One of my earliest indications that I should think about visiting Ethiopia came about a decade ago when I picked up a copy of the outdoor magazine Blue, which listed the world's best hiking trails. The Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia was ranked something like fourth or fifth (I've also since ticked off the Annapurnas in Nepal and the West Coast Trail in British Columbia). I really love hiking, and some of my favourite walks have been through the tame but beautiful English countryside. But in terms of jaw-dropping awesomeness, nothing in my experience besides the Annapurnas has come close to matching the Simiens.
I updated the last blog entry using the wi-fi in a local hotel after all the Internet cafes had closed, painstakingly pecking away on my Kindle (who knew how useful it was going to be to have that along for the journey--thanks once again, Eddie!). This was after having a get-to-know-each-other-and-plan-out-the-next-day meal with my three trekking mates. Jase is a gentle-souled Aussie who's something like 12 months into an endless round-the-world adventure, and Till and Wilma are fine representatives of the Master Race. Till in particular has the looks and physique that would have populated Hitler's wet dreams. They're both medical students in Hamburg and take every break in the school year to travel somewhere new.
The next morning, we got on a minibus to Debark, the launching point for treks in the Simiens. North of Gonder, the road becomes a bumpy strip of dirt through the hills, though all along the way we saw work crews slowly transforming the road into something more navigable. Each work crew had a Chinese supervisor.
Debark is an uninspiring town at the best of times, and we arrived just in time for a rain storm that turned it into a squalid mudpit. All the more reason to get up to the mountains pronto, and everything went smoothly, at least by Ethiopian standards. We spent a couple hours at the park headquarters making arrangements and waiting for things to happen (having been told we needed to hurry if we wanted to get up to the mountains that evening, we asked about getting food for the journey: "You will need to go to the market with your cook." "Is the cook available?" "Yes." "Can we meet with him?" "Yes." "Now?" "Yes." No movement.). But things slowly came together. We're required to take an armed scout into the mountains (not entirely sure why, since there wasn't the slightest hint of any danger, although we certainly needed someone to show us the way), and took the option of taking along a cook, which turned out to be well worth it, as well as hiring three mules and muleteers. The scout accompanied us on the hiking trails, while the cook and mules followed the easier road between campsites, meaning that our tents were pitched and hot drinks were waiting for us when we arrived! With all of this entourage, plus a rather costly (but again worthwhile) ride from Debark up to the real start of the hiking trail at Sankaber, the four of us still managed on about $50 US per day each. Good reason to have a group, though, as it would have been super expensive on my own.
By the end of the day, we'd pitched our tents inside a camping hut at Sankaber. One upside to doing the hike toward the end of the hiking season was that there were fewer hikers, and so we could pitch up under the cover of the camping hut rather than outside. One downside is that the camping huts were necessary, since the end of the hiking season coincides with the beginning of the rainy season. For the most part we were lucky, and the downpours held off till late afternoon and overnight when we were safely sheltered, but poor Wilma got a bit drenched in a downpour on the second night when the wind blew the rain under the shelter and onto her and Till's tent, which turned out to be far from waterproof. Good thing we weren't forced to camp outside!
The outing lasted four days and three nights: we spent the first night at Sankaber, hiked to Gich the following day, to Chennek the day after that, and then back to Sankaber on the last day, getting a ride from Sankaber back down to Debark. For the most part, the hike followed the most astonishing escarpment I've ever seen: cliffs that at points dropped over a kilometre, with distant views of the lower, but jagged, peaks of the highlands to the north. To put this in perspective, I was looking a kilometre down at peaks whose summits rose higher than Mount Whistler north of Vancouver, not to mention the local mountains closer to home. The hike itself ranged between 3200 and 4000 metres above sea level, and while I escaped any of the awful altitude sickness I experienced in Nepal, I was certainly gasping for breath on any climb of real significance. If it weren't for the altitude, the hiking wouldn't have been too strenuous, though, and we never hiked more than five or six hours in a day. Despite the cliff drops, my fear of heights never interfered with my fun beyond the fact that I stayed a couple feet further from the cliff's edge than the others. In addition, thanks to having mules to carry most of our things, we did the actual hiking with just day packs.
Spectacular as the views were, they didn't quite match being surrounded by 8000-metre giants in the Annapurnas, but the Simiens trump the Annapurnas for wildlife. The place is swarming with gelada baboons, which are endemic to Ethiopia, and seem mostly unafraid of human company. Geladas are unique among primates in being almost exclusively grass eaters, and large troops--hundreds at times--would move progressively across the hills, picking at grass, chirping to one another, and all too frequently breaking into vicious squabbles full of bared teeth and loud shrieking. By the end of three days, a baboon sighting became almost (although not quite) as commonplace as a squirrel sighting back home. Except baboons are a lot more fun to watch.
At Chennek, our scout also led us to a herd of walia ibex, notable for their thick, curved horns. The walia ibex live only in the Simiens, and there are only about 500 left, making them almost certainly the most endangered animal I've ever seen in the wild. Despite this (or perhaps explaining their endangered status), they were far less skittish than deer back home, and we managed to get surprisingly close to them.
One upside/downside to not also engaging a guide is that none of our companions spoke English. The downsides weren't all that down--mostly communication failures--and the upside was that I learned a fair amount of Amharic as a result. Nothing drastic, but I now know how to say "our compliments to the chef!" and a few other things thanks to my Lonely Planet phrasebook. The cook was a sweet man who prepared surprisingly good food considering it all came up to the mountains on muleback. Best of all (well, maybe second best to the heartiness and tastiness of the food after a strenuous day of hiking) was that he served us dinner wearing a white puffy chef's hat, a white chef's shirt, and a white apron, all of which was comically out of place while camping in the mountains of Ethiopia, but charming nonetheless.
The only sour point in the trip arose because one of the mule men (maybe more than one--hard to judge through the language barrier) insisted that he get four days' pay even though he was only doing three days of work. I find this sort of situation all too common when travelling in the developing world, and hard to find the right balance with: on one hand, every penny means a lot more to these people than it does to me, but on the other hand, it's galling to have people try to cheat me. It's not simply the principle of the thing, but also that it damages the tourism industry in general if locals start thinking of foreigners as gullible money pumps. Generally, I've aimed to tip generously but not outrageously, accept that I'll be overcharged for certain things, and stand my ground in the face of blatant cheating. In this case, it helped that both the scout and the cook seemed to agree with us that this guy's claim to an extra day's pay was unfounded. A good indication that it's wise to be friendly with the people you work with: always good to have the guy with the kalashnikov on your side of a dispute.
Jase, Till, and Wilma made fine travelling companions, and indeed I'm still with them in Aksum, where I've found an internet cafe from which to type this up. I've particularly enjoyed conversations with Jase, and Till's large-spirited gregariousness can be good fun as well, and makes a curious balance with Wilma's more reserved nature--they've been together since they were fifteen, so it seems to work out all right. I've even had some opportunities to practise my German with Till and Wilma, although it would be rude to do so with Jase in tow.
After a welcome shower and sleep in a real bed, we set off for Aksum yesterday morning. The bus ride from Debark to Shire (we had to change in Shire for an easy 90-minute minibus ride to Aksum) was hands down the worst bus ride of my entire life. This includes the 34-hour trip from Istanbul to Graz with my sister, where extortionate Bulgarian transit visas meant we were paying something like $8 an hour for the privilege of passing through the country and we were later accused of stealing someone else's smuggled cigarette cartons; the rickety bus from Calcutta to Siliguri where I was given very little reason to believe that my driver was concerned to avoid accidents; and the night bus from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg where I was squeezed next to an angry drunk who erupted into a fury every time my nodding off meant that I made the least bit of physical contact with him (at least he didn't chop my head off).
The journey began with an hour-long quarrel. The bus up to Shire begins in Gonder and is full before it reaches Debark, for which reason we paid someone to go down to Gonder the night before and reserve us four seats on the bus. Four ghost riders are naturally given the worst seats on the bus, and we were expected to cram into the back row, where the distance between the seat back and the seat back in front was less than the distance between my thigh and my knee. And bear in mind that Till is several inches taller than me. Till and Wilma quickly seized two somewhat better seats, and Jase and I managed to barely fit by occupying three seats in the back row, Jase stretching his knees into the aisle while I bent sideways so that my knees crossed over the seat next to me. This, of course, meant that we were taking up three seats between the two of us, and this was unacceptable. Very good at being unaggressively stubborn, Jase simply refused to budge (and understandably, none of the passengers in more leg-roomy seats further up front were willing to swap with us), and eventually the bus left with tempers severely strained. Over the next eight hours, the bus bounced along 200 kilometres of uneven dirt road, several bounces sending me half a foot into the air: bear in mind that, at the back of the bus, we were sitting directly over the rear wheel where the bounces are the worst. Credit due to the engineer who even managed to cut a road through these mountains, as there isn't a patch of flat earth between Debark and maybe 30 kilometres south of Shire, and the road is full of hair-raising hairpin turns over death-defying drops, but the world's bus riders can also eagerly await the arrival of asphalt and Chinese foremen on this god-forsaken road. Add to that the fact that the window just in front of us wouldn't close, and dust was everywhere. I got a self-portrait at the end of the journey that still doesn't quite do credit to just how filthy we got. When I took off my shirt at the end of the day, the inside and the outside were two distinctly different colours, and even after vigorous scrubbing in my hotel sink with camping detergent, the shirt still has a dusty hue on the outside.
But we made it to Aksum in surprisingly good humour, had a good night's sleep, and besides a slightly tender back, that bus ride is a distant memory. Time to go out and explore the ancient capital of Ethiopia.
I updated the last blog entry using the wi-fi in a local hotel after all the Internet cafes had closed, painstakingly pecking away on my Kindle (who knew how useful it was going to be to have that along for the journey--thanks once again, Eddie!). This was after having a get-to-know-each-other-and-plan-out-the-next-day meal with my three trekking mates. Jase is a gentle-souled Aussie who's something like 12 months into an endless round-the-world adventure, and Till and Wilma are fine representatives of the Master Race. Till in particular has the looks and physique that would have populated Hitler's wet dreams. They're both medical students in Hamburg and take every break in the school year to travel somewhere new.
The next morning, we got on a minibus to Debark, the launching point for treks in the Simiens. North of Gonder, the road becomes a bumpy strip of dirt through the hills, though all along the way we saw work crews slowly transforming the road into something more navigable. Each work crew had a Chinese supervisor.
Debark is an uninspiring town at the best of times, and we arrived just in time for a rain storm that turned it into a squalid mudpit. All the more reason to get up to the mountains pronto, and everything went smoothly, at least by Ethiopian standards. We spent a couple hours at the park headquarters making arrangements and waiting for things to happen (having been told we needed to hurry if we wanted to get up to the mountains that evening, we asked about getting food for the journey: "You will need to go to the market with your cook." "Is the cook available?" "Yes." "Can we meet with him?" "Yes." "Now?" "Yes." No movement.). But things slowly came together. We're required to take an armed scout into the mountains (not entirely sure why, since there wasn't the slightest hint of any danger, although we certainly needed someone to show us the way), and took the option of taking along a cook, which turned out to be well worth it, as well as hiring three mules and muleteers. The scout accompanied us on the hiking trails, while the cook and mules followed the easier road between campsites, meaning that our tents were pitched and hot drinks were waiting for us when we arrived! With all of this entourage, plus a rather costly (but again worthwhile) ride from Debark up to the real start of the hiking trail at Sankaber, the four of us still managed on about $50 US per day each. Good reason to have a group, though, as it would have been super expensive on my own.
By the end of the day, we'd pitched our tents inside a camping hut at Sankaber. One upside to doing the hike toward the end of the hiking season was that there were fewer hikers, and so we could pitch up under the cover of the camping hut rather than outside. One downside is that the camping huts were necessary, since the end of the hiking season coincides with the beginning of the rainy season. For the most part we were lucky, and the downpours held off till late afternoon and overnight when we were safely sheltered, but poor Wilma got a bit drenched in a downpour on the second night when the wind blew the rain under the shelter and onto her and Till's tent, which turned out to be far from waterproof. Good thing we weren't forced to camp outside!
The outing lasted four days and three nights: we spent the first night at Sankaber, hiked to Gich the following day, to Chennek the day after that, and then back to Sankaber on the last day, getting a ride from Sankaber back down to Debark. For the most part, the hike followed the most astonishing escarpment I've ever seen: cliffs that at points dropped over a kilometre, with distant views of the lower, but jagged, peaks of the highlands to the north. To put this in perspective, I was looking a kilometre down at peaks whose summits rose higher than Mount Whistler north of Vancouver, not to mention the local mountains closer to home. The hike itself ranged between 3200 and 4000 metres above sea level, and while I escaped any of the awful altitude sickness I experienced in Nepal, I was certainly gasping for breath on any climb of real significance. If it weren't for the altitude, the hiking wouldn't have been too strenuous, though, and we never hiked more than five or six hours in a day. Despite the cliff drops, my fear of heights never interfered with my fun beyond the fact that I stayed a couple feet further from the cliff's edge than the others. In addition, thanks to having mules to carry most of our things, we did the actual hiking with just day packs.
Spectacular as the views were, they didn't quite match being surrounded by 8000-metre giants in the Annapurnas, but the Simiens trump the Annapurnas for wildlife. The place is swarming with gelada baboons, which are endemic to Ethiopia, and seem mostly unafraid of human company. Geladas are unique among primates in being almost exclusively grass eaters, and large troops--hundreds at times--would move progressively across the hills, picking at grass, chirping to one another, and all too frequently breaking into vicious squabbles full of bared teeth and loud shrieking. By the end of three days, a baboon sighting became almost (although not quite) as commonplace as a squirrel sighting back home. Except baboons are a lot more fun to watch.
At Chennek, our scout also led us to a herd of walia ibex, notable for their thick, curved horns. The walia ibex live only in the Simiens, and there are only about 500 left, making them almost certainly the most endangered animal I've ever seen in the wild. Despite this (or perhaps explaining their endangered status), they were far less skittish than deer back home, and we managed to get surprisingly close to them.
One upside/downside to not also engaging a guide is that none of our companions spoke English. The downsides weren't all that down--mostly communication failures--and the upside was that I learned a fair amount of Amharic as a result. Nothing drastic, but I now know how to say "our compliments to the chef!" and a few other things thanks to my Lonely Planet phrasebook. The cook was a sweet man who prepared surprisingly good food considering it all came up to the mountains on muleback. Best of all (well, maybe second best to the heartiness and tastiness of the food after a strenuous day of hiking) was that he served us dinner wearing a white puffy chef's hat, a white chef's shirt, and a white apron, all of which was comically out of place while camping in the mountains of Ethiopia, but charming nonetheless.
The only sour point in the trip arose because one of the mule men (maybe more than one--hard to judge through the language barrier) insisted that he get four days' pay even though he was only doing three days of work. I find this sort of situation all too common when travelling in the developing world, and hard to find the right balance with: on one hand, every penny means a lot more to these people than it does to me, but on the other hand, it's galling to have people try to cheat me. It's not simply the principle of the thing, but also that it damages the tourism industry in general if locals start thinking of foreigners as gullible money pumps. Generally, I've aimed to tip generously but not outrageously, accept that I'll be overcharged for certain things, and stand my ground in the face of blatant cheating. In this case, it helped that both the scout and the cook seemed to agree with us that this guy's claim to an extra day's pay was unfounded. A good indication that it's wise to be friendly with the people you work with: always good to have the guy with the kalashnikov on your side of a dispute.
Jase, Till, and Wilma made fine travelling companions, and indeed I'm still with them in Aksum, where I've found an internet cafe from which to type this up. I've particularly enjoyed conversations with Jase, and Till's large-spirited gregariousness can be good fun as well, and makes a curious balance with Wilma's more reserved nature--they've been together since they were fifteen, so it seems to work out all right. I've even had some opportunities to practise my German with Till and Wilma, although it would be rude to do so with Jase in tow.
After a welcome shower and sleep in a real bed, we set off for Aksum yesterday morning. The bus ride from Debark to Shire (we had to change in Shire for an easy 90-minute minibus ride to Aksum) was hands down the worst bus ride of my entire life. This includes the 34-hour trip from Istanbul to Graz with my sister, where extortionate Bulgarian transit visas meant we were paying something like $8 an hour for the privilege of passing through the country and we were later accused of stealing someone else's smuggled cigarette cartons; the rickety bus from Calcutta to Siliguri where I was given very little reason to believe that my driver was concerned to avoid accidents; and the night bus from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg where I was squeezed next to an angry drunk who erupted into a fury every time my nodding off meant that I made the least bit of physical contact with him (at least he didn't chop my head off).
The journey began with an hour-long quarrel. The bus up to Shire begins in Gonder and is full before it reaches Debark, for which reason we paid someone to go down to Gonder the night before and reserve us four seats on the bus. Four ghost riders are naturally given the worst seats on the bus, and we were expected to cram into the back row, where the distance between the seat back and the seat back in front was less than the distance between my thigh and my knee. And bear in mind that Till is several inches taller than me. Till and Wilma quickly seized two somewhat better seats, and Jase and I managed to barely fit by occupying three seats in the back row, Jase stretching his knees into the aisle while I bent sideways so that my knees crossed over the seat next to me. This, of course, meant that we were taking up three seats between the two of us, and this was unacceptable. Very good at being unaggressively stubborn, Jase simply refused to budge (and understandably, none of the passengers in more leg-roomy seats further up front were willing to swap with us), and eventually the bus left with tempers severely strained. Over the next eight hours, the bus bounced along 200 kilometres of uneven dirt road, several bounces sending me half a foot into the air: bear in mind that, at the back of the bus, we were sitting directly over the rear wheel where the bounces are the worst. Credit due to the engineer who even managed to cut a road through these mountains, as there isn't a patch of flat earth between Debark and maybe 30 kilometres south of Shire, and the road is full of hair-raising hairpin turns over death-defying drops, but the world's bus riders can also eagerly await the arrival of asphalt and Chinese foremen on this god-forsaken road. Add to that the fact that the window just in front of us wouldn't close, and dust was everywhere. I got a self-portrait at the end of the journey that still doesn't quite do credit to just how filthy we got. When I took off my shirt at the end of the day, the inside and the outside were two distinctly different colours, and even after vigorous scrubbing in my hotel sink with camping detergent, the shirt still has a dusty hue on the outside.
But we made it to Aksum in surprisingly good humour, had a good night's sleep, and besides a slightly tender back, that bus ride is a distant memory. Time to go out and explore the ancient capital of Ethiopia.
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