Wednesday, May 16, 2012

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."

2 comments:

  1. Please include the century of construction for every site you visit! From now on, I mean.

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  2. Well done on expressing your mixed feelings about poverty! I came away from Uganda with a deeper sense of cynicism due to the overwhelming poverty and the effect it had on my travel experience. I found I had to put up a shield against too much personal interaction with the locals because inevitably they would ask for something and I'd have to turn them down. Since that time, I think I've become on board with (my admittedly shaky understanding) of development as freedom.

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