The road was fast with huge straights and we pealed off many kilometres but still couldn't quite make the boarder in a day so we pulled off the road and camped in amongst some thorny acacias. It was so nice to be away from people and we had a huge fire under the stars before trying to sleep in the still sweltering heat. The people that live in this area must certainly be tough, temperatures must have been pushing 40 degrees with nothing for the goats to eat but piles of rocks and flying dust. We saw a few people standing on the road with a poor goat for sale and only the odd kid asked for water and also witnessed a huge march in support of some politician as Kenya has elections next month..
It's amazing just how quickly the landscape changes, within the last 100km of the Ethiopian boarder we went from hot dry dusty rocks to shrubby vegetation to full on forest and the people changed too with the nomads giving way to Muslim farmers. The boarder turned into a tedious experience, we were stamped out of Kenya without hassle but then a random so called Ethiopian offical on the side of the road wanted to see our visas, after much back and forth we agreed and then he sent us off to another building to get stamped without too much difficulty, unfortunately by the time our truck had cleared customs it was lunchtime so they shut the boarder for two hours leaving us to drink 3 birr (18cents) coffee and play cards while local kids yelled at us thinking we were Chinese (they build all the roads). For the second night in a row we were camping in the bush, much to everyone's delight. We were amongst large termite mounds and received a couple of curious locals who couldn't work out how we fitted all our houses (tents) into the truck. Once Walter the driver explained that we weren't moving into the area permanently and that we were brothers from other mothers they moved off satisfied.
Due to the delay at the boarder we had a few kms to catch up on the next day. This was fine and dandy until we turned off the main road towards Jinka in the Omo Valley. The road quickly deteriorated into a construction site with long sections completed while other sections were steep narrow dust lanes with the odd ford for good measure. It took us nearly 5 hours to do the 100km but the scenery and diggers kept us? (Nick) entertained. On route we picked up a local tour guide who informed us a bit about the 16 tribes that live in the area including the Mursi tribe with their huge lip plates. We had to drive down into the massive Rift Valley and then climb all the way back up out of it. The 1200m climb eventually took its toll on our poor old girl and we blew the air line for the clutch, luckily it was a quick 2 min fix before we were back on the road trying to steal photos of the locals and their interesting hairstyles. In the past 3 days of driving we must have seen 4 or 5 distinct ethnic groups and taken over a hundred photos.
Africa’s short rainy season was upon us and we had a 20 minute downpour just as we arrived in Jinka so we flagged putting up our tents and instead went to our local guides house for dinner. Although only a short walk away we somehow managed to loose our driver and guide in the dark narrow streets and eventually once everyone was found had an excellent dinner of injera which is fermented flour cooked like a pancake and delicious veggies and sauces all eaten the African way (with fingers). More rain and thunderstorms occurred through the night and it was nice to hear the pita patter on the tent for a change. We went and visited two of the local tribes the next day, the Bana and Ari people. Though they live in close proximity and have small similar huts their culture is rather different. The Bana have short cropped stylised hair and the boys wear short little skirts and look after herds of cattle and goats while the the Ari are much more conservative in appearance and grow a huge variety of crops. We had an interesting tea made from coffee leaves, ginger, garlic, chilly, lemon grass and a few other spices. Wednesday is fasting day in Ethiopia so it is not common to eat meat, instead we shared two huge injera with a variety of vegetables including beetroot, potatoes and spicy tomato.
Most of our group stumped up the cash and headed to the Mursi tribe with their lip plates and fearsome reputation. We opted instead to head down the road to the local weekly market where a number of tribes converge in their best get up to trade goods and discuss any issues. We hitched a ride with a Dutch couple who had a driver and after coffee we found a knowledgeable Rasta guide who took us through the market. The women were all wearing their goat skin wedding skirts and necklaces but the real entertainment was two male donkeys fighting in the middle of the market, they had everyone young and old skittering in all directions and knocking over stalls and produce. After another awesome platter of injera and vegetables and honey beer we crammed into a minivan with 20 other, 4 goats in the boot and two on the roof and a chicken and headed back to Jinka. We wandered into town for a couple of beers and food and ran into a big bunch of Mursi people and the rather infamous street kids who was kicked out of town because of his electric blue eyes.
We had a couple of drive days to get to Addis where the truck would be based for a minimum of five days as we had to get our Egyptian visa before we could get a Sudanese transit visa (tourist visas are nearly impossible). On route we stopped off in a couple of rather nondescript towns though one of them, Shasameene is home to the Rastas as their king Haile Sallisi (once king of Ethiopia) gave Jamaicans land here. It was funny to hear thick Jamaican accents in the middle of Africa and a whole bunch was turning up to celebrate salessies 125 birthday (apparently he isn't dead yet). The roads along the way were terribly built with all the surfaces cracking up, it’s as if the Chinese forgot to bring their rollers with them before they sealed the roads and on numerous occasions we were all sent flying as we hit camouflaged bumps.
The other thing about Ethiopia which differs from the other parts of Africa we have visited is the complete lack of regard for their livestock which are all over the roads. Donkeys carrying huge loaded carts are constantly moving along the narrow roads and we saw plenty of overworked emaciated horses but the real thing that we couldn't understand was how they just let their goats, sheep and cows wander freely amongst the traffic. We had to slam on our brakes frequently to avoid a herd of cows that some little kid just herded straight out onto the road and saw a fair few dead dogs, sheep and the odd cow that had succumbed to a truck or a bus.
Then again when you learn that in 2007 97% of Ethiopian foreign exchange was from aid it's no wonder that a sense of disregard and lack of pride or responsibility is prominent with the people. Nowhere else had we experienced so many people of all ages, men, woman and children all asking for a handout, their sense of entitlement is mystifying. If the locals weren't calling us Chinese they were just yelling you, you, you then thrusting out their hands even from people who had jobs such as the road workers.
Now while I'm on my little high horse ranting and raving about the people I might as well put one last thing out there, the Ethiopian toilets are disgusting. We have seen our fair share of toilets from grimy squat toilets, to long drops and nice porcelain ones with bum guns but here they are festering holes in the ground, often nearly overflowing and haven't been cleaned in years, if you are really lucky you might even get rats watching you! There really isn't too much excuse for this dirtiness and I can now understand why we see so many people just pissing in the nearest gutter or shitting on the pavement…
Our hotel in Addis was the oldest in the country and used to be a grand old building and still proved very popular but no one had done any maintenance in the last 60 years or so. We arrived in the city just as a huge deluge occurred creating surface flooding everywhere as there is hardly any drainage infrastructure. We had to sort a mountain of paper work for our visas before we had a pretty good dinner to send off Jenny who was leaving the truck. It was nice to meet back up with a few of the truck members who had flown up to Addis (and Djibouti) in advance and hear their stories. We also did some rather large currency exchanges as there is a pretty good black market for US$$ in Ethiopia, the official rate is somewhere around 23 birr for the dollar but we were getting 26.5 which makes quite a difference in the long run.
We wanted to break up our time in Addis with a trip to the Muslim walled city of Harar which is out east and famous for it's hyenas. We had to walk through the shambles of the downtown area to the bus ticket office which was heaving with people. It seems that the demand for buses far outstrips supply and they were all full for the next couple of days, luckily there was space on a bus going to a town just past Harar but we had to pay more for this even though we were getting off early. From there we walked through the cathedral grounds where the highlight was seeing giant tortoises and parrots in the relatively tranquil overgrown gardens that surround it. We also went to the national museum with its 10birr (38c) entrance fee. The ground floor exhibit on evolution was actually very good and they had a fair few interesting skeletons from the Rift Valley including Lucy the very first hominid ever found.
Sleeping in a bed after so long in our tent was a slight novelty and we awoke to pouring rain. This wasn't terribly motivating so we lounged around most of the morning reading the local paper and chatting until the fasting (vegan) buffet was served. It was an awesome feed of breads, salads, pastas and veggie stews and meant we only needed a very light dinner. The rain had eased off so we walked to the ethnological museum which is located in Haile Salisse’s former palace and now part of the university. Although slightly neglected it provided an interesting overview into the hugely diverse ethnic groups of Ethiopia from the orthodox Christian north to Muslim east and primitive south.
On the walk home we finally, after more than two years of travelling, met a pick-pocketer. This guy was gross, he let fly a big hoik of spit which hit Nick on the leg and while he apologised profusely and tried to wipe it off slipped his hand into Nick's pocket. Upon realising that he had swiped the city map Nick cheekily protested so he returned and tried a second time to empty his pockets and made off with sweet fanny Adams. We are wiser than that but can now add being pick-pocketed to our list of experiences!
Time to get out of the city for a short break. Harar was our destination and the bus left at the ungodly hour of 4:30am, well this was chicken time (NZ accent our “check in” always sounds like chicken to everyone else) but the bus didn't leave for another hour. It was quite a scenic drive though poured with rain for the first part and the only minor delay on the 10 hour trip was for a
100 000 Christian pilgrims off to see St Gabriel. Harar is a bit like Fez in Morocco in that it is a walled Muslim city with intricate alleyways. Our guest house was inside the wall and was very traditional. It had interesting little rooms, an attic and huge collection of brightly coloured ceremonial pots, baskets and crockery. Nick and I were lucky enough to stay in the honey moon hovel, a small room off the lounge where newlyweds are locked up for a week and are passed food through a little cubby hole in the wall!
David Attenborough made Harar famous in recent times by filming about the local hyenas which are fed every night by a few dedicated locals but we had to wait for dark for this so with our local guide we went to explore the city. First up was a camel market at the neighbouring town, there were a few still being sold but we were a bit late or there weren't many on this day so we had a quick look through the market before Nick got challenged to a table tennis match which seems to be pretty commonly played around Ethiopia. It was a pretty even match with Nick maintaining a slim lead but after being 19-16 up he threw it all away and lost 19-21. We quickly left town! Lunch was a really nice injera with rice, lamb, potatoes and a salad (helps having a guide to order the right thing) and then a huge piece of cake as it was our travelling buddies big 30th birthday. With full bellies we zigzagged through the narrow alleys and saw a hive of activity with sewing machines buzzing, bakers making the evenings bread and blacksmiths bashing out plows for bullocks to pull. We completed a full lap around the outside of the wall and saw all five gates and in doing so worked up a thirst so found a male dominated watering whole where handles were 10 birr so enjoyed a few ales.
The samosas in Harar are plentiful and delicious and at 1 birr each a bargain, so we grabbed a load of them and met back in with our guide and headed into the dark night in search of hyenas. Although they used to feed them right outside the main gate it's now a couple of kms down a dark lane where the lights of the tuk tuks are used to illuminate the man and his basket. He collects all the scraps from the butchers and tourists can then feed these wild creatures with a stick. It's pretty nerve racking to have a pack of hyenas lurking around you and they just kept appearing and vanishing into the darkness, especially knowing that hyenas are responsible for the most human deaths after hippos in Africa… To calm the nerves afterwards and celebrate Tom’s big 30th birthday we went out for another beer and ended up sitting next to a local truck driver who's English got better and better the more he drank. We eventually conveyed that it was Tom’s birthday and he broke out singing happy birthday and shouted us all our drinks (also calling the boys beautiful with Tom managing to nab the crown with “excess beautiful” thanks to his impressive beard).
Before we knew it our couple of days in Harar was up and we had to once again awake at the ungodly hour of 4am for the return bus. It was a helter skelter trip with the driver driving as if the bus was stolen, thankfully we made it back to Addis in one piece and gave Walter our driver a big hug and told him how thankful we are for his cautious driving. We arrived in Addis just as a huge thunderstorm broke sending down some of the biggest hail stones I've ever seen. In no time at all the roads turned into torrents of water and pulling 20cm or more deep in places. We were thankful to learn that our passports had returned complete with both the Sudanese and Egyptian visas so we only had one last night in the grotty old Taitu Hotel before we headed north to Bahir Dar.
We departed in yet more rain but soon drove out of it as we headed through lush green pasture lands full of cows and donkeys. Only China has more donkeys than Ethiopia (I'm not sure how so many of them survive given the way the just amble along the roads). The highlight of the drive was the spectacular Blue Nile Gorge. We had to descend over 1500m in elevation down a very steep winding road that in true Ethiopian fashion was super bumpy and washed out to a new bridge donated by the Japanese before climbing back up out of it all in the space of 20km. We camped just off the main road in a field and somehow managed to have completed all the dishes just in time before the rain came. Everyone was very happy to be back in their tents with full stomachs of Walters special sadza recipe and a light pitapatter on the roofs.
It was a calm 150km drive to Bahir dar with only one pee break thanks to the departure of one couple in Addis who had needed to pee every 45min or so. We were back staying in a hotel and this one proved to be ten times nicer than the rickety Addis one. It was raining again when we arrived so after an early dinner everyone remaining met on the truck for a wee truck party. Since Sudan and Egypt are supposedly alcohol free we set about drinking all our left over supplies. Cards and shot glasses came out, clothes came off, the music was pumping and people got put to bed but it was one rowdy night and I have no idea how nothing got broken. There were a few sore heads in the morning and a good mess to clean up.
It was an early departure from Bahir Dar as we set off for Lalibela and it's famous rock hewn churches. We stopped for lunch and to pick up supplies at a small town and what seems to be pretty typical here in Ethiopia found nothing, no market or street vendors selling fresh produce even though everything is incredibly green and fertile. We had to turn off onto a rough road for the last 60km as it wound its way through steep hills. The Chinese have been working on it for 3 years and it is still a long way from being finished. The engine break finally gave out when we were lumb,ering up a big steep hill so we stopped in a village and dug out the spare from the bowels of the truck meanwhile the whole village turned out to ask for food or money so we had to keep an eagle eye on all the tools and spares. We rolled into Lalibela and found our hotel which was fairly new and right next to the biggest monstrosity of a conference centre which had a 20 tier spilling swimming pool, all not finished of course. Anyway half the group chose to upgrade from their tents while the other half were offered to camp out inside a couple of the partially finished rooms. Unfortunately the huge spa baths were not yet functioning.
Our guide who was an ex deacon met us next morning to take us to the churches. After paying the $50 entry fee we first visited the biggest church which was full of chanting priests, deacons and worshippers. It was really cool to see that little has changed since being built in the 12 century and we were welcomed in to observe the spectacle. All of the churches were built for different saints and angels and was a replica of Jerusalem, they had even carved out two huge channels to replicate the River Jordan. Some were very small and could only just fit our group inside while others were much bigger with elaborately painted ceilings. One of the best and probably most photogenic is the Saint George church which is a perfect equal sided cross both inside and out and stands an impressive 14m tall. In the walls surrounding most of the churches were empty tombs though in Saint George's there are the remains of a few dedicated pilgrims who chose to die in this holy place.
In total we saw a dozen or so of these churches which had all been carved out of one solid piece of rock starting from the top. Some were linked by dark underground passageways and others had sections where only men could visit or areas where priests could see which only added to the mystery of the place. Our guide was great and informed us that Christianity was brought to Ethiopia by the Syrians before King Lalibela had all the churches built so Ethiopians didn't have to make the treacherous pilgrimage to Jerusalem through dangerous deserts and Muslim occupied areas.
The truck left very early the next day bound for Gondar while we opted to fly to the ancient city of Axum. By flying directly there we cut out a couple of drive days which gave us a free day to explore the ancient fort and palace of Gondar. Our flight was cheap and only 35 minutes but first we had to get to the airport which is at the bottom of a big hill 25km away. Our “taxi” read four wheel tuk tuk just fitted us in and we only had to get out and push it up one hill. The driver was funny and wasn't a fan of the Chinese and made all sorts of rude remarks at them as we somehow managed to avoid getting stuck in the muddy road under construction.
Axumite empire used to be a huge trading post in northern Ethiopia around 300AD and had strong links with the Roman Empire and influence over the Middle East. In recognition for this importance the rulers had the 25+ meter tall obelisks erected one of which used to stand in the centre of Rome before its return to Axum in 2007. One huge obelisk never managed stand and smashed to pieces while being erected while two others now take centre stage. Only 5% of the site has been studied by archeologists and they have discovered chamber tombs underneath two of the obelisks as well as many coins, glass vases and ceramics though a fair bit of it has been plundered and sold off by uneducated locals (and lack of interest from the government). The obelisks also showed the arrival of Christianity to Ethiopia as the inscribed symbols switched from pagan moons to Christian crosses. Other sites of interest include the tombs of Kaleb complete with stone coffins and a very well preserved stone tablet from King Enzana which is inscribed in three languages. The demanding locals and rude little kids got on our tits so we blew the town.
We had to spend the night in the small town of Shira as the bus to Gondar left early in the morning. The bus was the usual debacle, our ticket said 5:30am but the gates to the bus station didn't open until 10 past 6 then though everyone had a ticket with a seat no one wanted to sit in their designated seat though the driver insisted. So it took another 30 minutes of shuffling before we were finally moving. The road was incredible the first 100km or so was up and down gorges and if it was replicated it would make an awesome slot car track (or drift track for Rae Rae) before it deteriorated into a seriously steep mountain road similar to the roughest NZ ski road. There must have been 30 or more hairpin bends and thankfully we made it to the top before the rains began. The scenery was amazing, we saw the famous fluffy gelada baboons and maybe one day we will return and do some hiking in the Simian National Park (which the road drives through).
Gondar is set amongst rolling hills and it's hay day was in the 16th and 17th centuries before being sacked by Sudanese Muslims in the 1800’s. There is a large compound that houses 6 old palaces which were still in reasonable nick partly due to restoration done by the Italians in WW2 before the British bombed the compound. We explored these ruins for a few hours before we found a pizza for lunch, a welcome change from injera. Also on our entrance ticket was an elaborate old bath which is still used for holy celebrations every now and then. It consisted of a large pool surrounded by trees with twisted roots and a 4 story rock building in the middle carefully guarded by a goose who proudly stood atop. Finally our last evening in Ethiopia and we were treated to a superb all you can eat buffet dinner with some rather suggestive cultural dancing.
Everyone was glad to be departing Ethiopia, there are some amazing sites in the country and it is a country full of potential but the people and their attitude just lets it down. The last Ethiopian I talked to at the boarder summed up this attitude when he replied to being asked about all the truck loads of onions he said “Ethiopia’s economy is 85% agriculture so why the fuck do we import onions…” to which I had no answer.
