Photos now available online

Either on facebook, or if you're not on facebook then here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/101362065746989398132/Ethiopia

There's plenty more where that came from, but I figured only a very few people would be interested in seeing more than that. But feel free to drop me a line if you're one of those very few.

Back in England

I'm now in Oxford, staying with my aunt and uncle (and joined by my parents!). I slept two hours on the night of the 3rd before heading out to the airport for a middle-of-the-night flight that took me via Cairo to Heathrow. I felt wretched all day, couldn't keep my eyes open by 9pm, and zonked out only to open my eyes and look at the clock and see it was already 10am. I clearly needed a bit of sleep.

Being in England isn't as strange as I thought it might be. There have been a few moments of surprised recognition over the past 24 hours--just how green the landscape is, the fact that highways have multiple lanes, the absence of trash and livestock everywhere, the fact that I can eat fresh fruit and vegetables without worrying about the water it's been washed in, etc.--but nothing like the disorientation I remember feeling upon returning from India or Russia. I suppose those trips lasted longer, and I was younger. It's nice to be able to switch worlds without too much shock, although that shock also represented a greater readiness to find my ordinary world strange. I wouldn't want to think that I'm now so set in my ways that nothing surprises me.

Oh, and a month in Ethiopia's also done something to my lungs. I visited my grandmother this afternoon and decided to run some of the way back. After a month where I was more than 2000m above sea level for a good chunk of the time, I found I caught my breath after just one or two pants. I should have signed up for a marathon for when I got back down to sea level.

I don't have a whole lot to recount from my last few days in Ethiopia. I last updated the blog in Harar on the evening of the 1st. On the 2nd, I had an early start to take a 12-hour Selam Bus journey from Harar back to Addis Ababa, which was mostly uneventful. I had a brief and interesting conversation with a guy sitting opposite from me who does research in agricultural economics and was on his way to a conference in Arba Minch, the town that would have been next on my list of places to visit if I'd had a few more days in Ethiopia. He worked on the economics of rose nurseries, and showed me a copy of his print-on-demand (at €70 a pop!) book outlining his research on rose horticulture in southern and eastern Ethiopia. It was one of those interesting conversations where I learned all sorts of things on a topic it had never occurred to me to think about before. For instance, the world's three largest producers of roses are Kenya, Colombia, and Ecuador, where they're grown and then shipped in massive quantities via airplane (roses wither too fast to be shipped slowly) mostly to Europe. The Netherlands has the world's largest horticultural market, and roses there are sold at auction to the various florists of the West. The growers in Africa and South America (and Israel, which is another major rose producer, and a great innovator when it comes to efficiency with water use) have agents in the Netherlands who do the selling for them, and they only find out what their roses have fetched after the auction. Ethiopia has the right climate for roses, and has certain advantages over European rose-growers in not needing expensive greenhouse technology and having cheap labour, so there's good reason to hope that roses will be a growing export industry for Ethiopia in the future.

I effectively had one day in Addis, and decided to take it pretty easy. There was nothing I was itching to see or do (with one exception, which I'll get to shortly), so I decided to spend the day relaxing, reading, and writing at the Taitu Hotel, which has a pleasant and quiet patio space. As it happened, being a solitary traveller in a hotel that sees a lot of tourist traffic, I did far less reading and writing than I'd planned. I was approached early in the day by Toby and Rory, two-thirds of a set of public-school-educated British triplets (I didn't ask which, but they'd mentioned Berkshire, so it could well have been Eton--Toby and I also overlapped for a year at Oxford) who'd just arrived in Ethiopia for a two-week visit where the main priority was a trek in the Simiens. Toby first approached me as I finished breakfast, looking for some tips on what to see in Addis, but we got on well enough that we spent a good chunk of the day chatting. I also wound up having lunch with a group of UN interns that I'd met briefly in Harar. And I also did a bit of reading and writing.

When I last saw Samuel, I told him I wanted to have a proper Ethiopian meal on my last night in Ethiopia, and he more than delivered on that request. Joined by his brother Getachew, the three of us went to 2000 Habesha, a "cultural restaurant," which is one of Addis's hot spots. The place feels a bit kitschy, done up with every cliché in the Ethiopian book, although the Ethiopians in the crowd far outnumbered the non-Ethiopians. It was certainly a different class of Ethiopian than I was used to, all very dressed-up, well-to-do, and self-important, and Samuel explained that a significant number were probably expatriates back in Addis for a visit. What made 2000 Habesha particularly special was the stage show they had to entertain us (this was the "cultural" part of the "cultural restaurant"). Musicians, singers, and dancers gave a string of performances from various parts of Ethiopia, ranging from the Gurage in the south to the Tigraians in the north. Most impressive was that the band--and the singers and dancers to some extent--was the same throughout the show, meaning that they'd achieved a high level of competence (I'm obviously in no position to judge just how high) in a wide range of performance styles. One thing that Ethiopians repeatedly emphasize, and with justifiable pride, is that Ethiopia is home to over 80 distinct ethnic groups--not to mention sizeable numbers of Christians and Muslims--and that they all live peacefully side by side. Compare that with Somalia/Puntland/Somaliland, which is/are the only country/ies in Africa to be linguistically and ethnically homogenous, and yet where people notoriously do not live peacefully side by side a lot of the time.

Anyway, the performances were great. All very lively, and with a great sense of humour: at one point they staged a Gurage wedding where a Swedish woman was dragged on to the stage and interviewed about her husband, while being fed answers in a language she clearly didn't understand (fortunately I had Samuel on hand to translate for me). And I can reiterate what I first learned at the Asmari Bet in Bahir Dar toward the beginning of my travels: Amharic dancing is incredibly sexy. Sexy, but, unlike Turkish belly-dancing or Latin American dance or what passes for dancing in Western clubs, not overtly sexual or seductive. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't morris dancing: I was watching sexual beings, not anthropomorphic shrubbery. But what made the woman sexy wasn't the jiggling of luscious body parts, but rather the vigorous way in which her whole body was alive in the dance. It was as if this person came alive to dance, and that while she danced she was more alive than I ever am. And she looked damn good doing it.

Also, the food was great. Alongside the sublime Habesha Kitfo in Gonder, it was probably the best food I've had in Ethiopia (that both restaurants have "Habesha" in their name becomes less of a coincidence when you bear in mind that "Habesha" is Amharic for "Ethiopian"). And this seems a good moment to say a few words in praise of Ethiopian food. The mainstay of Ethiopian cuisine is injera, a spongy flatbread laid out pancake-style, upon which are dumped various curried meats, stewed vegetables, and sauces. The diner then tears off bits of injera and uses them to pick up the toppings and eat them together. First of all, injera itself is very tasty, even if a bit sour, and highly nutritious: it's made from a grain called tef, which grows only in the Ethiopian highlands, and is unusually high in protein and minerals (it's also fine for the gluten intolerant in case that applies to you). Second of all, the sauces that come with the injera are super tasty. My favourite was shiro, a red chick pea paste that's perfectly spiced and has a wonderfully creamy consistency. Which brings up the third point, which is that Ethiopian cuisine is very vegetarian friendly. I had to pass on some Ethiopian dishes that are apparently very nice, but I was hardly wanting for tasty meals. Not only are there great dishes like shiro tegabino and fata, but also Christian Ethiopia observes fasting days every Wednesday and Friday, where the whole country (or at least the Christian part) goes vegan, and you can order delicious fasting plates, which include shiro as well as a variety of stewed vegetables and roots on top of injera.

The one thing I'd say against injera is that it's very heavy, and I don't think I could happily consume more than one injera meal in a day. But fortunately that's just the beginning of the culinary story. Perhaps the one upside of Ethiopia's brief experience of Italian colonial administration (I couldn't help but wonder whether Somaliland's stability compared to the rest of Somalia was connected to the fact that Somaliland had formerly been under British colonial administration while the rest of Somalia was governed by the Italians) is that the main alternative to injera is pasta. And if Italian food isn't enough, there's also juice. "Juice" in Ethiopia is consumed with a spoon as often as not. It's a thick purée of various fruits (the lack of added water is a good thing, since tap water would have made me sick), such as mango, papaya, banana, and avocado, which is surprisingly good in juice form. You can also have some combination of various fruits: my favourite was a mango-avocado mix.

All of which is to say, I ate well in Ethiopia, especially on my last night. However, I'm also not sorry to be introducing a little more variety and fresh vegetables to my diet now that I'm back in England.

After the 2000 Habesha outing, I had a fond farewell with Samuel, with mutual and sincere expressions of hope that we'd cross paths again, and then headed back to my hotel for two hours of sleep before getting up at 1:30am for a 4:30am flight (I'd been told to leave for the airport three hours before my flight, but predictably spent about half of those three hours sitting bleary-eyed in a departure lounge). And now here I am in England.

Clouds had been getting thicker during my last week in Ethiopia, and on the last two days the heavens opened for the first time since my trek in the Simiens. Ethiopia's wet season has arrived. High time for me to get back to England. It never rains there.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll get a digest version of my photos up on facebook (I doubt many of you want to see all 600). I'm not sure if anyone reading this isn't on facebook, but I'll try to get an album up on Picasa as well just in case, and will post the link here when I do.

A birthday in Somaliland

I celebrated my 34th birthday in a country that doesn't exist. According to any official world map, I spent the last 48 hours in Somalia, arguably the most dangerous country in the world. In fact what I did was visit the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland in the northwest of what maps tell you is Somalia. And, unlike the pirate haven of Puntland to its east and the catastrophe that is Somalia proper to its south, Somaliland has been stable and peaceful since it unilaterally declared its independence back in 1991. Before you freak out, let me remind you that no one has ever misattributed impulsive daring to me. There's no reason to start now: I'd been thinking about this trip almost as long as I'd been thinking about Ethiopia, I researched the security situation thoroughly, and I only decided for sure to go after asking around in Harar and hearing from everyone I asked that Somaliland, and the roads to Somaliland, were totally safe. Still, I knew that the first six letters of "Somaliland" plus its location might cause unnecessary worry, so I didn't tell anyone I was going, with one exception, just in case anything went wrong. As it happens, by far the most dangerous thing I encountered in Somaliland was my driver on my birthday outing (more on which in a bit), who drove at ludicrous speeds, spent half the time texting away on his mobile phone, and had the courtesy to turn and look me in the eye when talking to me--except I was sitting in the back seat (I tried to keep conversation to a minimum). Actually, I've found that in general the roads east of Addis Ababa are prone to madness. Quite in contrast with the north of the country, where people drive with admirable caution.

The outing started on the afternoon of the 29th. I left my big backpack with my super-friendly hotel manager in Harar, and carried just a daypack with the things I'd need with me to Jijiga, two hours down the road and the last major town before the Somaliland border. Jijiga is the capital of Ethiopia's eastern Somali province. The urban planner who designed the place must feel the kind of disappointment a parent feels in a delinquent and annoying child. A lot of paved roads--including a main strip that even has a meridian--and all laid out neatly in a grid, but the town that's grown up around this aspirational design could be generously described as a shithole. I suppose that's what happens when you try to impose an administrative capital on a people to whom the concept of administration is alien. Nothing frightening or dangerous about the place, it's just drab and ugly, and the hotel I managed to find was awful. There was so much dust on the floor I could see my footprints. Good thing I stayed there barely more than 12 hours, and spent most of that time sleeping.

The next morning it was an hour or so by minibus from Jijiga to the border town of Wajaale. Scruffy and dusty, as one might expect, but here there was the thrill of adventure: across that border was a place that's unmarked on maps. How often does one have a chance to visit such a place in the modern world?

Everything at the border went smoothly. I was stamped out of Ethiopia and stamped into Somaliland (one of my errands in Addis had been to visit Somaliland's "liaison office"--unrecognized countries don't get embassies--and get a visa) by friendly border officials. Everyone on the Somaliland side was very excited to have me visit the country. A youth hanging around outside the Somaliland border office shook my hand warmly and welcomed me to Somaliland: "It is a beautiful country." If he'd said it with any more emotion, he would have burst into tears.

That welcome pretty much set the tone for my stay in Somaliland. Unused to tourism, Somalilanders seemed for the most part fascinated and pleased that a foreigner should be visiting their country. Like in Ethiopia, many people approached me in the street, but unlike in Ethiopia, none of these people approached me to try to squeeze money out of me in one way or another. They just wanted to shake my hand, welcome me, and ask me where I was from. The whole atmosphere of the place made it hard to remember that I was doing anything that anyone would think of as remotely unsafe.

The capital city of Hargeisa is dusty and a bit ragged, but what struck me most is that it seemed wealthier than any town I'd visited in Ethiopia. There was far less destitution and far more private vehicles on the roads (in Ethiopia it's almost entirely taxis and minibuses). As I understand it, Somaliland's economy is almost entirely dependent on expatriates sending money home from abroad (many of whom live in Canada, which made me popular, as if I had anything to do with their being able to make decent lives for themselves in Canada), and I suppose, with a population of 3.5 million as compared to Ethiopia's 82 million, you're far more likely to know someone who can send you money from abroad if you're a Somalilander, and the Somali clan structure ensures that this wealth gets distributed to people without immediate relations abroad. Also, I imagine Somaliland's history has pushed a far greater proportion of its population to seek its fortunes abroad.

There's no financial transaction in Somaliland that the US dollar can't perform, but for souvenir's sake if for nothing else I traded $20 into Somaliland shillings. The shilling comes only in bank notes, and in denominations ranging from 100 to 5000. The US dollar trades at about 6500 Somaliland shillings. When I traded my $20 at Wajaale, I was given two-and-a-half bricks of one hundred 500 shilling notes wrapped in rubber bands. Downtown Hargeisa is full of money changers sitting with stacks of rubber banded cash. I've seen photos of this sort of thing from places like Zimbabwe and 1920's Germany, but I'd never seen it in person.

Hargeisa itself is rather devoid of tourism sights--the only thing that could fit the bill is the war memorial, where a MiG jet is mounted atop a stone block set with alarmingly graphic friezes depicting the destruction of the war that preceded Somaliland's independence--but it was fun to wander about for a couple of hours. The market is colourful and sprawling, the central mosque is massive (it was prayer time when I went by it so I decided it would be better not to try entering), and the whole place buzzes with activity.

And, as it turns out, Somaliland also gets its share of tourists. I stayed at the Oriental Hotel, which was by far the nicest hotel I've stayed at on my trip, although, at $15 a night, it was also the most expensive, but by not quite as far. At the same hotel was Daniel, a German I'd met in Lalibela, Pascal from Montreal, another German called Nawid, and two Italians, a journalist and photographer. The added company was a good thing because joining forces and finances with Nawid made my birthday outing cheaper (although still the single most expensive day of my trip) and allowed me to do more than I'd originally planned.

The original plan was to visit the rock paintings at Las Geel. Visiting Somaliland for my birthday wasn't simply a stunt (although I admit it was partly that) and it wasn't simply because I was curious what it would be like to step outside the nation-state system (although I admit it was definitely also that)--it was also that I'd read that Las Geel was spectacular. And indeed it is: if it were located anywhere other than in a geopolitical black hole I'm sure its name would be as famous as... actually, when I consider most people haven't heard of Lalibela, which doesn't lie in a geopolitical black hole, I wonder how many wonders this world contains that I know nothing about. Anyway, the Las Geel site consists of a series of remarkably well-preserved prehistoric rock paintings. (Actually, I was disappointed to learn that they're less than 5000 years old, but I guess while the Egyptians were building pyramids the Somalis were still in the Stone Age. On the bright side, they're better preserved than they would be if they were tens of thousands of years old.) On a rocky bulge in the mostly flat landscape, ancient Somalians painted red and yellow ochres with bits of black all over the rock faces and small caves. Judging from the paintings, camels hadn't yet reached the Horn of Africa (present-day Somalis are more obsessed with camels than Russians are with booze), and the big thing was cattle: big-uddered cattle, cattle humping, little people standing on the backs of cattle, little people standing beneath cattle, and more cattle. And all of it, in its primitive way, strikingly beautiful. I could have stayed much longer than I did, and kind of regret that I allowed Nawid's faster pace and the impatience of my guard to hurry me along a bit.

Right, so my guard: the main foreign relations priority of Somaliland is to have foreign relations. They've been struggling for twenty-one years now to get the outside world to recognize them--a key step in having an economy based on something other than expatriate remittances--and they're well aware that the worst setback to that campaign would be if bad things happened to foreigners within their borders (in case you're wondering or still worried, the last terrorist attack in Hargeisa was 2008, which was the first one in five years: all of this from neighbours trying to destabilize the country). As a result, they're obsessive about security. Foreigners aren't allowed to leave Hargeisa without police permission or an armed escort (the latter being easier to organize when you're on a short visit), and every town has a military checkpoint. It was all very relaxed and friendly, but it meant that Nawid and I sat in the back seat behind a driver and a soldier riding shotgun--or more accurately, riding Kalashnikov.

From Las Geel we drove on to the port town of Berbera (this is the part that I couldn't have afforded on my own). Jijiga lies at the foot of the eastern spur of the Ethiopian highlands, and the Somali homeland beyond (or at least what I saw of it) is a mostly flat and arid landscape of dirt and scrub. Driving through this expanse of nothing, I couldn't help but wonder what could possibly possess people to kill one another over it. Somaliland has its desert-like beauty, but it's also damn hot, and gets hotter the closer you get to the sea. We drove out to Berbera with the windows rolled down, and the wind in our faces felt like a furnace blast. Berbera itself was a balmy 38 degrees (that's a touch over 100 Fahrenheit for the Americans in the audience), but it was such a dry heat that I barely sweated: any moisture that rose to the surface of my skin evaporated immediately. This was a mild day by Berbera standards: the town often records temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and it receives less than 5cm of rain annually.

The town was a bit of a disappointment. The port had a certain lazy charm to it, but the main event of dipping my feet in the Gulf of Aden was marred by the fact that as soon as we reached the shore ("we" being me, Nawid, and Pascal, who'd come down to Berbera the evening before) a gang of tough-talking youths approached who were clearly looking for an excuse to start a fight, so we decided it would be better to retreat.

I drove back to Hargeisa without Nawid. In case there was any danger of my thinking I was doing anything remotely hardcore by visiting Somaliland, he one-upped me: tomorrow he's flying from Hargeisa to Mogadishu. This sounds insane, and in a way it is, but Nawid's prepared for the whole thing with impressive sanity. He's been fascinated with Somalia for a long time, has read all about Mogadishu, and has spent ages planning his two-day visit. $1000 per day buys him a fixer--referred to him by a German war correspondent as the best one money can buy--a driver, and seven armed guards, who will escort him to all the bullet-riddled sights of the world's most dangerous city. Nawid's visited 106 countries in his time, and has decided to end his world travels with a bang--hopefully not literally. I wish him well and look forward to seeing the photos when he gets back safely.

So all in all, it was a fun birthday outing. The only thing missing was a celebratory drink at the end of the day. Strictly no alcohol in Somaliland, though in Berbera we met a group of Russians who service the airplanes at Hargeisa airport and I'd be very surprised if they hadn't smuggled a stash into the country. On the bright side, whereas Ethiopia specializes in coffee, which I don't drink (though everyone raves about Ethiopian coffee), the hot drink of choice in Somaliland is tea with camel's milk, which is a big step up from the warm-cup-of-water-plus-cheap-teabag that I normally get in Ethiopia. I'll make up for the absence of alcohol by having a beer tonight now that I'm back in Harar. Tomorrow it's an early bus back to the capital, giving me a little over 24 hours to rest up before flying to England. All told it's been a really nice trip. This is probably the penultimate post.

All over Ethiopia, and Somaliland, I see knock-offs of designer labels. To judge from the last month, you'd think the world's two top designers are Galvin Klein and Adibos. Today on the minibus from Jijiga back to Harar I saw my favourite yet: a guy wearing an athletic jacket with Adidas stripes and font, but instead of "Adidas" is just said "Addis."