the vast forest and twin lakes below, where we rested for the busy days ahead.
Going deeper south - animals and tribal markets
On my walk through this forest resort to breakfast, wild baboons ran through the huts searching for food and generally causing havoc. After a life-affirming coffee or two, we headed to our van to see two concerning sites. A broken window in a 4WD from a baboon breaking into grab a banana (you can’t make this stuff up), and a monkey on its last legs with internal injuries from being stoned by local villagers. The conflicts between humans and animals and the cross-over of their habitats are ever-present and this became more apparent when we hit the water.
After a short drive through farmland dotted with honey farms set high in trees and banana and mango plantations, we reached Lake Chamo’s edge and hopped aboard a boat to seek out some wildlife. Almost immediately we saw a large crocodile swimming toward the reeds less than 50 metres from the boat. Behind the crocodile was a local fisherman standing on a homemade canoe navigating the waters similar to a paddle boarder. Only the month before a fisherman had been killed by a crocodile doing just that. Chugging past flamingos, fish eagles and hundreds of different birds, we eventually found several pods of hippos and a particularly aggressive mother who was not too happy at us getting so close to her baby and began to charge at us. A quick departure led us to the king of the lake, a 7 metre male crocodile resting on the shore amongst his harem of lovers. Again, only a 100 metres or so from this terrifying menagerie, several fisherman paddled by on their flimsy vessels. Life is relenteless in the Omo Valley.
The markets in the south are a melting pot of tribes - many travelling over 100km every week to sell or barter their goods - and once all the business has been completed it turns into quite a rowdy booze session. At Key Afar’s market, where Konso, Tseme, Benna and Ari tribes gather, we were told to get there early to avoid becoming part of any alcohol-fuelled animosity. Even before the drinking began, the market was bursting with bravado, friendliness, desperation and good old fashioned salesmanship. Many people in the various tribes didn’t take kindly to one tourist taking photos, often hissing at him and generally creating a brouhaha. Most interactions were friendly although there were a few classic tourist “scams” here and there (money for photos, overcharging etc) but it was all to be expected. I put scams in inverted commas because the poverty is always abundantly clear and their actions are driven by necessity. You certainly appreciate how lucky you are when a child asks you to buy shoes for him - his name was Alberto and his “scam” was holding my hand and leading me to the shoe shop. Clever kid and he got what he wanted and it didn’t bother me that he may have been in cahoots with the shoe vendor. We left the markets shortly afterwards, dodging more dancing kids.
The nomadic Mursi people
Overnight the Muslim call to prepare started at 4.30am for 2 solid hours mixed with roosters crowing and cows mooing, seemingly in pain, creating quite the wake up call. It was the beginning of one of the most confronting days of travel I’ve experienced amongst the Mursi people high in the mountains in Mago National Park. The rumour goes that when the British came to Ethiopia to try and impart their beliefs on the Mursi, they inserted sticks and discs in through the women’s ears and lower lips so they would be unattractive to the British men. Ironically, while the large discs in their lips were inserted to make the Mursi women ugly, the same discs are now considered attractive by the Mursi men. Either way, you can see how the Mursi are not so welcoming of foreigners.
We were lucky enough to visit a less violent Mursi village on our visit although we had to leave before midday when the mix of home brew beer (49% alcohol content) and AK47s (one of these and 40 goats buys you a wife, and a Mursi man can have multiple wives) apparently do not mix well. The Mursi are nomadic pastoralists so their temporary camps (they move every few months) are made up of rudimentary huts (made of bark and cow hide) and other living areas. After navigating more dancing and dressed up children on the dirt path up the mountain and paying the tribal leader a monetary gift, we entered the village to find a new born baby seemingly abandoned in the middle of a clearing in the midday sun. Her mother was nearby making lunch - the Mursi herd cattle and goats and trade them for corn to make porridge. One young girl spotted the umbrella in my bag and I gave her it and she paraded around the village, while another begged for my water bottle which she was quickly provided. The Mursi had nothing and everything and through our guide who spoke the language we learned that they truly wanted to continue this lifestyle and avoid outside influences.
After an interesting sales campaign, I bought a lip plate from an elderly Mursi woman who removed her own lip plate exposing the stretched lip and skin which held it in. Nearby a small commotion was stirring as a result of a sick infant with an infected eye and we were asked if we could help. I happened to have saline eye drops in my backpack so I gave her my eye drops to her father who applied it rather forcefully to her eyes and the commotion grew. I had to stop him and show him again how the drops come out of the dropper and eventually the child had some relief, albeit it would have been short. Our visit spanned over an hour and was full of such strange scenes, 360 degree encounters of the type I’d never even imagined, with over 100 villagers. The whole thing felt like a waking dream: we were elated and shocked and enthralled at the same time and when it came time to leave we were all lost for words.
We gave a Mursi man a lift to town and he told us he has 2 wives and 7 children but that one of his children had died from a disease the day before. He continued on, not showing much emotion. It must be hard, he certainly was. He also happened to be the best stick fighter in the village (a brutal ceremony which is exactly what you are thinking) which got him his two wives at such a young age (the women flock to the best stick fighter). After dropping him off we went to a coffee shop in Jinka to debrief on what we had just seen. The shop was run by two Muslim women and was nothing more than a few planks and tiny plastic stools serving the cool kids of Jinka who rocked up on their USD$1000 Chinese motorcycles. We talked about the lifestyle of the Mursi people and how it compares to our own. Many would see the life of the Mursi as primitive and one that should change but the Mursi chose not to. Is forcing a less primitive culture on them really progressing their wellbeing other than in the eyes of anyone but the Mursi? It goes back to the colonial mindspeak of yesteryear and I’m not sure if there is a correct answer. At the same time, when you are faced with a 9-day old baby alone in the dirt or hear of the death of a young child due to a preventable disease, it does make you question things. Certainly the interaction with tourists is changing the Mursi. I’ll need a lot more coffee to properly consider this outside of my naive first thoughts.
The Ari people, Demeka markets and bull jumping
Was the lifestyle of the Ari people the answer to our Mursi ponderings? We considered this as we explored an Ari village and saw their lifestyle: a mix of the old and new, with more modern housing, old blacksmith-traditions but using discarded car parts as the base for making knives and new tools. Local children followed us throughout the village as we walked in the rain from place to place, breaking branches off a local tree to use as a bush umbrella. I was given a jack fruit by one household straight from their tree - it’s an unusual feeling accepting such a gift from people with so little but they insisted.
The Ari guide led us through several houses where we were given little exhibitions of their modern life, from making injari (their local bread) to clay plates and my favourite, a bush distillery! The liquor it produced was 50% alcohol, and the lady manning the crude but clever homemade distilling machine ploughed us with shots at 10am. It was made from maize, corn and a few other bits and bobs and was a surprisingly smooth liqueur that likely killed any stomach bugs I had, or will ever have. At the end of our walk through the village, scores of children mobbed us and when we gave some money to them, a mini-riot erupted. Thankfully our guide, Abay, was there looking over us, using his mixture of charm, braggadocio and harsh words to change the situation. It's clearly a tough life for those Ari kids too but most were in school and when they weren't they were hustling tourists in a very entrepreneurial manner so I saw some hope.
We drove to the Demeka markets, which was surely one of the highlights of the trip. Populated predominantly by the Hamma and Konso tribes there was never a dull moment. The Hamma women had their distinctive short braided hair covered in red clay following a recent bull jumping ceremony. Tobacco, chillies, red clay and ochre, honey wine and a whole lot more were for sale in the crowded marketplace. The Konso men were tall warriors, walking around with bravado and flair with beads adorning their heads and arms and brightly coloured clothing. Once aseller has sold all their goods, they tended to drift toward the local bars to get drunk on home brews. It's difficult to explain the intensity of the marketplace, the endless chatter, arguments and laughter, it often being hard to distinguish between the two. The stares, of curiosity and joy and anger and struggle and hope were often all seen together in one fleeting glance. Such proud tribes, confident in their ways and hustling for their livings. The walk through that market will live on in the memory for many years.
In the afternoon we headed to Turmi for a very unusual afternoon of ‘bull jumping’. It is basically a coming of age ceremony for a single boy from one family in the Hamma tribe, a tribe that never washes. His entire family comes together to help celebrate. Firstly, the women create music and dance and get into trance like states for hours and hours. As a sign of their love for the soon-to-be-man, they ask other family members to whip them on the back, with large bloody lash wounds prominently and proudly on display on their backs. It's brutal but they smile and are fearsome at the same time, a beguiling mix. This continues for hours while the other men in the family cover themselves in face paint all leading up to the grand finale.
We (hundreds of people, both locals and tourists) walked several kilometres from the start of the ceremony through bushland to a clearing where a large human circle was created and about 20 bulls were ushered in its middle. The women continue to dance and be whipped, their striking beauty contrasting bitterly with their flesh wounds, while the men wrestle the bulls into a line, with a small young bull at the front. Meanwhile, the boy strips naked and is covered in cow dung and a milky substance. Finally, after 4 hours of dancing and preparation, the boy runs toward and over the bulls making his first jump with a slip on the first 3 bulls but steadying himself to clear the 6 or 7 bulls. He then goes back and forth 5 or 6 times and he is now a man. The crowd quickly dissipates but the local family celebrate for the next few days, killing a goat for everyone to eat and drinking to their heart's content. Now that he has completed this ceremony, the boy is officially “on the market”. He now will have all the single ladies in the region after him although his father will chose his first wife in a dowry deal with another family. We walk back to the lodge along the dry river bed and some of the family collect firewood to take back to town to sell at the markets. For them, the celebration and life are not separate events.
The Daasanach, being hand-fed, football and the Bunna people
We took a long drive along a Chinese built road to Omorate, a town near the border of South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia to visit the Daasanach people. We crossed the crocodile infested Omo River in a dugout kayak: not a sentence you write everyday. The Daasanach are an offshoot of the Masai Mara, the famous jumping dancers of Kenya and they follow the same traditions. We walked for some time out into the dessert to their village to watch them dance and also explore their village. Their homes, formerly made of cow hide but now corrugated iron domes, were so very hot inside, and this is in comparison to the heat of the desert outside. It's amazing how traveling just 50km in the Omo Valley leads to an entirely different looking people, with a new language, different housing construction and social structures, different dances and of course a healthy abundance of AK47s thanks to nearby Sudan. Fighting between tribes is common although tourists have escaped harm. Even so, it's still a little disarming (boom-tish) to see a solitary tall figure walking down the highway toward you with a semi automatic rifle over his shoulder.
We headed back to the lodge for a rest out of the midday sun. After ordering food, I decided to try a massage after 7 days of ‘Ethiopian massage’ travel and both the food and the massage were late such that I had to choose one or the other. I chose the massage which was delightful. I emerged and went to find my sandwich although it was only the staff present. They said they'd fix me up the sandwich I ordered and then the chef and manager invited me to their table to eat with them. They were finishing a goat injera and much to my surprise and delight, they not only offered some to me but they also fed me. I mean, fed me the food with their hands right into my mouth. This is a sign of respect in Ethiopian culture and combined with them sharing their ginger and lemongrass tea and water, was very humbling and made me love the Ethiopian culture even more. The trend continued as our driver picked us up to go into the two donkey town to watch Ethiopia play Ghana in a wooden shack with about 80 locals in front of a tiny TV. We chewed chat throughout, a plant that produces a slight high, and after the game we were invited into a hidden shisha bar at the back of a farm and smoked and chatted with local drivers and guides over a few beers. It was such an amazing experience and we felt very much part of the local culture. Very real. I'll remember it for a long time.
One day we stopped the car in the middle of Banna territory. Some kids came to the car and before we knew it, we were jumping the hyena fence and walking through a cornfield for a kilometre or so to get to their home. We were greeted with warmth by their father and mother who invited us into their hut for an impromptu coffee ceremony, made fresh over the fire in the traditional way and served in vessels made of bark. They even offered to track down a goat so we could have fresh milk, which we politely declined. The coffee had a woody taste but was delicious, even the actual bits of wood in it. After the ceremony, the father, whose second wife was working in a nearby field, offered to kill a goat for us for lunch. A goat would be worth several months salary so this was an extremely generous offer, which we also declined. We had literally just walked into their house from the road and the welcome we received was phenomenal: such a touching and random experience.
The last tribe we visited was in the town of Konso. The Konso people created their amazing mountainous village overr 800 years old and it features spectacular tiered farming of multiple crops to save water and yield more harvests. These incredible advanced, clever and hardworking people created the village out of stone walls almost 1000 years ago. The village is UNESCO heritage listed and you can see why as it is so intricate it appears architecturally designed but from the 12th century! Outside of this traditional village, Konso is a bustling town. I spied a roadside shoe factory where the shoes were made out of old car tyres: the resourcefulness is incredible. We had dinner in the beautiful Kata lodge where smart rainwater tanks underneath it use rainwater to feed their wonderful flowered gardens in a beautiful Tuscan-like villa. A spectacular way to end our tribal adventures.
The human zoo, a near-miss lynching and back to the capital
Ethiopia is a great country, but like all developing countries, it presents ethical and moral dilemmas to visitors. Sometimes, when visiting a village, a local guide would line up villagers and ask us which one we would like a photo with (each photo requires payment of about 25 cents unless you've organised a payment for the whole village for unlimited photos). It feels wrong, choosing people like you might choose fish from a tank at a Cantonese restaurant. The phrases ‘human zoo’ and ‘poverty porn’ often sprung to mind.
On the one hand, taking photos of locals is a good income source for impoverished villagers who otherwise only have their livestock or harvest to trade. On the other hand, it's demeaning and morally repugnant. What is the middle ground and do we have a right or obligation to decide? Probably not on both counts. I'm not sure there is an easy answer. I do know when I saw some tourists pull aside a Hamma lady who had just been whipped as part of a bull jumping ceremony, for a photo, it didn't feel right. The look on the lady's face was of surprise, resentment, resignation and pride. While she acquiesced, she chatted with her friend afterwards presumably questioning why tourists were allowed at these family events. Then there are the tourists who take photos of kids, who put a panoramic lens in the face of villagers like they're an object. Models in the western world welcome this, for an expensive fee. For many tourists, it's considered a right to photograph what they want. More often than not it is the camera watching the once in a lifetime experience and not the person. It's curious to see where our societies are heading.
It’s worth noting that while we managed to speak with a lot of people from various tribes and regions, it was all through the lens of our brilliant guide, Abaya. He navigated over 10 local languages with ease, giving gifts of water to kids we pass on a road in the middle of nowhere, yelling away hawkers, snarling at cheeky kids then giving them a coin or two. He showed a mixture of love and respect and discipline, and truly made the journey amazing, his maniacal laugh and general attitude will not easily be forgotten. Even he was affected at times by the “poverty porn” dilemma, even though he in part encouraged it, both by the nature of his job and certain actions, often chastising other tourists for their actions, and then smoothing things over with villagers when a tourist had disrespected them via an unwanted photo. It was a finely balanced act. All these thoughts were running through my mind as we made the long journey back to the capital, much of it necessarily through ground we had already seen. A new road had been built by the Japanese which promised a 60km shortcut so we took it without hesitation.
We were driving through Oromia territory and just before a bridge we saw a large police presence and scores of people all over the road. They cleared quickly enough and we drove on a few kilometres to the next town where there were over 100 people in the middle of the road brandishing spears and stones. They quickly engulfed the van speaking in Oromia which no one understood (not even our guide who was looking rather nervous) and yelling and trying to open the van doors. It was clear that very soon we were about to either be robbed or killed, such was the tension. A person emerged from the mob who spoke Aramaic which both our driver and guide spoke and before we knew it our driver had been pulled from the car. All the doors of our van and the boot were opened and our suitcases examined and we hoped that it was simply a robbery. Our driver showed he was a licensed tour guide and it soon became clear that this was not a robbery and the stones and spears were no longer raised. It seemed that earlier a truck had driven through the town killing a local and a mob had formed to lynch the driver. As they learned we were tourists "farange" and not harbouring a killer truck driver, they dispersed a little, one even asked where I was from while brandishing a rock the size of his fist. Our guide said it was clear they were going to kill someone. It was a tense ride through the remaining Oromia territory as we avoided the people on the road, speeding and anything that may upset the locals. It certainly was one of the more frightening things I've experienced.
After that we headed to Awasa which was a heavily built up town with a luxury resort Haile, named after its owner, the famous Ethiopian long distance runner who won gold at the Sydney Olympics. We swam at the pool, walked along the lake and generally lazed about for a day before continuing on the long road back to Addis. Along the road, pool tables and futsal tables are hidden behind shacks next to shed bars such that the street facade often looks the same but with hidden delights behind closed doors. Back in Addis, we watched a Christian mass go ahead in Aramaic, the language of the bible itself, in the largest cathedral in Africa. Rather than take place inside the building, the sermon was at the entrance and parishioners were seated in front in a small row of chairs but were mostly scattered throughout the large grounds listening over loudspeakers over an entire city block, the heady smell of frankincense ever present. In the evening, we ate traditional injera, shared between the table, and headed to a nightclub where we drank and smoked shisha to our heart’s content with full knowledge that we were about to get monumentally ripped off. It was worth it and was a fine way to say goodbye to Petros after an eye-opening few weeks of travel in the only African country that has not been colonised.
Lalibela and the replica of Jerusalem that no-one knows about
Before I left Ethiopia, I took a trip north, an area that couldn't be more different than the south. Lalibela is a mountainous town spread through various hills and valleys. I stayed at the Panoramic Hotel and from my balcony watched tuk tuks wind their way up and down the meandering mountainous roads while the sun seemed to set forever. While it was a good time to relax and contemplate the sensory overload of the south, the exploring continued. Lalibela is home to 13 churches that were carved straight out of the rock over 800 years ago. To give you some perspective, imagine you are standing in a rock roughly the size of a 10 storey building, but that is sunken into the ground. Workers used chisels to dig into that rock creating 13 churches and underground passages connecting them all from the rock underneath you. These sunken churches took 23 years to complete and all workers were paid. King Lalibela went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, decided it was too far for his subjects to travel so recreated Jerusalem in Ethiopia - truly a wonder of the world!
The roughly 45,000 population still use the churches today. One church is shaped like a cross. Their construction out of rock sunken in the earth was in part to prevent them from being destroyed noting an abundance of Muslim invaders at the time. While some parts of the churches have been eroded due to rainfall over the last 800 years, they are largely intact and are truly awe-inspiring. The town itself runs at a different pace from the south, more sleepy and contemplative, a little like me at the time. On my final day, I trekked up to the mountains to the Yemehrine Kirstos Cave church, which is a church inside a cave that is even older than the churches in Lalibela (over 1000 years) and is still being actively used, the 10 priests outnumbering the congregation which included me and my guide. It was a wonderful place to end the trip of a lifetime.
While my experiences gave me some idea about the Ethiopian way of life, several stories spring to mind which provide even more insight. There is the battle of Adwa in 1896 which followed 5 years of Italian occupation of northern Ethiopia. It saw a better equipped and larger Italian force lose to traditional Ethiopians. You can still see bullet holes in the stone of some churches in Ethiopia. Inside one of those churches is a picture of Balthazar, one of the 3 wise men, an Ethiopian who carried frankincense to the baby Jesus. The country continually surprises with its history.
One of the things people always ask when you speak about Ethiopia is the famine. As I soon found out, it ended in the mid ‘80s and it is now widely agreed that it was caused by the political situation rather than a lack of food in the country. The fertile Rift Valley had enough food but the ruling government apparently chose not to redistribute it. As you would have guessed from my experience, poverty remains a problem but the country is rich with food thanks to the many rivers that run through it, despite it being landlocked. Every Ethiopian you meet wants you to be an ambassador for the country, to correct people when they assume it to be still in the grip of famine and encourage tourism in what it one of the most diverse countries I’ve ever visited. I couldn’t agree more and cannot wait to get back.
The next adventure: the Silk Road
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! Part of the reason for this email was to also send a message out about the next adventure along the Silk Road, from China to Spain. Liz and I are hoping to complete it in the second half of 2019 and would love any tips on where to go, recommendation for places to stay or people to meet up with and it would of course be good to cross paths. Potential countries are China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Malta, Italy (know anyone with a villa? Ha ha), Switzerland, France, Spain, UK - London, Germany, Egypt and Iran. So if you have any input or you would like to meet up, shoot me an email!
Thanks for getting this far, old friends, Dom