In the footsteps of Rambo

I've spent the past couple days in and around Harar, whose walled old city dates back to the 16th century, when it was the launching point for Muslim warlord Ahmed Gragn's destructive assaults on the Christian empire to the west (actually, the old city is five centuries or more older than that, but the walls and its rise to prominence come thanks to Ahmed Gragn). To this day, old Harar is said to hold more mosques per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world--some of them tiny little one-room buildings that you'd scarcely notice if it weren't for the little crescent moon above the whitewashed stone wall--and is considered by some (mostly African and certainly not Shi'a) Muslims to be the fourth holiest city of Islam after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Islam entered sub-Saharan Africa from Arabia via the Horn of Africa, and Harar is one of Islam's earliest footholds on the African continent. For all that, it's a wonderfully open and relaxed city, where major churches and a significant Christian population live alongside their Muslim neighbours, and for the most part you wouldn't guess which were which. I'm told that, in a spirit of solidarity, many Christians fast during Ramadan and many Muslims fast during Lent.

But really, Harar is the opposite of a sacred city. It's long been a major trading post, and to this day maintains strong trade links with the Somali region in eastern Ethiopia, as well as the breakaway state of Somaliland with its strategic (by virtue of slipping under the customs radar) seaport in Berbera. This means that a lot of contraband passes both ways through Harar, and its thronging markets have a harmless but scruffy black market feel to them. Adding to the port city feel, Harar is ethnically mixed: indigenous Harari mingle with Amharic Ethiopians from the west, Somali from the east, and Oromo from the south. The Oromo are much more stereotypically African in their appearance, with darker skin, rounder faces, and broader, flatter noses.

Even though Harar is one of Ethiopia's main centres of coffee production, its main cash crop is chat, the mild narcotic leaf that's eagerly imported by lowland Djibouti and Somalia to the north and east. Chat is absolutely everywhere in Harar, and by midday it seems half the city is stoned on the stuff. So, applying the "when in Rome" principle, I hired a young guide called Sisay who'd come recommended from a couple sources to chew some chat with me yesterday afternoon. Best job he's ever had, I'm sure.

Sisay and I picked up 20 birr worth of chat at the market and then took a tuk-tuk out to his place. The whole thing had a delightfully college dorm seedy feel to it. I entered Sisay's cheap digs, where we were joined by his girlfriend and a couple guys who didn't bother to introduce themselves. Everyone reclining on cushions, we chewed chat, smoked apple-flavoured tobacco from a shisha, and sipped water and chewed peanuts. Canada's travel advisory warns me that chat is illegal in Canada and mustn't be imported, but as far as I can tell, its main danger to public health and order is that it would induce general idleness in the population. A couple hours of chewing gave me nothing more than a mild buzz and a very pleasant lethargy. My mind was perfectly alert--it has a similar effect to caffeine, and I had trouble getting to sleep last night--but I just didn't much feel like getting up or doing anything. Which might explain the general disposition of most people in Harar. And much of Ethiopia, I suppose. I don't know the unemployment figures here, but I'm sure they're pretty awful. And if you've got nothing else to do all day, you might as well enjoy not having anything to do.

Sisay was a curious figure. Unlike all the other guides in Harar, he wasn't pushy or eager to please, and had a very serious demeanour despite being quite young. Our conversation didn't go very deep, but I got the impression that he was unusually intelligent. It occurred to me that it must be tough being very intelligent when that intelligence--as distinct from business savvy--is of pretty much no value. All Sisay can hope for is some work as a guide entertaining cheerfully wealthy Westerners or maybe getting a driver's license and driving a minibus, and his outsize intellect only makes him smart enough not to be content with this lot. It made me profoundly grateful to be from a part of the world where intelligence in itself--if I may arrogate so far--can open doors rather than just make one more aware of their shutness.

The most famous trader ever to set up shop in Harar (Richard Burton also passed through here in 1855--the first European to enter the walled city--but he wasn't a trader) was the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, known in these parts, it seems, as "Rambo." Using the free wi-fi at the Ghion Hotel in Bahir Dar a week ago, I downloaded onto my Kindle the Penguin edition of Rimbaud's selected poems and letters, and blazed through the book in a week. It's always a bit tricky judging poetry in a language that isn't my own, even with facing text translation (facing text translation isn't the Kindle's strong suit), but the poetry of this adolescent genius struck me as a bit, well, adolescent. Rimbaud seems to have shared that assessment: having revolutionized French poetry by the time he turned 20, he abandoned his art altogether and sought out work in various commercial endeavours in various corners of the world. He spent the 1880's moving between Aden in Yemen and Harar, trading in hides, ivory, coffee, and arms. By 37, in 1891, he was dead of a cancer that started in his right leg.

Despite occasionally striking passages, and a staggering precociousness, I found the person more intriguing than the poems. What kind of self-confidence do you need to wander around France, Belgium, and Britain as a teenager, drinking yourself into oblivion, insulting everyone you know, and justifiably proclaiming that you're going to transform poetry? And what kind of a tortured soul abandons this self entirely and becomes a hard-nosed trader in some of the most remote places European commerce had touched at that time? Reading the letters were fascinating, not only to see this Wunderkind transform into a practical businessman, but also because it provided an intimate view of a place and time that I find interesting in its own right. Rimbaud was in Harar around the time that King Menelik of Showa expanded into the area, and shortly before he became emperor of all Ethiopia. Rimbaud's letters discuss various frustrations in his dealings with Menelik, as well as Menelik's governor of Harar, Ras Mekonnen, father of the future emperor Haile Selassie.

Rimbaud's time in Harar is commemorated by a small museum in a beautiful old house, which I visited this morning (having only finished reading the letters last night). Along with a bunch of information about Rimbaud's life, both before and during his Harar years (all only in French, and clearly put together by someone who has some experience with European standards of curation), the museum also collected a number of fascinating photographs of late nineteenth century Harar. Rimbaud was the first, but by no means the only, person to bring a camera to Harar.

I hired a guide called Girma to wander the streets of the old city with me. Strictly speaking, I didn't need a guide, but Girma was great in that he's the kind of guy who knows everything and everyone. I didn't learn a whole lot about Harar that I couldn't have learned on my own, but wandering the narrow streets, I was made to feel a part of the place as we stopped and greeted various friends and acquaintances. Unlike the dusty dirt roads and corrugated metal roofs that blight most Ethiopian towns, old Harar is paved in cobblestones and the buildings are walled with thick whitewashed (and occasionally colourfully painted) stone.

As well as wandering the streets of the old city with Girma, I also had an outing with him yesterday to Babile's camel market and the slightly overbilled "Valley of Marvels." The valley is full of bizarre rock formations, not unlike--but not as spectacular as--Capadoccia in Turkey. The camel market was great fun. Never have I seen so many camels in one place (although I suppose that's not saying much). The whole place had a terrific bustle about it, with Somali and Oromo women in their colourful clothing squatting and gossiping in groups, while the menfolk bartered and haggled over camels. I decided not to make a purchase when I learned that a good-sized camel can fetch upward of $1000.

The strangest sight in Harar, if not in Ethiopia as a whole, is the hyena man. For no one quite knows how many years, there's been a hyena man who posts himself just outside the old city walls every evening (this guy is the son of the previous guy who may well be the son of the previous guy and so on back), and feeds the hyenas who skulk out of the shadows at his summons. For 50 birr (the best 50 birr I've spent in Ethiopia) you can watch, or join in the action. It truly is amazing to behold. With a series of whistles and gestures he signals to these animals, and even calls each one forward by name. He'll hold a stick of maybe a foot in length between his teeth, and suspend a piece of fresh meat from the end. A hyena will stalk forward, snatch the meat, and then retreat quickly. For show, he'll even toy with the hyenas, lifting the meat away so that the hyena will be reaching over his lap almost like a pet dog. Truly, in my list of bizarre tourist attractions, this ranks up with the Hair Museum in Avanos in Cappadocia, where a deranged Turk has collected locks of thousands of women's (and only women's) hair and attached them to the ceiling of his cave, each one indexed with name, nationality, and harvesting date. The whole cave looks like those medical pictures of the throat with its thousands of cilia.

But hyenas are emphatically not pet dogs. First of all, these are wild animals, and they're no more tame than the bears back home that have become dangerously habituated to human settlements and food scraps. Second, they're big. Much bigger than I'd imagined. After lions and ahead of leopards, spotted hyenas are Africa's second largest land predator (although this anthropocentric count naturally excludes the world's most deadly predator). Much bigger than all but the biggest dogs, and very heavy-set with powerful haunches. I was also interested to see that they're much more cat-like than dog-like (and apparently more closely related to cats than to dogs): they have round heads and short muzzles, and move about with a feline slinkiness.

But you might still be wondering what I meant in the paragraph before this last one when I said "join in the action." I meant join in the action. I was invited to hold a foot-long stick between my teeth, the hyena man suspended a bit of meat from it, and I got a from-twenty-centimetres-away close-up view of a spotted hyena grabbing a piece of meat. Strangely, this wasn't particularly frightening. The thing is, despite their habituation, the hyenas were clearly more uneasy about this whole operation than we were. They'd pace back and forth nervously, and when it came to snatching the meat, they'd approach quickly and retreat even more quickly. I can understand them not being aggressive toward their feeders, but I was genuinely surprised by their clear nerviness surrounding a nightly activity. All to the good, though: I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel feeding a hyena who was more comfortable about the procedure than I was.

Last night as I tried to drown my chat-induced sleeplessness with beer at my hotel, I was joined by Nebil, who I'd briefly met twice the previous day, once when he was urging me to buy his brother's wares, and once at the hyena feeding place. I don't know what possessed him to sit down with me, but he was utterly distraught: two close friends had died on the same day. One had been ill for a while, but the other had died quite suddenly, and neither of them was much over 40. I did my best to listen and ask the right questions and say the right things, quickly learning that compassion doesn't require linguistic complexity. Much as this whole country is exotic to me, I suppose I'm exotic to everyone in this country. Maybe sometimes the person you need to speak to in your grief is the one who's furthest removed from you.

Later that night, in bed, I was treated to the howling of hyenas. I was told they laugh. Maybe they do that as well, but what I heard were bullhorn-loud deep-throated moans, as if the nearby football pitch was haunted by hungry ghosts.

What's your status? I be in Addis.

For some reason, a line from an early hip hop track has been running through my head the last few days: "What's your status? I be the baddest." It somehow seemed appropriate since I'm in the hustle and bustle of Ethiopia's capital.

I've never been much of a big city person, and places like New York and London are only tolerable because their big-city-ness comes with a vast range of cultural and other offerings. I've been in Addis Ababa long enough only to find out that the National Theatre is infuriatingly hard to contact and the football season is over, which leaves me with a very big city of rather recent historical vintage. Like Berlin, Addis only became the centre of a major empire in the late 19th century, and unlike Berlin, Addis didn't have the sort of twentieth century that turned it into one of the most fascinating cities in the world (not that Ethiopian history's been dull, mind you, just that it hasn't been Berlin). I'm staying at the Itegue Taitu Hotel, built in 1898 and billed as the oldest hotel in the city. It certainly has a rickety old-world charm to it (although it would be nice if the leaky toilets had seats), but it really isn't that old. Founded in 1887 by the Emperor Menelik II, Addis Ababa is one year younger than Vancouver.

I arrived in Addis mid-afternoon on the 23rd after a long bus ride from Bahir Dar. That gave me enough time to take a quick walk around the city to orient myself before the sun set. The city gave decidedly mixed first impressions. I was braced for big scary urbanity, and I never felt uncomfortable strolling about. On the other hand, by the end of my two-hour walk, I was coughing from all the exhaust fumes, and I'd been approached by three "students" and one child who wanted to accompany me on my walk, and one urchin had had a try at my pockets. Fortunately, I'd made sure to keep all my valuables out of easy reach, and three weeks in Ethiopia has given me plenty of practice at being polite but firm in telling my companions that actually, thank you, I prefer to walk alone (the alternative is a conversation that grows boring as it slowly turns to the question of how best to extract money from me). Still, it was enough to think I might leave for Harar a day early. I'm going to aim to get back to Addis a day before my flight out anyway, and I've now seen all the sights I wanted to see.

Those sights included: the Addis Sheraton Hotel, the Mercato, the National Museum, and the museum at the university. There are a few other things I could investigate on the day before my flight, but nothing I'll be wringing my hands about if I miss.

The Sheraton wasn't exactly a must-see, but I'd heard enough about it that I thought it deserved a look, so I included it on my first afternoon's stroll. It's thought to be one of the finest hotels in Africa, and certainly strolling around its spacious grounds gave me a sense of luxury that I've very rarely experienced even in North America or Europe (certainly not if I'm the one footing the bill). Coming off the dusty streets of Addis, it was intriguing to see not only how the other half (or the other 0.01%) lives, but also who that other half is. A range of well-groomed white folk, slick-as-oil Chinese, and a number of authoritative-looking Africans, some attired in business suits and some in the sort of traditional clothing that I associate with visiting dignitaries (Addis hosts both the African Union and a major UN headquarters). I had to pass through two security checkpoints to get in, but as with other security checks I've been through in Addis, my white face earned me the kid gloves treatment. Next time I hatch a plan to commit grand larceny or plant a bomb in an African capital, I'll make a point of being white. There's the flip side to my white face drawing would-be con artists and pickpockets out of the woodwork.

The Mercato is the major market area in Addis, and said to be one of the largest public markets in Africa. It might have been the time of day I came, or maybe I somehow by-passed the interesting bits, but it was a bit of a disappointment. Lots of stalls selling mostly clothing, but nothing like the bustle and chaos I'd anticipated. I went in high security mode as I'd been warned the Mercato was also a haven for pickpockets, but never felt even followed as I wandered about.

The day I visited the Mercato (yesterday) I also spent familiarizing myself with the minibus network. My initial walk through town the previous day had given me enough of a sense of where everything was that I didn't feel lost as the minibuses zipped me around, and it was a genuinely pleasant experience. There aren't bus stops in Addis the way there are in most cities I know, but there are areas where minibuses congregate before shooting off to various other corners of the city. Because I'm not yet familiar with which minibuses stop where, I constantly had to ask people to help me. And I think that's the secret to starting to like whatever potentially scary city you're in: in Addis--as I imagine almost everywhere in the world--99% of the people are genuinely decent and friendly and a good chunk of them are very eager to help if you ask them for help. (The ones to watch out for are the ones who seek me out before they know I need help and try to find ways that they can place me in their debt.) I got lots of friendly help, a few friendly conversations (I chatted with a guy wearing a Chelsea shirt about the soccer game the previous week), and occasional politeness on a scale I'd never see in the West. The last person on to one of the minibuses (they don't leave till they're chock-a-block full), I had a rather precarious seat, and one of my neighbours insisted on trading seats with me. I'm not sure I've ever seen people on Vancouver buses get up to help seat someone because he was an out-of-town tourist. Also, no one ever tried to charge me more than the very low standard price: the whole experience really made me feel like I was an honoured guest in the city.

And if there's kindness from strangers in Addis, imagine the hospitality from not-quite-strangers. My friend Renee has an Ethiopian friend Yabebal (they studied astrophysics together in Cape Town), and she put us in touch shortly before we left. Yabebal was massively helpful over e-mail, teaching me some basic Amharic words, pointing me toward Selam Bus, whose added comfort has been a life-saver on long-haul trips, and giving me the contact details of his brother Samuel, who still lives in Addis. Problems with Samuel's cell phone meant that we didn't meet up until after I'd been in the city for a full day, but we met up for dinner last night. Samuel is a big man full of smiles and laughter, and despite the fact that we'd never met before and don't have any obvious common interests, the conversation didn't flag for an instant. He even insisted on lending me a spare cell phone so that I could be in touch more easily, not to mention paying for my meal (Samuel used to work as a cook, so he also knows where to go for good food). He was going to join me on my museum outing today as well, but work got the better of him. Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet up again before I leave. Not least because I still have his cell phone.

The museum outings today were the most standardly tourist activity of my time in Addis, and were indeed quite satisfying. I started at the National Museum, which houses a replica of Lucy, as well as artifacts from Ethiopia's historical past, before moving on to the museum at the university. Both were very good museums, certainly several steps above the disappointments in Aksum and Lalibela. Besides the fascination of seeing several million years of hominid evolution at the National Museum (Lucy was the biggest find, but Ethiopia's Rift Valley has been the site of finds from pretty much every stage in the past five million years of hominid evolution), it was intriguing seeing the best collection I know of from Aksumite and pre-Aksumite civilizations. Aksum and Yeha are obviously the unmoveable sites of the monumental architecture, but I saw far more small-scale stuff from the millennia before and after Christ in the National Museum. It helped fill out my picture of these civilizations, especially in the case of Yeha, where what remains there doesn't tell you a whole lot about the people who lived there.

Addis Ababa University is a place worth visiting in itself, a leafy and inviting campus that certainly benefits from being situated on the grounds of a former palace of Emperor Haile Selassie. The Institute of Ethiopian Studies is the building that used to be the emperor's palace, and the museum includes a few rooms that preserve the emperor's and his wife's bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as featuring some of their garments. Being an emperor seems to be pretty good work if you can get it (although you also run the risk of being killed in the aftermath of a military coup). The museum also has a floor dedicated to ethnography, featuring various artifacts used by the dozens of different nationalities in Ethiopia (the far south in particular features a number of tribes that are quintessentially tribal African, with ritual scarification, lip plugs, and various fascinating coming-of-age rituals: I'm not visiting (a) because it would cost too much, (b) because it would require at least two weeks, and (c) because I'd feel a bit odd viewing human beings as if they were exotic wildlife). The upper floor collects an impressive range of musical instruments as well as Christian art and sacred crosses. These latter two were very well represented but not quite as eye-popping as they are when situated in their original contexts. And I've had the good fortune of seeing the original contexts already.

The Institute of Ethiopian Studies also houses a large library and reading room. I was a little too shy to wander around while people studied, but it was a nice feeling to suddenly find myself at the heart of a university after the best part of a month removing myself from such a familiar element. The library was really very attractive, with big wood tables and high ceilings more reminiscent of Oxford than a Canadian university.

And now I have the rest of an afternoon to myself before getting up super early for yet another very early Selam Bus out to Harar. I arrived in Addis a little apprehensive, but I feel I'll be leaving it having not exactly befriended the city, but at least made friendly acquaintance.

"Beneath this rock I will build my church"

I'm back in Bahir Dar after three days in Lalibela, where the internet is super slow and four times as expensive as it is in Bahir Dar, which is why I've waited till now to update the blog. It takes a minimum of two days to get from Lalibela to the capital of Addis Ababa by bus, so I decided to break up the journey by returning to Bahir Dar, where I plan to spend tomorrow relaxing on the beautiful lakefront patio of the Ghion Hotel, as well as making a trip out to see the Blue Nile Falls, which I missed on my last visit. As if to announce that I'd made a good choice in coming back, I stepped out of my room at the Ghion just after checking in and a sizeable tortoise ambled across my path.

The trip from Lalibela to Bahir Dar featured the worst and the best of travel in Ethiopia. Despite being Ethiopia's premier tourist destination, Lalibela is removed from any major roads, so I needed to take a two-hour minibus to the junction town of Gashena and then hope to find a free seat on a bus or minibus passing through Gashena in the direction of Bahir Dar. After getting bad information about when to catch the minibus, I finally found myself on one a bit late at 9:30am, having agreed on the standard 50 birr fare. I was squeezed next to two Japanese tourists, who'd been deceitfully told it would cost 100 birr, and so when the guy asked me to pay my fare and I gave him 50, he insisted on 100. (In general, I found Lalibela a rather difficult town in terms of children and adults trying to plead or scam or manipulate money out of me.) I told him that I'd been told 50 and he refused to carry me, and I refused to pay up, so I had to get out of the minibus and wait another half hour or so (and turn down a few other inflated-price offers) before finally a minibus was willing to take me at the standard rate. This isn't just thriftiness on my part: it's that I refuse to support the idea that it's acceptable to rip off foreigners. Even though this was the bad part of the trip, I should add that I was helped a lot by Jordi, a local guide who also helped me get the bus from Mekele to Lalibela four days earlier, and through all his help never got a commission nor asked for a tip (I gave him one at the end anyway).

The good part of the trip began about half an hour after I arrived in Gashena. Along with Taka and Masae, the lovely Japanese couple I'd been squeezed next to on the earlier overpriced minibus, I hitched a ride in a super-comfy 4x4, carrying four guys from Addis who work for an agricultural insurance firm that offers insurance for smallholder farmers using a system that's closely related to microfinance. They'd been assessing risk indexes in the farmland around Lalibela (and seeing Lalibela's churches for the first time in their lives), and were heading back to Bahir Dar for some more meetings. Not only did they do the reverse of gouge us on the price--I thought I'd agreed to a slightly-inflated-but-totally-fair-for-4x4-comfort 200 birr, but at the end of the trip the driver insisted I pay only 150 birr--but they also went out of their way to help Taka and Masae, who were trying to get to Gonder, which is in the opposite direction from Bahir Dar after the junction town of Werota. After dropping Taka and Masae at the Werota bus station, the Ethiopians refused to leave until they were sure that Taka and Masae were on a bus, they assisted in negotiations, and insisted on driving them to Bahir Dar when it was clear that they couldn't get a fair price in Werota. They also spoke excellent English and made for fascinating conversation. Not only did I have a long chat about Ethiopian politics, and the disappointment of the rigged 2005 election, but I also had the lyrics to a number of Teddy Afro songs explained to me. Teddy Afro is Ethiopia's most popular singer, and you hear his music absolutely everywhere, including our 4x4. A rather cheesy ballad took on rather touching significance when I learned that it was a love song where the singer mourns his separation from his Eritrean lover. With none-too-subtle political overtones, the song wishes for peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea so that the singer can be reunited with his lover. Teddy Afro has been imprisoned in the past on what are generally thought to be trumped-up charges for taking stances critical of the ruling political party.

But at this point you're probably thinking, "what about those three days in Lalibela? What was that about Lalibela being Ethiopia's premier tourist destination?" If you're like me before I read my Ethiopia travel book, you may never have even heard of Lalibela. If it were in Egypt or Jordan instead of Ethiopia, it would be (nearly) as famous as the Pyramids or Petra. But because it's in Ethiopia, it's largely escaped the notice of the wider world (although that said, it was the only place I've been in Ethiopia where you really did pass a white person every five minutes). But, to cut to the chase, Lalibela was Ethiopia's capital during the Zagwe dynasty from roughly the 10th to 13th centuries, and is named for its most famous king, who, during the 12th century (clear enough on dates, Eddie?), oversaw the construction of eleven churches dug out of the rock.

By "dug out of the rock," what I mean is that, over about 24 years, 40,000 labourers dug into the red volcanic rock and carved ornate monolithic and semi-monolithic churches whose roofs stand at ground level, and whose foundations lie ten or more metres down below. The sight is truly awesome to behold, even if all but one of the churches is now covered by hyper-modern white roofing supplied by the European Union to protect them from centuries of erosion. The roofing doesn't quite manage the ironic elegance of I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, but I suppose it's better than letting the churches crumble.

The churches stand in three clusters. The northwest cluster is the most impressive, featuring Bet Medhane Alem, which, at 11.5m in height and 800 square metres in area, is the largest monolithic rock-hewn church in the world, as well as the smaller Bet Maryam, with a breathtakingly elaborate interior. I had to keep reminding myself that these structures were dug straight out of the rock. Bet Medhane Alem has the dimensions of a sizeable church, and the only difference between its pillars and the ones in a normal stone church is that there are no fissures where stone slabs were placed on top of one another because the whole church is one single massive piece of rock. Especially because the white roofing prevents any distance shots, the whole thing has to be seen to be believed.

The southeast cluster is a little more scattered, with long tunnels and winding passages leading between churches, making me think that the eight-year-old me who thrilled at exploring the ruined castles of the Welsh border would have been in seventh heaven racing around between these churches. And even the adult me kind of wished he had nieces and nephews here with whom he could play the world's greatest game of hide-and-go-seek.

Separate from the two other clusters, Bet Giyorgis stands on its own, and is probably the picture you'll see if you do a google image search of Lalibela, because it's the only one of the churches that isn't covered in roofing (yup: just checked). It's also sublimely beautiful in its cruciform shape, even if the interior is a little disappointing.

I swear, the person who's missed out the most in not knowing more about Ethiopia is Steven Spielberg. This place would have been perfect for an Indiana Jones film. Wandering about the churches yesterday with a Dutch couple, we started plotting out the whole thing. Pre-WWII Ethiopia occupied by Italian fascists--who naturally need a few Nazi advisors to give Indy someone to clash wits with--the real location of the Ark of the Covenant at stake, not to mention an ancient Christian culture with its own mysterious rites and dark secrets: the film really just writes itself.

My first visit to the churches at Lalibela couldn't have been better. I'd arrived late afternoon from Mekele following a route that didn't go by the churches, so I hadn't seen them when I arrived. That evening I met an English couple halfway through a Cape-to-Cairo motorbike trip (I really like English people) who were getting a guided tour of the churches the following day and had been invited by their guide to drop in at a pre-dawn ceremony at Bet Meskel, one of the smaller churches in the northwest cluster. They offered to let me join their tour, starting with the ceremony.

Each one of the churches has particular associations that make different days sacred for different churches. Each church has a special ceremony about once a month, where the priests stay up all night chanting and praying, and last Thursday night was Bet Meskel's special night. So after getting up before 5 the previous day to catch an early bus from Mekele, I got up before 5 again on Friday morning so that I could catch the last hour of the ceremony before the priests went off to bed at dawn. When Anna, Kristian, and I arrived, it was still dark, so my first view of the churches was of these shadowy masses looming up from down below me. Without any proper orientation as to where I was, I descended into the rock, passed through a tunnel, and found myself in a smallish square on the outside of a circle of about twenty priests, all clad head to toe in white, swaying back and forth and chanting in Ge'ez, accompanied only by a drum and these metal rattle-like things that they'd shake for a kind of tambourine effect. I've never been so glad that my camera has a video function. Gradually, the dawn light seeped through the blackness, and the rocks around me changed from a shadowy grey to dark reddish brown to increasingly paler reddish brown. By a bit after 6, it was unmistakably day, and the drumming and chanting climaxed and calmed down, and people slowly filed into Bet Meskel or off to wherever they were going to sleep.

Not only are the churches of Lalibela astonishing monuments of a long-dead dynasty, they're also very much living temples of Christian worship. In case Spielberg needed further incentive.

After heading back to the hotel for breakfast, Kristian, Anna, and I rejoined our guide, Agiew, who gave us the official tour of the churches. To be frank, the tour was a bit disappointing, but the churches themselves weren't, and since I'd given myself three days in Lalibela (and since the $20 (!!!) admission ticket is good for five days), I was able to come back yesterday and tour around a bit by myself and a bit with the fun Dutch couple that was staying in my hotel and who I ran into halfway through my day at the churches.

The churches in Lalibela are definitely the town's highlight, but they aren't the only churches in the area. On Saturday, I spent the morning hiking up to Asheton Maryam, a church up a mountain overlooking the town. Lalibela itself is at a cool 2600m above sea level, and Asheton Maryam must have been at least another 500m higher. The church itself was nothing compared to the ones in town, but the hike was lovely--barring the fact that I was followed almost the entire way by prospective guides and pestering children ("Hello pen!" "Hello money!" I seriously worry about the future of a country where it seems 90% of the children grow up thinking it's normal and acceptable to ask foreigners to give them things for no reason at all.) A steep climb up beyond the church took me to a beautiful small plateau overlooking the town and much of the surrounding countryside. I could happily have spent an hour up there relaxing if I hadn't forgot to bring a hat to protect me from the midday sun and if I hadn't been joined by a young man who'd appeared from seemingly nowhere and was slowly working his way toward asking me to give him money.

On the way up to Asheton Maryam, I passed crowds of villagers coming down the same road, with donkeys loaded with goods. Saturday is Lalibela's market day, and the Lalibela market is deservedly famous, drawing in people from the surrounding villages, many of them making several hours' journey to buy, sell, and trade. It was great fun wandering about the stalls, which were selling everything from clothes to food (I finally got to see the tef grain from which injera is made) to (my personal highlight) flip-flops for farmers made out of used car tires.

And what does one do on a Saturday night in this holiest of Ethiopian cities? Why, one watches the Champions League Final, of course. Ethiopians are soccer-crazy, and it's all over TV screens, so the most important club-level match of the year was a must-see. I was also with Till and Wilma, who aren't great soccer fans, but felt they had to go out and support Bayern Munich, who were unlikely finalists against Chelsea. For my own part, and despite being almost entirely ignorant about soccer, I was on Bayern's side partly because Franck Ribery is sublime (and Robben and Schweinsteiger are pretty great too) and partly because I object in principle to teams like Chelsea and Manchester City that are effectively the playthings of billionaire owners.

Till, Wilma, and I found our way to a small cafe/bar that had been converted into a viewing area, with loads of chairs and a big-by-Ethiopian-standards screen set up at the far end. We were the only Westerners in a crowd of about 80 Ethiopians, and judging from the cheers, I'd say that they were at least 90% Chelsea partisans. This has mostly to do with the unhealthy respect Ethiopians seem to have for the English Premiership. Of the conversation-openers I meet with in my walks around Ethiopian cities, one of my favourites is "what is your favourite team in the English Premiership?" It's one of my favourites because it seems to me to be the one that most genuinely reaches out to try to form a friendship. Questions like "What is your country?" inevitably reinforce a sense of distance between the questioner and the answerer, but who your favourite football club is can genuinely create a sense of fellowship. More's the pity, then, that I know far too little about English club football to bond over this question. "I'm more into ice hockey" usually draws blank stares and only serves to reinforce whatever distance there already was between us (I was trying to guess where the nearest ice rink is, and figure it's probably in Dubai or Israel), but I really can't honestly claim to have a favourite club. The only clubs where I know the names of more than two players are clubs like Chelsea, which I object to for reasons mentioned above, or Manchester United, which is more a massively successful marketing phenomenon than a sports team. So, sadly, I end up struggling a bit in football conversations with Ethiopians, especially since they all seem to have encyclopedic knowledge of all things football-related.

A secondary reason for Chelsea's popularity on this occasion (it seems Manchester United is generally the runaway favourite) is that their star striker, Didier Drogba, is a fellow African. Seeing the delight in the crowd as Drogba scored the equalizing goal in the 88th minute and then the winning penalty in the shootout (a further injustice is that Bayern overwhelmingly outplayed Chelsea and didn't deserve to lose), it struck me how remarkable pan-African pride is. Ethiopia and Drogba's Ivory Coast have next to nothing--geographically, ethnically, historically, linguistically, culturally--in common, but because Drogba's African, he's still a hero. Imagine a Spaniard cheering on a Polish athlete because he's European. It just wouldn't happen.

And that pretty much brings me to the end of this rather long post. But since I'm heading back to the big bad city of Addis Ababa tomorrow, I should say a few quick words in praise of donkeys, who I'll probably be seeing less of in Addis. In the course I taught this spring, I required students to give group presentations on different animals of their choice, where they discuss the biology, human uses, cultural significance, etc., of an animal of their choice. One of the best of the bunch was a presentation on donkeys, which brought out their importance to third-world economies, as well as giving an insightful treatment of their symbolic role as humble beasts of burden (as well as stupid asses). Donkeys are everywhere in Ethiopia, and the respect that I first learned from my students has developed into a deep love. They're remarkably strong for their small size, incredibly hard working, and gentle creatures to boot. Jase described them as broken-spirited, which I suppose is true, but in them I see (what may amount to the same thing) a spirit of resignation. Resignation to one's fate, to the fact that life is hard but must be endured, is central to every religion, and I couldn't help but see in the gentle resignation of donkeys a truly spiritual genius. This might sound like the worst kind of anthropomorphism, but donkeys strike me as quintessentially religious animals. And thinking in that vein gives a new perspective on the significance of Christ's riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Certainly, being in a country that relies so heavily on their labour gives me a deeper understanding of the symbolic significance of donkeys in Western literature.

Travels in Tigrai

I'm taking it easy in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia's northernmost province of Tigrai. It's a very pleasant place to take a day's rest. It's a laid-back city with a strong sense of self. And because the tourist industry barely brushes against Mekele--it's a useful transit hub but doesn't have a whole lot of its own to offer to tourists--it's a very relaxing place for a tourist to spend a day. Unlike every other place I've been, I'm not constantly chased down by screaming kids and would-be guides or middlemen. Also, the hotel I'm staying in is great: the afternoon's plan is to sit on its outdoor balcony above one of the town's central roundabouts and do some reading and writing.

This comparison is probably off in all sorts of ways, but Tigrai gives me the impression of being to Ethiopia what West Bengal is to India: somewhat on the fringes geographically and economically, and with more than its fair share of destitution, but also very proud and cultured, carrying a well-earned sense of being the most civilized part of the country it belongs to. The current president of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, is Tigraian, and Tigrai was a focal point of resistance to the Derg dictatorship that lasted from 1974 to 1991. A massive memorial on the outskirts of Mekele commemorates the sacrifices of the Tigraian People's Liberation Front.

The morning passed uneventfully enough. The only real tourist destination in town is the Yohannis IV Museum. Yohannis was one of a string of strong Ethiopian rulers in the late 19th century who managed to unify Ethiopia and keep it free of European colonial ambitions. The high point of this struggle for independence came in the 1896 Battle of Adwa, where Yohannis's successor Menelik II decisively beat the Italians and kept them from occupying Ethiopia for another forty years. Yohannis was Tigraian, and so Mekele was the country's capital during his 17-year reign, and while his palace is under restoration, his museum is temporarily housed next door. Being pretty much the only tourist in town, I got a detailed guided tour from the museum's curator, who also insisted on taking all my photos for me. In fairness, he did a good job of getting shots of things behind glass with minimal glare, but I'm not sure I needed quite as many photos as he took for me. But it was nice of him to let me take photos at all: the whole site is under government authority and so photos are strictly prohibited, but he told me as long as no other tourists were around it couldn't hurt. The museum itself housed a number of antiquities, as well as costumes worn by Yohannis and his successors (including two lion-skin battle costumes), and some really beautiful ecclesiastical artwork and ornate metal crosses. But since most of the rest of this post will be about ecclesiastical beauty, I won't belabour the museum visit.

I spent the past two days shuttling around various places between Aksum and Mekele in a hired minibus with Till and Wilma (they've now gone on to Lalibela as their time in Ethiopia is a little shorter than mine). I might as well just run through those various places in turn.

The first stop was at Yeha, site of an ancient, pre-Aksumite temple, which, built sometime in the millennium before Christ, is probably the oldest standing structure in sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, it was under restoration when we visited, so the ancient reddish stone walls were covered in scaffolding. Even more than the stelae at Aksum, this one required a bit of imagination to get into, but it was remarkably solid, with impressively tight masonry, for a structure built about two and a half thousand years ago.

The next stop required very little imagination to be enjoyed to its utmost: not far from the Eritrean border stands the clifftop monastery of Debre Damo. And I really mean "clifftop": the whole monastery complex, and its contingent of about 150 monks, lives on a small clifftop plateau, half a square kilometre in total, where the only way up or down is by scaling a 15-metre cliff--with the help of a rope, thankfully. The monks shoot up and down very nimbly, but for tourists they provide a not-entirely-up-to-North-American-safety-standards leather harness. It was just enough security to get me safely up and down with a bit of huffing and puffing but without my fear of heights sending me into a panic.

Once up the cliff and at the monastery, I encountered a place of remarkable serenity, especially in comparison with the noise and bustle of even Ethiopian villages. Everything was very quiet (I could hear chanting coming from somewhere but never located the source), and a gentle, friendly monk showed Till and me (men only, so Wilma had to stay at the bottom) around the church and up to the belltower, with two big copper bells adorned with inscriptions in Ge'ez. The church reminded me somewhat of the Tibetan monasteries I'd visited in the highlands of Nepal and in Sikkim: squat and square, with thick wooden beams and a rooftop adornment (obviously the Buddhist ones didn't feature a crucifix) with metal wind chimes that tinkled gently against one another in the stillness. Like the good-looking thing, I wonder if there's something about living at high altitudes that leads to similar religious buildings. Beyond the church lay a small village's worth of modest stone huts, and beyond that, stunning views over the rugged Tigraian landscape.

Serenity aside, what's most astonishing about Debre Damo is that it exists at all. No one really knows how all the building materials made their way up the cliff, and it seems miraculous enough that tradition attributes it to miracles: the monastery's founder, Abba Aregawi, is said to have been carried to the top of the cliff by a flying serpent, and his disciple Tekle Haymonot is said to have sprouted wings to escape from the devil, and that he used them to make frequent visits to Jerusalem. The monastery is obviously reliant on supplies from down below, but has a modest supply of livestock (all male, of course, since this is an all-male monastery) and a number of wells dug out of the rock to supply water.

The only sour moment in the visit came at the end, when the kalashnikov-wielding rope guy refused to let us down unless we each gave him a 50 birr tip, which, at about $3 a head isn't really so much, but is outrageous by the standards of Ethiopian tipping. Strong-willed and unafraid of heights, Till decided just to go down on his own steam, and I provided the belay until the rope guy took it off me, resigned to the fact that he wasn't getting more than the standard 10 birr we'd already given him (although I have to say that my belaying technique is superior to his). I was ready to cough up the 50 birr since I don't think my fear of heights would have handled an unsupported descent, but just in the nick of time one of the monks showed up, who'd asked us if he could hitch a ride with us as far as Adigrat. Since we were doing him that favour, he very happily belayed me on my descent before nimbly hopping down himself without a harness.

The afternoon of the first day, and all of yesterday were given over to exploring the rock-hewn churches that dot the Tigraian landscape between the cities of Adigrat and Mekele. Photos sadly can't convey just how marvellous these structures are, and I fear my words will only offer a pale approximation. Between roughly the 10th and 16th centuries, over 200 hundred churches were carved into cliff faces across Tigrai. Small by the standards of Medieval European churches, these structures are still remarkably large when you consider that every breath of cavernous space was chipped out of the solid rock. (The largest I saw, Abreha we Atsbeha, is a roomy 16m wide, 13m deep, and 6m high, and could comfortably house a decent-sized congregation.) The interiors are adorned with frescoes, most in some state of centuries-old fading, but some of them remarkably bright (and recently touched-up), along with often ornately carved columns and ceilings.

Our first day took in Adi Kasho, just off the main north-south road through eastern Tigrai, and our second day took us into the Gheralta, a volcanically formed wonderland of towering cliffs and fairy chimneys made of malleable stone. I skipped out on the first church of the day, Abuna Yemata Guh, because it required a climb up a cliff face that I think my climbing skills could have handled but I suspect my fear of heights might have spoiled. But the second outing, to Debre Maryam Korkor, and nearby Abba Daniel Korkor, can count among the best three hours of hiking of my entire life. We hiked up toward twin cliff faces and then ascended a narrow passage between them that led us up behind the cliffs. Another thirty or forty minutes of hiking and scrambling up and around various billowing rock faces led us to a gentle plateau at least 500m above where we'd started. All of this while surrounded by far-as-the-eye-can-see views of the arid and rugged beauty of the Gheralta landscape. And all of it thrilling while never really testing my fear of heights (there was one moment where I leaped from one rock to another and only in mid-air noticed that the gap between the rocks dropped into a twenty-metre-deep crevasse!).

The church itself was moody and atmospheric, and, along with the soul-disencumbering climb, made it feel like one of the holiest spaces I'd ever entered. Up on a cliff, in the middle of spectacular nowhere, someone (or more likely someones) had carved out of sheer rock an awesome monument to God. It was almost enough to make me fall to my knees and convert to Ethiopian Orthodoxy.

On the opposite side of the pillar of rock into which Debre Maryam Korkor was carved, a ledge led round to the smaller (and now disused) Abba Daniel Korkor, with a tiny entrance just big enough for me to crawl through. Inside, the whitewashed walls sported frescoes of various Old Testament figures. I got a picture of me standing underneath King David with his harp.

Far easier to visit, but more impressive architecturally, was Abreha we Atsbeha (it was already 2pm at this stage and there aren't any restaurants in the Gheralta, so we weren't exactly sorry that this one was just a two-minute walk from our minivan and not an hour-long hike up a cliff), whose impressive size and brightly coloured frescoes make it the best hope of conveying photographically just how astonishing these churches are (although that will have to wait another three weeks and depend on an unstolen camera). Like almost all the other churches, this one is still very much in use. And here I have to object somewhat to the aesthetic blight of modernization. Many of the churches we visited in the last couple of days are fitted with ungainly electrical wires feeding loudspeakers and fluorescent light bulbs. Not to mention the fact that most non-rock-hewn churches I've seen in Ethiopia have foregone their original thatched roofing in favour of corrugated tin. I can see how these modernizing touches carry certain advantages for the priests and congregation, but at what I think is an unacceptable aesthetic cost. If the human voice and candles sufficed a century ago, do we really need loudspeakers and fluorescent lighting today? I also find myself scratching my head at the priests or whoever else it is who can't see what a blight all this wiring and technology is on their exquisite churches.

So those were two days well spent. Like the Simiens, the cost was over my budget, but I think I can make savings from here on in, especially since I'm planning to take things a bit slower.

At some point in this blog I should say a few words about poverty, and this seems as good a place as any. I'm sure it will surprise no one when I say that Ethiopia is a very poor country and that many people live in shocking states of destitution. I'm sure I'll hardly surprise anyone either when I say that almost all of the many other people here who live in reasonable levels of comfort still live on far less than even my modest-by-Western-standards expenditures (I am the 1%). By my calculations, I'm proportionately richer than the average Ethiopian as someone who brings in $1 or $2 million a year is proportionately richer than I am (although part of what shocked me in this calculation was that it brought home just how much richer the very rich in the West are). It would take two very deliberately blind eyes and a heart of stone not to be troubled by all this. Less obvious is how to respond to it all. In particular, this enormous disparity in wealth makes me a constant target for what I can't help but describe as hassles: children insisting that I give them money (as one scamp put it with great eloquence and irrefutable logic, "you rich, me poor"), sweets, my clothes, anything; half the people I have financial dealings with trying to overcharge me; and the general frustration that many of the people I have dealings of any kind with see me primarily as a source of money and only secondarily (if I'm lucky) as a person. (That said, I've been struck by just how many friendly people have gone out of their way to help me or show me kindness with no ulterior motive whatsoever: adopting a general attitude of suspicion would kill these genuine and uplifting interactions.) Part of me sympathizes deeply, and part of me objects to the chorus of "Give me! Give me! Give me!" that follows me around. I also think it does nobody any favours to create a culture of dependency, where it's simply expected that, since I have greater wealth, I'll voluntarily part with it for no good reason (I do make an exception for genuine adult beggars, but not for random children, even if they are a lot poorer than I am). It sort of helps me see how the super-rich in the West might look upon progressive taxation and other equalizing measures as annoying "Give me!" behaviour from those less fortunate than they are (and, in fairness, most of the super-rich have done more to earn their wealth than I have).

On the flip side, there's a tourist equivalent of the "Give me! Give me! Give me!" attitude: I've been occasionally struck by the way Westerners seem to treat Ethiopia as cheap goods that they've purchased, giving them the right to enjoy the country's riches however they seem fit. Which is to say, I've seen people behave with rudeness and feelings of entitlement that I'm sure they would never have the gall to exhibit back home.

On a further flip side (how many sides can you flip?), really what I'm confronted with is just the kind of neediness that prompts me to give far less than I should to various humanitarian causes. It's very comfortable to make a few mouse clicks with my credit card in front of me back home, and it's something else altogether to be confronted head-on with the need that I like to imagine myself as addressing in some small way, and to recognize that whatever I do to address it is impossibly far from enough.

My brother says the refrain of the responsible historian is "...but it's more complicated than that." I think that applies to the troubling aspects of travelling in a poor country as well. Too often, attempts to "explain" the situation or justify a certain way of dealing with this disparity in wealth strike me as ways to stop thinking about it, and hence to stop being troubled by it. Whatever thoughts I have about this situation, and however I try to respond responsibly to it, I have to bear in mind that it's more complicated than that. Whether or not my own attempts to enjoy my time here while also respecting the people I'm living amongst are decent, I think it would be cowardly for me to seek out a way to cease being troubled by it.

On a lighter note, my three favourite items of bad English in the past week or so are: a sign for the "Golden Get Trading Company"; a bank form (when changing money) that asked me to sign where it said "costumer signature"; and a bus company offering outstanding "public transpiration."

You can't see the Ark even if you Aksum nicely

I've found myself involuntarily whistling the Indiana Jones theme tune the last couple days. Not just because I'm in the town that supposedly houses the Ark of the Covenant, but also because so much of the exploration involves descending stone staircases into dark tombs, where all it would take is a few snakes, some Nazis (Till and Wilma are sadly too nice to fit the part), and a bullwhip to live out all my childhood fantasies.

Aksum is the most ancient of Ethiopia's capitals, and had its heyday from the 1st to the 7th centuries AD. A 3rd century Persian writer listed the Aksumite civilization alongside Persia, China, and Rome as one of the world's four great civilizations of his time (he obviously had no knowledge of the Americas). Sadly, far less remains of Aksum's glories than the other three, but it's also intriguing to be surrounded by half-excavated sites--and presumably many more that remain to be discovered--where piecing together Aksumite history is very much a contemporary archaeological project.

The most obvious evidence of Aksum's former glory is its stelae field, featuring dozens of obelisks dating from some indeterminate time in the past up until the early 4th century when King Ezana converted Ethiopia to Christianity and traded phallic symbols in for crosses, although not before leaving behind a 23m-tall stele himself. The tallest stele--at 33m, it's taller than anything erected by the Egyptians, and is indeed one of the most massive single pieces of worked stone that's ever been put upright in human history--is now a collapsed heap on the ground, but impressive even in its supine aspect. The stele field also features a couple of those tombs that had me whistling along with John Williams.

As for the Ark itself, that's supposedly stored within the Cathedral of Tsion Maryam complex, and is naturally so sacred and special that none but the highest appointed priests are allowed to enter the building where it's stored. I didn't even get into the Cathedral complex. First of all because everyone was off on their three-hour midday siesta when I dropped by, and second of all because the entrance fee has more than tripled since my guidebook was written four years ago, and $12 is a bit steep even by Western standards. Especially when the central church is a tacky 1960's structure (one downside to being the holiest church in Ethiopian Christianity is that it's also a prime target for the enemies of Ethiopian Christianity, like the 11th century Jewish Queen Yodit and the 16th century Muslim warlord Ahmed Gragn) and there are far more spectacular churches all over Ethiopia that charge far less.

(In case you're wondering, the story behind the Ark being in Aksum is roughly this: the legendary Queen of Sheba was an ancient Ethiopian queen who conceived a child with King Solomon. This son, who became King Menelik I, visited his father in Jerusalem as a young man, and secretly carried the Ark off to Ethiopia after being instructed to do so in a dream by God--and Solomon also had a dream in which he was told that this was okay--and it's remained in Ethiopia ever since. Take that, Spielberg. Naturally, every part of this story is highly suspect, but that doesn't keep Aksum from having an air of holy mystery.)

After a lazy morning yesterday, I explored the Stelae Field and adjacent museum with Jase in the afternoon, as well as a few other minor sites around town. Jase has a limited-time-only visa for Sudan that becomes active in a week so he had to dash off this morning to catch Lalibela before heading to the Sudanese border, so I gave him a semi-conscious farewell at 5:30 this morning before properly getting up an hour later to get an early start on a hike outside of town with Till and Wilma. Just outside of town, we took in the Tomb of the 6th century Emperor Kaleb, which even sported a few bats to add to the Indiana Jones feel, and gave further evidence of how the deciphering of Aksumite history is very much a work in progress, as a nearby tomb was in a state of semi-excavation, which apparently wasn't in itself reason for us not to clamber down into the bits that had already been dug up. After that, we had a very pleasant hour or two of strolling through the hills north of Aksum, passing by the monasteries of Debre Liqanos and Pantaleon, both manned by rather avaricious priests, so we decided to be thankful for the walk and the views and save our money for the churches we plan to see in the next couple days.

Besides, the walk was the real purpose of the outing. Tigrai is much drier than Amhara to its south--the notorious 1985 famine hit Tigrai the worst, although that has as much to do with Mengistu trying to punish the Tigraians for their resistance to his dictatorship as it has to do with Tigrai's arid climate--and the rolling hills were studded with magnificent succulents (euphorbia? My favourite biologist once explained to me the difference between cacti and their old world equivalents, but I forget the distinction) and a view all the way up to the closed-off Eritrean border to the north.

Sunday in Aksum has had a general party atmosphere. Michael (Egan) would be excited to know that there was a big cycling race in town--I didn't catch the name or the significance, but apparently it was 80km in circuits around the town--and when we set off on our morning walk, spandex-clad women were racing around town, and when we got back the men were in full swing. As luck would have it, a stroll through town had me at the finish line just as the winner squeezed through in a near-photo finish (which wasn't actually a photo finish since I could see that he was ahead by the length of a bicycle). The streets were lined with cheering spectators, and the afternoon was punctuated by victory parades for various winners. This being a Sunday, there have also been a few wedding parades, which here seem to involve the bride and groom on open carriage-like seats mounted above the rear of a white luxury automobile.

To tell the truth, the stelae of Aksum have been less impressive than the sights of Gonder and Lake Tana near Bahir Dar, but that has a lot to do with their great antiquity: they leave more to the imagination. And that said, Aksum itself is a far more pleasant town than Gonder or Bahir Dar, with a very friendly vibe. I'd stay longer but Till and Wilma have other plans for me. The next items on my itinerary are the rock-hewn churches and a couple other things in northeastern Tigrai, all of which are quite hard to get to. I was planning to spend five or even six days working my way around Tigrai, doing my best with public transport and the like, but it turns out Till and Wilma managed to get quite a reasonable deal (especially if you add a third punter) on a two-day chauffered trip around most of the sights I was going to see anyway. The only dilemma this leaves me with is what to do with the time I save. It could either leave me a few rest days to just chill out a bit (I might head back to Lake Tana en route to Addis Ababa) or I could try to push things and get to see Arba Minch in the south as well. I'm just not sure whether I'll have quite enough time to take in Arba Minch, and I might have a little too much time for chilling out. But we'll see. For the moment, I can be glad that the next couple of days are going to allow me to kill far more birds with far fewer stones than I'd anticipated.

Simians in the Simiens

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.

Stranded in Gonder

For a good chunk of the last couple of days, I've felt like a sailor in harbour waiting for the wind to change. I arrived in Gonder hoping to find a group to share the cost of a trek into the Simien Mountains. I arrived optimistically, having easily hooked up with five people in Bahir Dar, and a quick scope around the recommended agencies on the afternoon of my arrival told me about two groups leaving the next day, including a pair of Swedish women working at the local hospital. I figured I'd give myself a bit of time to explore Gonder, and see if I could find a better deal than the ones I was being offered (I turned down a chance to spend three days trekking in the mountains with a pair of virtuous Swedish women?!). So yesterday I did a half-day of sightseeing and then did the rounds of the trekking agencies to see if there were any new bookings. To my dismay, there wasn't a single trek on offer. I went to bed last night seriously worried that I'd made a major miscalculation. In my two days here, I'd seen maybe a dozen tourists, and all of them were either too old to be doing serious trekking or had recently returned from a trip. Both yesterday and today, I've been making a point of taking things slowly in Gonder so that I wouldn't run out of things to do and settle for a bad deal on the Simiens out of desperation.

I became a bit of a familiar face to the trekking outfits in Gonder, dropping in to check with them each day. That aside, the streets are full of young men keen to insert themselves as high-priced middlemen, or worse, scam artists, for prospective trekkers (sample opening: "You are from Holland?" "Canada." "Toronto?" "Vancouver." "I have a friend in Vancouver, that is why I say Vancouver.") I spent this morning taking it easy in a sidewalk cafe, trying to do some writing (I've got started on the "working" part of my "working holiday," although I'll admit that, at least for now, it's hard to focus on the things I was thinking about last month when I'm so emphatically somewhere else), and was found by Yalew, one of the trekking guys, who said he might be able to arrange something with an English guy and I could share a 3-day trek with him for $300 (which, by the way, is actually a fair price for what he was offering--the Tourist Information Centre is full of helpful and unbiased advice). I told him I'd look around and get back to him later that afternoon. After a futile look around the closed-on-Sundays trekking agencies, and finding no replies to my call for help on Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forum, I spent about an hour walking around town looking for white people. Very much like the other young men who fill the streets, I suppose, except that I expect I'm met with friendlier responses on the whole (my opening lines are better). Having almost given up, I sat down at another sidewalk cafe to read and nurse a Coke while I waited for my appointment with Yalew.

When I saw three white people crossing the street across the square, I jumped up from my seat and sprinted over to intercept them. They were two Germans and an Australian and they were indeed planning to start a Simien trek tomorrow. Rather than go through an agency, though, they were planning to take a bus to Debark tomorrow morning and sort everything out there. Debark is the village at the entrance to the Simien Mountains National Park and Gonder is the nearest city to Debark. As a solo traveller, I didn't want to risk going on my own to Debark, as finding trekking partners there seemed even less likely, but it seems I may be all sorted now,and have every reason to hope this will be my last time on the internet for a few days.

There were worse places I could have waited around than Gonder. It was Ethiopia's capital from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and has the goods to show for it. Most notable is the Fasil Ghebbi, or the royal enclosure of Kimg Fasilidas, who first consolidated the capital here. Smack in the middle of town, it's a 70,000 square metre walled fortress containing castles built by six different kings, as well as the remains of baths, the royal archive, and lion cages that housed live cats until the end of Haile Selassie's reign forty years ago. A lot of the buildings are now in ruins because the Italians set up shop here during the Second World War (it still looks impressively impregnable) and the British bombed it. A good one-two punch for European destructiveness.

I was shown around the enclosure by a friendly and puckish guide called Abebe, and we followed the visit with a trip out to King Fasilidas's Pool, abot a kilometre out of town. The pool stands empty most of the year (it's filled for the Ethiopian celebration of Epiphany, which falls in mid-late January and is apparently quite a sight) but is worth visiting just for the atmosphere. A stately house on stilts stands in the middle of the empty pool, and the surrounding walls are propped up and overgrown by thick-trunked trees whose massive roots straddle the walls. And, unlike the bustle of downtown Gonder, everything is quiet and serene.

As for today, once I'd settled my trekking plans, I walked about fifteen minutes out of town to Debre Birhan Selassie, which has a well-earned reputation as one of Ethiopia's finest churches. The church itself is handsome enough, and stands in a leafy courtyard, but it's the interior that draws in the punters. Like Ure Kidane Mihret, it's floor to ceiling with vigorous paintings, and the faces of eighty cherubs look down from the ceiling.

This being a Sunday, four or five wedding processions passed through during the two hours I spent at the church. The first procession arrived at the portico (is that the right word for the entrance area to a church?) while I was inside, so that I couldn't leave without disrupting the party. Fortunately, the church didn't exactly make me eager to leave. (None of the processions actually entered the church.)

A middle-aged priest inside the church engaged me in a bit of broken English theological debate. When he asked my religion I told him I was a Buddhist (more fun than simply being an atheist) to which he replied "oh, i'm so sorry." He was unimpressed that one couldn't petition the Buddha with prayer and downright shocked to learn that i'd been baptized a Christian and had since lost my way. Just as the conversation risked turning tedious his cell phone rang, the wedding processiom cleared off, and I crept out of the church.

From the outside I saw a few more weddings cycle through. If I hadn't sensed it before, these celebrations confirmed for me how different Orthodox Ethiopian Christianity is from other forms of Christianity I've encountered. With only occasional contact with the Coptic church in Egypt, Ethiopian Christianity has evolved almost entirely independently for a millennium and a half. The bride and groom were head to toe in silky white and both wore puffy white crowns on their heads. They were followed by a white-clad and turbaned entourage with drumming, clapping, chanting, and ululation. The couple themselves were a model of solemnity while the rest of the gathering couldn't have been merrier. Besides the entourage, family and friends joined in the fun in their Sunday best, all of it seemingly worlds away from the destitution that's all over the streets of Gonder.

I was chatted up by one of the guests at the last celebration I saw. He, like the groom, was a deacon of the church. And the bride, he told me with evident relish, was a virgin.

And now it's home to bed and off to the mountains tomorrow. Goodbye weddings, hello baboons!

The holy and the unholy

I've now arrived in Gonder, significantly ahead of schedule. I was originally planning to wait until Sunday to take the once-a-week two-day ferry across Lake Tana and get to Gonder the slow way, but decided that (a) two more days in Bahir Dar was more than I needed, and (b) since there's more of Ethiopia than I can see in a month, there's no point in lingering four days over a boat ride that's received decidedly mixed reviews. I was kind of keen on the idea of a rest day at my hotel in Bahir Dar, with its beautiful lakefront terrace--a perfect place for relaxing and reading and getting started on the writing I wanted to do this month--but since I might need a few days in Gonder to arrange a trek in the Simien Mountains that's to my liking, I've decided to compromise on the idyllic setting front and do whatever relaxing in Gonder rather than Bahir Dar. So this morning I made my best impression of a sardine and crammed into a minibus (next to an older guy who spent some time coughing up something I hope was non-communicable before succumbing to motion sickness--fortunately into a bag and not onto me) and shot through consistently beautiful surroundings to arrive in Gonder by early afternoon.

But let's rewind to Bahir Dar. Yesterday was a good day. It started with boarding a boat and chugging out into Lake Tana (actually, it started--for me at least--with waking up and eating breakfast, but I'm skipping the boring bits, for the most part). I was joined by four women on holiday from working in various aid and other capacities in Rwanda, and Nick, an American spending a couple weeks in Ethiopia. Lake Tana is dotted with venerable monasteries, mostly dating between the 13th and 17th centuries when Lake Tana was the centre of Ethiopian Christianity. We'd paid for a half-day outing, which meant we didn't get to see the monasteries in the middle of the lake (it would have cost a lot to get that far), but we did get to see the highlight of the monasteries on the southern end of the lake, Ura Kidane Mihret on Zege Peninsula. The monastery is truly spectacular, and I only hope my camera remains unstolen so that I can share the pictures when I get back to my laptop. Non-priests aren't allowed inside the inner sanctum of the church, but we were able to marvel at the frescoes that adorned outer walls of the square sanctum (actually, I don't think "fresco" is the right word, since they weren't painted directly onto the walls, but rather onto a kind of canvas stretched over the walls). And my, they were marvellous. Part of what excites me about Ethiopia is the way that it's full of all sorts of cultural artefacts that are unlike anything else in the world, which makes description-by-comparison a dicey business. But we're looking at walls rising maybe 20 feet, and top to bottom in a riot of brightly coloured images ranging from the life and death of Christ to some rather grisly scenes of war, monsters, and other fun stuff (one shows a massive fish that's been speared through the head, rescuing locals from the raiding of this monstrous sea creature). All of this in a cartoony style that's vaguely reminiscent of Medieval European art.

We had the option of viewing five monasteries, but since the $3 entrance fee for each wasn't included in the price of the tour, I only saw two, which is one more than all of the others. That second one was on the island of Kibran Gebriel, and wasn't anywhere near as impressive as Ura Kidane Mihret, but did include a museum where I got to look at a number of ancient trinkets, including the crowns of various Ethiopian kings, and some ancient manuscripts, all written in Ge'ez, which is to modern Amharic what Latin is to modern Romance languages. As interesting as the manuscripts was the priest who showed me around, with his leathery skin clinging to ferociously sharp cheekbones, and his half-blue-half-brown eyes sunk deep in their sockets.

The monastery at Kibran Gebriel is at the top of the hill on this tiny island, and although it was only a five minute hike up to the top, I was reminded by my breathlessness that, despite the heat, I was nearly 2000m higher than I was a week ago. And, in fairness, the heat hasn't been that bad. I imagine at this latitude at sea level it would be brutal. Because it's between the spring solstice and the summer equinox, and because Ethiopia's between the Tropic of Cancer and the equator, the sun stands pretty much directly overhead at midday.

On the way back to Bahir Dar, the boat also stopped in briefly at the point where the Blue Nile flows out of Lake Tana and begins its bendy route toward Cairo. The treat here was that a curious and massive hippo popped its head out of the water a few times to take a look at us. I was consistently too slow with my camera to catch it, which is a shame, since if I'd not even bothered trying I could have spent a few more seconds staring in amazement at this monstrous river-horse.

In the afternoon I had a brief wander around town to familiarize myself with the experience of being a foreigner walking the streets of an Ethiopian town. I also got a haircut and a shave, though the shave sadly just involved an electric shaver.

And then in the evening, the six of us (me, Nick, and the four women) headed out on the town to experience the Ethiopian Asmari Bet. We entered a small bar, where everyone sits on makeshift stools around a central dancing area. I decided to go for a local honey mead called tej rather than the usual beer. All the music is live, with a drummer and a musician fiddling away madly on a single-stringed lute-like instrument (I didn't get the name). A good chunk of the evening simply involves everyone dancing, and my do Ethiopians dance funny. Actually, both the music and the dancing fell somewhere between what I might stereotypically expect from the Middle East and from Sub-Saharan Africa, which, given Ethiopia's location, is hardly surprising, although such comparisons make it sound far less stranger than it is. The dancing involves a lot of high-frequency shoulder jiggling matched with knee bouncing that, among the enthusiastic, translates into jumping and kicking in the air. It's the sort of thing that I imagine could serve equally plausibly as a war dance or a dance of seduction. The merry and super friendly crowd had dragged me to my feet within minutes and tried to tutor me in the ways of Ethiopian dancing, and very encouragingly praised me as a true Ethiopian even though my dance moves have never been known to win praise, the less so when it involves high-speed jiggling.

There were also a couple of thrilling performances in between the general free-for-all. Early in the evening, a couple guys got dressed up in traditional warrior garb and paced back and forth in a warlike manner, chanting out various--well, I don't speak Amharic, so I don't know if they were threats, boasts, or something else--all to the rhythm supplied by the musicians. Better yet was later in the evening when the musicians, singers, and dancers started wooing the audience, rich foreigners being an obvious source of tips. One of the women shook in a near-epileptic frenzy in front of me, her face fixed in a maniacal grin, occasionally letting out gasps and hisses. I had never realized how seductive a hiss could be. Two of the male musicians did the rounds, singing improvised songs of praise--again, the words escaped me for the most part, but I did catch words like "Canada" and "America" as they tried to guess the nationality they were praising. My man got a 10 birr tip after I requested special praise for Vancouver. This improvised praise-singing, by the way, isn't something they just do to squeeze tips from tourists, but is an established feature of Ethiopian entertainment, and as a foreigner, I was decidedly in the minority in the crowd.

So good fun all round. I kicked off the evening by chewing some chat with Nick, which was supplied by his guide/friend Teklay, who may feature later in this blog since he's Tigraian and getting to some of the rock-hewn churches in Tigray is apparently much easier if you have a local guide. But that will probably not be for another couple weeks. Anyway, chat (I've seen it referred to as "qat" in articles about Somali pirates) is an East African narcotic that's prominent in Muslim areas where alcohol is prohibited, but has caught on in Christian Ethiopia as well. The idea is to munch on a bunch of green leaves, generating a mild buzz. I didn't chew very many--and also found that it filled my mouth so full of saliva that I had to spit it out sooner than I probably should have if I'd wanted the full effect--so it didn't really do much for me, but hey, when in Rome. I'd been warned that they taste awful, but I found they were kind of similar to pea pods in taste. Not at all bad.

And that pretty much sums up my time in Bahir Dar. So far my time in Gonder has involved scoping out the scene to see if I can find groups to share the costs for a trek in the Simien Mountains. It looks like it won't be cheap, and my hope of a week-long trek to the summit of Ras Dashen, Africa's fourth-highest mountain, is pretty much a no-go. I visited a couple tour agencies that have groups leaving tomorrow, but at nearly $100 per day for three- or four-day trips, I think I'll wait it out a little longer and see if I can hook myself up with a group and negotiate a better deal. I want to spend a couple days in Gonder anyway, and also am very happy to just take a day off relaxing if I need to wait, even if it isn't as pleasant as my lakeside retreat in Bahir Dar. I was pretty flexible in my budgeting, and if I have to spend in the neighborhood of $80 per day for four days, that shouldn't break the bank as long as I save costs on other days. Today's costing barely over $20 all told, for instance.

And that's about that. So far, I'm having a mostly great time. I'm still acclimatizing to being a constant target of attention from touts and children, and of having to be constantly vigilant about the ubiquitous desire to overcharge me, but the hassles are far less than I'd been led to fear.

Arrived safely in Bahir Dar

Well, I've made it safely to Bahir Dar, but sleeplessly enough that
this isn't going to be a work of literary genius.

My anxieties began at Heathrow. The flight out (EgyptAir if anyone's
wondering which airline not to fly with) was delayed by three hours
because the airplane burst a tire. I thought that would make me miss
my connecting flight in Cairo, but they held up the flight for me and
the handful of other passengers from London. I'd call this an act of
extreme generosity but I think it's more likely that EgyptAir didn't
want to have to spring on hotel rooms in Cairo for all of us. Which is
fair, since I kind of wanted to get to Addis Ababa myself. The catch
was that our delayed departure from Cairo meant we were getting into
Addis Ababa late, and that meant I risked missing my bus on to Bahir
Dar. Fortunately, Ethiopia isn't Germany, and the bus left half an
hour late and I managed to be on board by a whisker. But, as you can
imagine, it was hard to feel relaxed until I was sitting on that bus.

Gosh, first impressions. This place brings back all sorts of odd
memories, especially of India and Nepal, which I suppose is the
closest I've come to Ethiopia in geographical terms. I'd forgotten how
Indian towns and cities are built of corrugated metal sheeting, and
the same is true here. I've also had the same experience of
culture-shock-but-not-really as I remember having had on first
arriving Calcutta. On one hand, everything is exotic and overwhelming
and I feel tremendously self-conscious, sticking out like an extremely
affluent white thumb. But on the other hand, this is all pretty much
what I was expecting, and so I'm not really thrown by it in any big
way.

What I am thrown by is the exhaustion. I managed to sneak about an
hour's sleep on the flight to Addis. Fortunately, arriving in this
massive city and needing to find my way about had me wired enough that
I was alert, and for the first couple hours of the bus drive out I was
likewise wide awake because it was the first moment that I could
simply relax and be astonished at the fact that I was in Ethiopia.
Later on in the bus ride I was nodding through a half sleep, where
every time we hit a bump in the road I'd start with the thought of,
"oh, the plane's landed," look out the window and experience a brief
moment of panic that we're not on an airport runway, and then remember
where I was.

There are all sorts of things that I assume I'll get around to at some
point in my life--read Paradise Lost, see the Amazon, have
children--and there are enough of these things that I also know that I
won't actually be able to do all of them. The only thing that makes
this bearable is not knowing which ones I won't do. But hey, I've now
been to Africa. Not so hard to do, you might say, but I could have
given this month over to reading Paradise Lost with much less
expenditure of money and effort.

The trip to Bahir Dar took about ten hours, with occasional breaks for
food and restrooms and to be stared at by locals. The landscape is
astonishing. The high point was the descent into the Blue Nile Gorge,
more than a kilometre deep, and then winding back up the hill on the
other side. The temperature was noticeably hotter in the gorge than it
was on either side at the top. So there's another box ticked: I've
seen the Nile. Although it was a rather disappointing sight, all told,
just a slow brown trickle, maybe as wide as the Thames is in Oxford. I
suppose it's the dry season. And also apparently a lot of the water
upstream is diverted into hydroelectric projects.

And now I've made it to the shore of Lake Tana, the source of the Blue
Nile. I've found myself a remarkably nice hotel, which is a bit above
the budget I'd set myself, but at $15, I'm hardly breaking the bank,
and I need a bit of pampering. And it seems like value for money: a
nice big room with en suite toilet and shower, and beautiful grounds
lined with shady trees and pretty flowers, all overlooking Ethiopia's
largest lake. The main thing to do here is to see the various
monasteries along the shore of the lake and on islands on the lake.
One of the downsides to being a solo traveller (the other, I'm quickly
realizing, is that I get more attention from people who want my money
in various semi-scamlike ways) is that things like boat outings cost
more. But fortunately I've managed to join forces with four women who
are on holiday from various forms of aid work in Rwanda, so we're
splitting the cost for tomorrow's outing. And, to tell you the truth,
it was a bit of a relief at the end of my first day in Africa to
connect to people who've lived in Africa for several years.

One other first impression: Ethiopians (or at least Amharic
Ethiopians--the country's very ethnically diverse) are incredibly
beautiful people. I'm sure most of you know what I mean anyway, but
it's one thing to see the occasional Ethiopian in a city like Toronto,
and it's another to see a whole country full of them. Obviously, all
ethnic groups have their share of ugliness, but the Ethiopians do come
out quite well on the whole, with their rich skin tone, delicate bone
structure, soft eyes, etc. It occurred to me that I was similarly
struck by the Sikkimese and Gurung people in the Himalayas. I wonder
if there's some correlation between living at high altitudes and
beauty. If Tolstoy and Lermontov are to be believed, the Caucasus
Mountains are also full of beautiful people.

If I must generalize, at least it's about something superficial, right?

Favourite sign of the day: "seedy yogurt." No thank you, I'd much
prefer the upstanding yogurt.