Jelin in Ethiopia...Haile Unlikely

Jelin in Ethiopia...Highly Unlikely

I decided on this destination impulsively, out of a long-standing, but truthfully rather mild curiosity, little thinking of the up-front downside (22 hours of travel time only 8 days after a 13 hour flight home from the Balkans and Italy) or even of the up-front upside (in all respects this is an absolute antidote to an overdose of Euro-culture, Renaissance, artistic refinement and good food and creature comfort). I also had not bargained for the impact of high altitude on the travel-wearies. Addis Ababa at about 8000 feet is purportedly the world’s 3rd highest capital city (Who in God’s name figures such statistics out?) and sits smack between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, in the middle of a climatically mild, potentially very fertile huge plateau, inhabited by 2/3 of the vast country’s 65 million people though it represents less than 30% of the country’s land mass. Addis is the sprawling, dust home to 3 million souls. The country is twice the size of Texas, but the North and East are wretched deserts, and the far South drops into jungle. There are plenty of rivers on the high plateau, including of course the Blue Nile; but there are also some pretty fierce mountain ranges including the Simiens where we shall trek later, and these plus the deep gorges make it very difficult to get the water to where it is needed for any serious agricultural development (beyond the traditional subsistence level) without the infusion of major development capital and engineering skill. As the 3rd largest country in Africa, and with a population larger than any European country except Germany, one might think it would be a huge potential market and the multinationals would be flocking. But there is no skilled (or really even literate) work-force, the bizarre Amharic language is an inhibition, the infrastructure is almost non-existent (e.g. only dirt roads connect even the major cities), and the world is still waiting to see if the long history of instability and corruption in government is finally over (the jury is decidedly out on this one). Yet it remains the only country on the entire continent never to have been subdued and colonized by a European power…and it has a history (mythology, chronicle of fables and long-held fantasies?) to knock your socks off.

On the plane I met Michael, a very chatty, quite sophisticated and slightly mysterious Ethiopian, travelling on an American passport, coming “home” to wife and family from San Jose, Calif where he had been working for 20 years for an American computer company, until a car accident put him on permanent disability. He absolutely insisted on driving me to my hotel, as we were arriving at 3 AM and Addis was really not all that safe (a non-confidence builder for one who was going to spend a few days wandering about before the group arrived). However, when his honey-colored, pants-suited, quite glamorous wife and 3 rather scruffy (and I think armed) brothers met him, I began to wonder if I might not just take my chances with a taxi. As it turned out 7 of his 11 huge suitcases had got lost somewhere, and his negotiations with the airlines took almost an hour. Then it turned out that even his 6-door stretched Mercedes limo (who the hell is this guy…President Menegitsu’s long lost nephew returning to seize power?) could not hold all the people and luggage. So he insisted on putting me in a prepaid taxi with the youngest (yes, he was in fact armed) brother to my hotel. He also insisted that he would phone to take me out for real Ethiopian food the next day, which he of course never did (but then perhaps he was arrested or shot en route “home”…I shall never find out who he was or what his story was…but it made for quite a colorful entry into what was to turn out quite an uninteresting city (3rd highest capital or not).

At 5 AM I finally crashed and slept for 16 hours, nearly an outside-of-hospital record for me. The Hotel Ghion is the flagship of a government run chain. Its “central location” means that it is the same 45 minute walk from everything purportedly noteworthy in town, but then they all turn out to be all not really worth the effort anyway. After one day on the dusty, auto-emissions-choked boulevards that had more donkeys and goats on the broken pavements and in the center lanes than either I (or a large number of the motorists, for that matter) expected. But then it was Saturday market day at the Mercato, Africa’s largest market (another somewhat suspect statistic…how do you measure? By number of piles of garbage? Melons and sacks of grain sold? Pockets picked?)…. I trudged over the British Air office and gleefully squandered $100 to move my airlines departure forward 2 days to avoid squandering yet more time in Addis at the end of the trip. Get out of Dodge! The hotel has lots of armed security, which I find more disquieting than comforting, an inordinate amount of sculpted velveteen upholstery and drapery fabric that has a mock (and mocking) Italian brothel feel. While there is no neon, it could be a Motel on Route 66 in 1967, or a set for a Gus Van Sant movie (visualize |Nicholas Cage and Uma Thurman plopped down in Highlands Africa…I digress…there’s not a lot else to do.) On the plus side, there is en suite CNN and BBC World, a huge bath tub that I can float in, and the breakfast buffet has fresh pineapple and papaya and good strong (I should hope so, it’s their leading export since slavery ended!) coffee. Little did I know that this was the last I was to see of any of the foregoing except the coffee for the next 16 days! I continued to wander about this sprawl of dusty, sleeping (I hope) beggars, snot-nosed kids (grabbing at my clothes and yelling “You..,You,,,Give money!) and goat and donkey droppings, evading wannabe guides, black-market money-changers, and taxi-hawks, pushed and shoved and jostled (with all my valuable zipped into inside pockets and brandishing my walking stick and a newly acquired fly-whisk as menacingly as I could, and trying to ignore the shouts of “Faranji” (which is either an insulting epithet meaning “foreigner” or a call ahead to the next pickpocket that lunch was on the hoof and on its way). The highlight of this vast array of food stuffs and household necessities was the adrenalin rush of being constantly on guard for someone trying to victimize you, kid of the way gazelles must feel in the savannahs. It was not relaxing. I retreated to Churchill Avenue and its crafts galleries, whose sameness and mediocrity and lack of imagination and originality soon became numbing. How many yellow/black/red/green Rasta caps and scarves can one politely decline? Of course, if you are afflicted with the insidious virus, and if you look long enough, and if you bargain hard enough, you do in fact end up acquiring…in this case a rather fetching little teak man with animal teeth fangs, and a cowrie shell trimmed leather injera (pancake…more about this stuff later) basket carried by women on their heads (one of the lighter burdens they bear in this atavistic society…more about that later too.)In the process I have pegged the “walk out the door and they chase you down the street” price at 2/3 off the original asking price, which may just come in useful should I actually find anything I really want later on. The City Museum, at the top of Mezcal Square, in a decrepit wooden once-palace, is of course closed (the Italian influence doth linger in odd corners) ; so I returned to the hotel where I encountered Travis Gibbs, our group leader, a totally delightful 30-ish, shaved-headed, ear-ringed, Birmingham-born but no resident on the Isle of Man, wonderfully accented…tho’ I don’t know what, person. W arranged to rendez vous for Chinese food tonight (Laugh not, it is the best thing in town!) and I learned that my room-mate-to-be was a Yorkshireman named Roger, that we were a group of 16 and that there was one other “Yank”. Since there is so little to talk about touristically, I shall return to the history that brought me here. It is more interesting than the present actualities. Since 1974, when australopithicene Lucy was discovered in the Danakil region of Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley, and the evolutionary clock of us humanoids got rolled back another 1 and 1/3 million years, it has pretty well been accepted that this is (at least so far) the cradle of human-kind. I saw a plaster cast of her bones and teeth toward the end of the trip. It is considered one of the things to see in Addis. Got the picture?

Jump in time. Around 3 to 4000 BC, at about the era of the first major pyramid building in Egypt, there was millet cultivation and some crude pottery making in Northern Ethiopia (not exactly the apogee of civilization, but that is an issue to which I shall keep returning because it haunts me…primarily because of the guilt feelings I have over the politically incorrect but gnawing suspicions I have what the reasons are for this extraordinary gap in cultural achievement despite documented contacts between the peoples). The Greeks believed the Egyptians actually originated in Ethiopia and migrated up the rivers into their areas of greatest flourishing. The Egyptians certainly had significant trade contact with Ethiopia, which they called “Punt” , before 2500BC though the Greeks thought Punt was along the Tanzanian or Eritrean Coast somewhere. Up until around 400BC Ethiopia and Yemen and large chunks of the coastline of the Red Sea where dominated by and often ruled together by a shadowy people called the Sabaens, whose city was either near present-day Axum in Ethiopia or in Yemen. Enter the Queen of Sheba. Ethiopians haven’t the slightest doubt about their history from here forward, even if the Western scholars consider most of it undocumented mythology. Here is how it goes. Ethiopia was founded by Ethiopic, great grand son of Noah (yup, the guy with the ark and the zoo), and his son Aksumai founded Axum, and his dynasty ruled for anywhere from 52 to 97 generations, expanding the territory until it was a huge empire. The last ruler was Queen Makeda, who in the 10th Century BC had a fleet of 72 ships, a caravan of 520 camels, trade relations with India and Palestine, and ruled both Ethiopia and Yemen from her capital Sabea (wherever that was). As a very young queen, and apparently a real knockout, she schlepped a lot of spices and gifts up to Jerusalem to meet the young and famous King Solomon. She stayed in the Royal Palace long enough to convert to Judaism and to return home pregnant with his son, Menelik I (a corruption of “King’s son”). At the age of 22, young Menelik returned to visit his Dad, was offered the throne but replied something to the effect of “Thanks a lot, King, says ||I in a manner well bred” and goes home to Mommy dearest, taking with him as a parental token, 1000 men from each of the 12 Tribes (hence the “lost tribe” legend) and the eldest sons of each of Solomon’s commanders and priests. Also unbeknownst to Solomon (at least at first) he also took with him the Ark of the Covenant containing the original tablets of the 10 Commandments, which are to this very day housed in Axum (more about this later too…I am told I saw them in a candle light Lenten parade!) Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, please take note. Menelik’s socalled Solomonic Dynasty lasted until the overthrow and death of Haile Selassie in 1974. The early history thus recounted relies a lot on such scattered items as : the Hebrews called Ethiopia “Cush” and there are lots of Biblical references; Moses married a black, and it is presumed Ethiopian woman; Genesis and the Book of Isaiah are filled with references to the Ghion (Blue Nile) river; Judaism in its archaic form before the reforms in the 8th century BC is what was practiced in Ethiopia by the court and people until Ezana of Axum converted in around 340 AD and even thereafter by the unconverted Felasha who remained in periodically rebellious, periodically dominating independence until the last were airlifted to Israel in 1991. When the powerful Axumites became Christian, it was under the influence of the Coptic Church from Alexandria and their doctrine was “monophysitic” (Christ had only one aspect, the divine, not 3 as Rome insisted). This branded them heretical and they remained a separatist church until 1955. The attempts to Christianize, or alternatively just to tax the Felashas led to centuries of warfare. Around 1000AD a Jewish King Gideon and his infamously bellicose daughter Queen Yudit conquered and laid waste to huge areas from Lake Tana (the source of the Blue Nile) to Gondar to Axum; but after 150 years or so of this Jewish kingdom the Solomonic dynasts returned to power. Their rule gave rise to the popular European medieval legend of thje Christian kingdom of Prester John who was believed to be a direct descendant of one of the 3 Magi (the Black one). This supposedly sparked the Portuguese to find their way to the Lake Tana region around 1520, though knowing the European motivations of the time for wandering about, one suspects it was all more mercantile and commercial than religious.

Meanwhile, to add to the stew pot, Muslims were given sanctuary in the late 7th century in Axum. Mohammed himself, during his lifetime, placed Ethiopians in a special and favored grouping, but none of this prevented a huge trade war over coastal shipping routes that turned into a basically religious war that lasted for hundreds of years and ended Ethiopian control over Yemen. Islam penetrated the plateau via Harar (more about this later, too) which became their doctrinal and missionary spear into all of Africa); and Ethiopia was ruled from lots of different places by a sort of wandering feudality until Fasilidas the Great established a powerful kingdom based in Gondar in the 17th Century, where the capital remained until 1855 when it was moved finally to Addis. But progress still came terribly slowly and painfully late. Electicity, telephones, hospitals of even the most rudimentary sort, rail roads and any sort of schools were not even begun until the 20th century, and then only in Addis and perhaps Harar. Slavery and the on-going trade in slaves actually kept Ethiopia out of the League of Nations. Then once the British routed the Italians in 1941, the USA and Britain gave their ally/friend/puppet/stooge, Haile Selassie carte blanche to do what he wanted with the former Italian colony of Eritrea, and what he wanted was Eritrea’s only seaport for his historically land-locked country. What ensued was a 35 year long carnage that only reached an uneasy and still uncertain final settlement in December 2000. I visited Eritrea in February 2000 on my round the world cruise, and never was more shocked than at the numbers of lost limbs from still uncleared landmines, at the spite bombing ot the port of Mitsawa (if Ethiopia couldn’t have it then no one would), at the pulling up and carting awa of all the metal rails from the only rail line in the country in the same vicious spirit. It is hard to feel much sympathy for a country of 65 million that would do such things to a country of 2 and a half million over access to a sea port. But then since 1974 Ethiopia has endured famine, drought, the AIDS pandemic, 2 revolutions, an unhappy period of Russian & Cuban “friendship”, the flight of almost all foreign investment and industry, and several remarkably corrupt regimes even for Africa. It ranks as one of the 3 poorest countries in the world, and after two days in Addis I can opine that it is going to be a long while before money comes back in with any confidence in either the stability or integrity of the government or the competitive viability of the infrastructure and work force. There are still 70 languages actively spoken in the country. The official tongue is Amharic, a Semitic root language deriving from the Hebraic Ge Ez, the original language of the Sabaeans and still the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tongue. It has its own weird script that looks vaguely Pharsee, with over 200 characters each of which is a syllable not a letter. This makes it very hard to teach and literacy is a problem still not addressed, especially in the countryside where there are no move-about teachers and of course no schools. Forget educating girls and women. They are merely beasts of burden, more useful than mules primarily to bear children between carrying things. This is a cultural issue of profound importance, and without foreseeable solution.

The rest of our group arrived 2 hours late. They seem pleasant enough. The other Yank is a painter for the San Francisco Airport and a 40-ish Hippie-manque. He is quiet, and may actually be stoned part of the time, but amiable. My room-mate is a Yorkshire-man, a retired elementary school principal, who cultivates his Yorkie accent the way some Southern Belles do theirs. We are clearly two room-mates separated by a common language. Arising at 4AM, fortified with bottled water and strong coffee, we were herded to the airport where we were tormented thru security. I suppose in this part of the world, with a 35% Muslim population, a pan-African terrorist tradition, and lots of world pressure, security is inevitably tight…but the attitude was hostile, which is not smart if you need tourist revenues so badly and have so little to offer those who actually come. After a 2 hour wait, our near antique Fokker 50 (anyone remember Allegheny and Mohawk commuters?) flew us 55 minutes to Bahir Dar, where the Blue Nile spills over its Falls out of Lake Tana in much photographed spray and splendor, only to be turned around due to fog and sent back. Why no one phoned ahead to ask if we could land truly is beyond belief. A 4 hour wait, held in transit, in a brand new but gloomily sterile airport, mollified only by fruit juices and thin layers of green road kill on styrofoam bread, and off we took once more. . Bahir Dar is a city of 160,000 with a 5000 student university, a textile factory, a hydro electric plant, and a frenzy of half-completed lake-side hotels that apparently think “if you build it, they will come.” Well they won’t…not when some turkey in government planning plopped the hydro dam down in such a way that 80% of the water that used to make the Blue Nile Falls a grand attraction (when all the photos were taken!) It is now a pallid vestige of what once was a 900 foot wide, horseshoe-like-Niagara, 100 foot high torrent. We returned to our hotel, on the Lake about 2 km out of town, and I wandered about looking for anything memorable, but in vain. At one point I suggested to Degu, our local guide, that one secret to getting tourists to buy was to offer them choices, not every stall in every market in every town offering exactly the same few items. In return for this relatively valuable piece of retail wisdom, he asked me for $600 so he could go to school to study hydro-electric engineering (and wreck Victoria Falls, I presume). So brazenness exists, if not discretion. Our group is well-travelled, mostly retired but active, even vigorous. They are all liberal politically (they all hate both Bush and “his stooge, Tony Blair”), kind and polite to beggars and urchins, comfortable conversationalists, some with interesting backgrounds. Iris is a pinched and prim looking loner, who withdraws constantly to smoke, and who is a vice president of international distribution for an American software company though she is German and lives in Heidelberg, tho raised in Mozambique and educated in South Africa. Shah and Judy are husband and wife, just retired, general practitioners of internal medicine who have practiced together in Nottingham, though he is originally Pakistani. They are quiet, polite and very nice. Joan is an attractive, New Orleans born though British national, widowed from an English barrister and now living in Montreux. She loves the arts and travels a lot, and is a quite charming companion, though she often absents herself from mealtimes and tends to worry about all sorts of unlikely but terrible possibilities (accidents, illnesses, etc.) There is Mary, a vegetarian lady with two sons in their forties who have both moved back home to live with her. And her frequent travel companion Margaret, who has a 40-ish daughter who lives at home and drinks and smokes horrific amounts. I wanted to suggest that they match up the kids, but it seemed both too obvious and too inappopriate. And then there is a truly delightful couple, Graham and Liz Robinson, husband and wife microbiologists from Nottingham, who met while both doing PHD’s at Queens College, Belfast and who for 34 years have maintained and sly, teasing, unthreatened, flirtatious, affection for one another that really is rare and delightful. He now teaches part of each year in Malaysia and is almost ready for retirement from Nottingham University. The love travel and birding, and she is taking thousands of digital photos, the best of which she will email to Abbott for me. I may actually go up and visit them in Nottingham during my English phase of this trip. I am quite sure we shall remain in touch.

This afternoon we took an hour’s boat ride across Lake Tana to a famous monastery, one of the numerous rumored hiding places for the Ark of the Covenant during the 800 years when it was not at the Church in Axum. The Lake is 40 miles by 35 miles and 27 feet deep on average, not all that big as the main source of the huge Blue Nile. It is home to perch, tilapia, catfish, crocodiles, hippos and innumerable birds. On 37 islands there are 20 to 30 active or abandoned monasteries, some with as many as 200 monks still hanging out. Most of them date back to the 10th century, the period when the marauding Jewish monarchs from Gondar were harassing the area.The Ura Khidane monastery we visited is round, wooden and open-sided, with a thatched roof and 3 interior concentric rings. In the central ring, not accessible except to priests, is the tarbot which every Orthodox Church has, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant and the central icon of the faith, even moreso than the crucifix. The brightly colored, crudely primitive frescoes are a curious amalgam of the gory, the child-like, the fanciful and folkloric themes . .Supposedly original to the 15th century, they remain quite bright and lively. One convention I quite like is that true believers all have 2 eyes and face forward, whereas the wicked and heretical are one-eyed and in profile. Thus St George (a big time favorite, though I thought he was Celtic in origin) faces forward but the dragon is in profile; and at the Las Stupper, everyone faces forward except Judas who is in profile. This is not so different from the Italian Renaissance tradition of showing a scorpion on the table in front of Judas,,,nice little teaching devices in a time when pictures were the tools. ….For dinner we had a traditional injera dinner (the name does suggest an alarming conjoining of injury and enteric, both of concern in Ethiopia). It turned out to be both good and fun. Injera is a huge bowl shaped pancake made of millet that has been fermented for at least 3 days. It is ugly grey, which usually signals mould or other reasons for inedibility, and when it arrives it resembles rolled up carpet underlayment. Its taste is vaguely that of sour limes, but then come the spicy meats, vegetables, chutneys, goat cheeses, and sauces, served in dollops like timbals at a rijstoffel. You just keep tearing off chunks of the grey stuff and dipping and combining and munching, washing it all down with the best of the local cold beers, Dashen, all for about $4.50 including 25% tax and service. Food here is very cheap. I also prefaced dinner with a 45 minute wait, at the far point of the hotel’s lake-side garden, under a purple jacaranda, near enough a fragrant pink plumeria, for what should have been the perfect sunset which never came. Instead the light simply dwindled, greyed down and finally vanished. But there were several charming and fearless vervet monkeys, the distant mooing of hippos as they came up out of the lake to graze, and an evanescent sense of tranquility…until the hotel began testing its audio equipment and the mosquitoes arrived. Sic transit.
Up at 6AM for a 5 hour drive in an unair-conditioned van over some of the worst inter-city roads ever imagined, so dusty that we could not open the windows, increasingly so hot inside that we had to despite dust. Experiencing the absence of infrastructure first-hand translates “world’s 3rd poorest country” from abstraction to reality; and the notion that the road is “under construction” translates into occasional piles of gravel that have been sitting there for years. In 5 hours we saw one crew, working in a desultory fashion with one roller and one grader. This means roughly 8 or 10 years to complete the 80 mile stretch from Bihar Dar to Gondar, two of the country’s 5 largest cities, and that’s assuming the rainy season doesn’t wash out or turn to rutted & impassable mud those sections already graded but not paved. This is a long haul to the “paradise on earth” that Jamaica’s Rastafarians designated it to be, when the simultaneously named Haile Selassie as their divine and adopted Marcus Garvey’s concept of a black return to a black homeland (though without either man’s consent, complicity or rhetoric). Finally we are in Gondar, moving through hordes of uniformed students from different schools, heading up a steep hill to the Ghion Hotel Goha, which at least has a fine garden terrace looking out over this huge and refreshingly green valley, home to some 150,000. This was the capital city from about 1650 when, with the help of some 450 armed Portuguese soldiers (who had somewhat the same impact as Cortez or Balboa’s small bands had in Mexico) King Fasilidas’ father defeated the spreading Muslim tide and enabled Fasilidas to refound the dynasty and build a new seat of power, in effect ending the long dark ages of the country. The quid pro quo was his conversion to Catholicism, which sparked a civil war, cost the father his throne, and prompted the son to take the whole country permanently back to the Orthodox Church once more. The Portuguese were tossed out, and the son/king built his “great castle complex” which is neither great nor complex but more of that in a moment. En route along the dusty road, while attempting to open a window, my favorite yellow-lensed distance glasses flipped out of the window. Switching to my blue-lensed back-ups, I had a most glorious fantasy/vision (endemic in this country). Recalling “The Gods Must Be Crazy”….only instead of a Coca Cola Bottle magically falling from an unseen airplane, some impoverished shepherd will discover my bizarre glasses which then become an object of wonder, mystery and veneration. A cult grows up, and “Occhiale Armani” becomes one more new faith in the land of religious hodgepodge.

This afternoon we visited 2 palace complexes and another frescoed church, all dating from the mid-17th Century. Given the large empire over which Fasilidas ruled, I was surprised that the palaces were no larger than a nice but not super-nice house in Weston, Scarsdale or Beverly Hills. In style they were an odd, but not unpleasing mix of medieval Saracen, with some Portuguese Indian touches and a few Hittite looking domes that resembled bee-hives. There is a cage house for the Imperial lions (the last of whom lived until 1992) and a small summer cottage built in the middle of a roughly 200 foot by 200 foot square stone pond, ringed with banyan trees whose roots were espaliered over the walls. This pond is now flooded once a year for mass baptisms. What startled me is that this was all being built in the mid to late 1600’s which is contemporaneous with the settling of Nantucket and the building of my house…and with stately homes in London, and Palladian Villas along the Brenta. And here is this vast empire doing its grandest power center in primitive, small stone in a style at least 400 years out of date. I have always enjoyed time-line charts, showing what is going on at the same time in different places: but this rather personalized comparison is really off the charts, and quite fascinating to contemplate. I tried to give our local guide, a nice and articulate young man, another master-stroke of a suggestion… using the royal enclosure for a son et lumiere, which would cost little to install, do no damage to the facades which are the most interesting parts of the building, capitalize on the story of the past which is a hell of a lot more fascinating than the vestiges now visible, and provide an excuse for tourists to visit and spend money. His response was laconic and almost uncomprehending, though he had seen sons et lumieres in other countries and knew exactly what I meant. Once again, I think the non-entrepreneurial attitude is a problem cultural issue.

Today a pleasant 3 hour drive north from Gondar, pausing at some gorgeous mountain views down long valleys and steep canyons. We stopped at a dusty cluster of 6 or 7 thatched-roof, stick and twig sided, dirt-floored hovels, typical of rural, central Africa everywhere. Only this one had a blue and white sign out front announcing “Felasha Village” and a wood Star of David on one of the hovels, and two quite silly looking plaster lions out on the entry path. Though the building smelled suspiciously like a donkey stable, it was proclaimed to be the synagogue, and it was surrounded by 6 souvenir stands selling identical and dreadful unglazed black pottery lions almost as silly as the big plaster ones. There was the usual complement of snotty-nosed urchins begging (in this order) for money, food, pens and plastic bottles. No one in the place was Jewish or knew what Jewish was (though someone atavistically sensed that there was a birrh or two to be made from all this. The last Felashas were in fact all air-lifted to Israel in 1991, though rumors persist of small colonies around Lake Tana and Gondar. Then on to a larger market town, with a dusty market offering dusty vegetables and piles of sea salt, spices, old gasoline cans, two drug shops with hand lettered signs that gave no clue what “drugs” were being sold (elsewhere “pharmacy” was used), several really grotty tin hovels that called themselves “hotels” and our two-storey dump for the next 2 nights, which was not much better. We had reached the Siemen Park Hotel (clearly unrelated to Jimmy’s parent multinational or to an parenting fluids, but rather a misspelling of the Simien Mountains where we were to trek the next day). Debark is the jumping off point for this national park that is known as the Roof of Africa, a high escarpment that is kind of a cross between Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon, and is home to gelada babboons, klipspringers, lots of indigenous birds and monkeys, Sadly the tourist trade has not reached critical mass to support acceptable human habitation. As a result, Roger (and his snoring and nocturnal farting) and I are in 2 near-pallets, in an almost jail cell, with filthy floors, no furniture, one naked light bulb, opening onto a parking lot with 4 plastic tables that is the terrace (shared with our van). The toilet facilities for all 16 of us (plus the hotel staff and any crazies who dribble in from the bar or restaurant/TV room) are 2 squat holes without flush mechanisms (there is a tin can of water). There are also 2 outside showers and one outside sink. All are filthy. The food is 2 types of spaghetti, one spicy, one styrofoam, or a vegetarian mess. But a half-litre of draft beer, a bottle of beer, a coffee or a tea or a cappucino costs 25 cents. It’s liquid diet time (plus dusted off bananas from the market). The inadequate reason for this waste of 2 days is to permit us to climb and walk along an admittedly dramatic mountain ridge (with a guide and a kalyshnikov-toting guard to protect us from robbers, kidnappers we are reassured being no problem), encounter a few families of big brown baboons, one very skittish klipspringer, and occasional begging children who materialize magically out of the scrub, hands out. The birders are atwitter about things like yellow bee-eaters and black and white vultures. I trudged along, occasionally startled by the straight down vertical and vertiginous drops of 3000 feet, from our 9300 foot high elevation. Sometimes I even got far away enough from our chatty group to enjoy the spooky silence of Africa’s vastness. But a lot of the time I kept thinking that this wasn’t worth the trouble and unpleasantness, when there is a direct 45 minute flight from Gondar to our next stop, Axum, even though I know Explore Tours love to throw in some trek/nature/adventure stuff in their brochures. It’s all very eco/PC but it was just poorly thought out. The long road to Axum followed over 800 hairpin turns down the North side of the Simien range, something of a tour de force of Italian engineering, though a few guard rails might have been nice. Changing several climate zones, we soon began to encounter lots of camels, replacing donkeys but not women as beasts of burden. Moving north, the people seem to be becoming darker, more Sudanese looking. Lots of wrecked trucks that had misnavigated the turns, and some wrecked tanks and cannon caissons that looked too recent to have been from the 1937-41 Italian war, and must have been from the 1990’s civil wars. Kids were climbing on them so I did too, briefly forgetful of the land-mine horrors I had seen in Eritrea where one simply never left the road-bed. A hot soak in a big bath, a reasonable room, and the 80 cent beers at the Hotel Yeha seemed well worth the price increase.
The Axumite Empire ran from about 100 AD (forgetting all the Biblical stuff) until about 450AD, reaching its zenith between 300 and 400, at which time it ruled not only Ethiopia but also Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, large chunks of Somalia and the Sudan. In its era it was considered one of the 4 great empires, beside Rome, Byzantium and India, with all of whom it traded. Around 340 Emperor Exana converted himself and the Empire from the idiosyncratic, pre-700 BC reformation, form of Judaism that had been in use for at least a half a millennium, to the equally idiosyncratic form of monophysitic Christianity that the Coptics of Alexandria had devised. Why all of this extraordinary story was never part of any course of study in my generation or, I suspect, in my kids’ generation, suggests a distressing, perhaps racial bias that anything in black Africa really couldn’t have been of much interest or academic value. The legacy of all this is that there has been so little archaeological excavation, so little scholarly inquiry done, that there is really not much to see. Admittedly this was not a culture given to ornamentation or to record-keeping, as were the other Empires they had contacts with. But even the question of why that should be the case is interesting and worth trying to answer.
I got up at 4:45AM because at 5:30 the Ark of the Covenant (Yes, Harrison Ford & Steven Spielberg, the “real deal” according to 45 million faithful) was being treated to its annual Lenten candle-light parade out of its secret place in the Church of St Mary of Zion and around an old stone well and an old sycamore tree. More than 2000 white robed believers, and six of us from our group, all holding waxed twig tapers, followed it, the non-tourists keening softly and occasionally falling to their knees and touching their heads to the ground. The Ark itself was, needless to say not visible; but the honcho priest, over whom an embroidered velvet canopy on 4 posts was carried, held over his head a box (also draped in embroidered cloth) about the size of an orange crate or a 24 pack of beer, which leads me to contemplate how small the actual stone tablets of the 10 Commandments must in fact be. I found the entire scene, its size and scale, lovely and unpretentious and only faintly hokey. Somewhere amongst the white robed figures, the curse of the ark reached out and found my heresy just as prophesied, and I tripped on the broken stones, skinned my knee and elbow, doused my taper and retreated (though not exactly in wide-eyed terror) to my bandaids, iodine and neosporin. Asmall price for joining the ranks of Solomon, Menelik and Exana. After a stock breakfast (toast, eggs, papaya juice and coffee) we were guided in painful detail around an overgrown field with 12 stele, 6 standing. The 13th is gracing a Roman Piazza, which annoys the Axumites when they are not worrying about starving. The talles fallen was 90 feet; the tallest standing is 66 feet and tilted about 10 degrees off center. A few have simple geometric designs and false doors carved crudely on them. Under some tombs have been found, all empty except for a few bones and a few 6th century coins (Axum was the only sub-Saharan civilization to have minted its own coins). That’s it…the grandeur of the Empire is slim pickings today. Then on to a couple of 4th to 8th century churches and 2 that Haile Selassie built in the 1960’s. Only noteworthy thing was a thousand year old illuminated-on-goatskin book and a collection of 5 royal crowns from Exana, Fasilidas & Haile Selassie (‘tis said). In the churches I was quite taken by 2 almost identical, side by side, frescoes of the Virgin and Child. The 4th Century one was pre-Byzantine and the faces were black, and their eyes looked at one another giving a lively and personal quality. The 6th Century one had adopted the Byzantine conventions, and the faces stared straight and unemotionally forward and the faces were all white. I found that sad. All the tombs, palaces, pools and cisterns and the local museum were quite disappointing. A few original stones, a lot of brick reconstructions of surmised foundations. Indeed UNESCO World Heritage has not even designated Axum as part of the world patrimony, though it has done so for Gondar and Lalibela. Perhaps it is simply still all too speculative a history. It is still surprising that the world’s universities and foundations, always competing to dig and find and announce and publish and build reputations, have not even prowled around here looking.


Lalibela begins with a rare treat, an honest to goodness paved, two-lane road from the airport to the edge of the small town, where 16,000 dust covered souls live at 8000 feet off the tourists. Their houses are unique in Africa, round stone towers with 2 floors and thatched conical roofs, the lower floor for beasts, the upper jammed with family. Way below in the valleys surrounding are Monopoly-set mosaics of shiny, light-reflecting corrugated tin rooftops, and they (like the kraals of stone walls and spiny plants around Axum, when viewed from the plane above) make wonderful and varied geometries, like grand Paul Klee doodles, or medical slides of amoebas. The trip to visit the famous 12 rock-carved churches, all built in a frenzy of activity in a mere 24 years in the 12th Century due to a vision of King Lalibela’s, starts with a steep climb and a lot of flies (who seem to adore both “Off” and “Cutter’s”). A gorse-tail whisk and the repetitous strokes of a flagellante are the only defense. Most of the churches are shored up with protective, ugly, view-obscuring scaffoldings and tin roofing, awaiting UNESCO funding of a major project, for which the paper work and approvals are purportedly all done, which will cover and preserve these relics while still allowing them to be seen. Candidly, individually viewed, they are not at all overwhelming to anyone who has seen Petra or the rock carvings of India, Sri Lanka or Indonesia. These are relatively small, scantily ornamented and quite rough hewn. Their symbols are in number or shape of doors or windows, their interiors are dark and almost unfinished cave-like affairs. Only St George’s is totally free standing, unscaffolded and surrounded by a 5 to 8 foot trench that permits viewing both from above the rim and then down below as you climb down the 30 foot stairs to enter. All the resident priests are happy to trot out their treasures for you to photograph (for a few birrh, of course). The problem is that all the priests and all the treasures appear to be identical….a few processional crosses, an occasional crown and an old, goat-vellum book. It could almost be a Potemkin parade, with one priest scooting on ahead of us by some back route, showing us the same stuff over and over. Our guide did make special arrangements (translate: “tip enhancing”) to have the “solid gold” Laliblela Cross brought out. It was made notorious for having been stolen 6 years ago, missing for 2 years and then recovered by coustoms agents in Belgium in the luggage of an antiques dealer who had paid $25,000 for it. Cumulatively the complex deserves preservation, as it is the most special thing we have seen amidst the disappointing paucity of visible remnants and relics of past glories.
Our second day consisted of a 1500 foot ascent (which is a lot when you are starting at over 8000 feet) of very steep angle, via mule for about half way and on foot for the rest, to a rock-hewn monastery way above the town. My mule, a gentle 8 year old named “Samoun” performed sure-footedly as ordered, and was quite responsive to my voice. My muleteer brought along his 11 year old son, Masala, a 7th grader with good English skills and flashing, flirtatious eyes, who made the 5 hour trek up and back very nearly worthwhile, as we taught each other words, and he fended off beggars who materialized in droves all along the narrow trail. He loved the bag of hard candies I gave him about half way thru the trek; and. at the end of the precipitous downward return, with Samoun fully aware that he was homeward-bound and his ordeal almost done, when I tipped his father the prescribed amount (about $2.25) and gave him an apparently unexpected equal sum, he kissed my hand, which I found more sad than sweet. But then government-built housing costs $5 a month, plus $1 for a key to the water pump nearby. Of course, no electricity or heat. So $4.50 is a lot for a family to receive in one fell swoop. On returning to the hotel we found a 55-strong group of black Americans from Los Angeles, not church-sponsored as most such groups here are, but run by a local black TV station and newspaper, which send along reporters to cover the experience, in effect creating human interest stories. This is their 4th African country in 4 years.

I also had a long chat and a beer with our local guide, an engaging man in his mid-40’s, who seemed pleased that I was Jewish and willing to swap old Testament analogies between the 2 religions (which proved to be a major dredge-up of my Hebrew school memories) and who was quite willing to share the saga of his quite dreadful life (a virtual chronicle of Ethiopia’s traumas of the last 50 years). In his early 20’s, as a University trained historian and professional guide, he had been arrested by the appallingly brutal Menegitsu regime for breaking the law against any form of direct contact with foreigners. His offense: he had gone to offer his services to 2 English writers who were researching a history book, and had been seen by an informant in their hotel lobby.) His 3 year'’ in prison cost him his wife and 3 children, who would have starved had the Church (of which he had been a Deacon, but which does not tolerate divorce) not recognized the “special situation” and annulled the marriage so that she could find and marry someone else to support the destitute family. My guide has now remarried and had 3 more kids because “his young wife needed to be a mother”, and now supports all 6 children. He is cultivated, literate and kindly, and still devout though he can no longer be a Deacon due to the marital history. All this was told openly, without recrimination or ulterior motive (he already had his tips). I was quite moved by our hour together. Another pleasing aspect of the past few days was getting to know and thoroughly enjoy Graham and Liz (MRS) Robinson, the delightfully accented husband and wife microbiologists who met doing PHD’s at Queen’s College, Belfast, and haver obviously been totally, playfully, teasingly, light-heartedly in love for around 35 years, laughing and enjoying sharing academic life, children, guest lectureships in Malaysia, adventurous travel and impending retirement in Nottingham. They are lovely dinner companions, and I may actually venture up to Nottingham when I am in England. I hope we shall keep in touch.
Ethiopian Airlines has cancelled our flight onward and delayed our connection, so we shall be losing a half-day or more of our time in Harar, the medieval Muslim walled city that is our last destination. It ended up taking an entire day to accomplish a 1-hour and 45 minute flight. But we had the morning to visit a rock-carved church in an overhanging cliff-cave that bore, on its outside, a striking similarity to Mesa Verde and Canon de Chelly. Then at the airport, due to the impossibly tight connections and the fundamentally untrustworthy promise of the Airline to hold our connecting flight, Trevor (our group leader), Graham (my new chum) and I made a deal to identify the group’s luggage and transfer it ourselves across the tarmac (under ouzi-toting watchful eyes) direct from plane to plane, thereby becoming unquestionably the racial-barrier-breaking, first-ever, white baggage handlers in all of Africa (if not the world!). We did get stares.
Our hotel in Harar is another downtown, noisy, screenless dump, but the disgusting shower and toilet are at least “en suite”, the food is reasonably good by local standards, the coffee is hot and strong, the beer is cold and cheap, and the street noises are exotic…donkeys braying, occasional hyenas moaning, the muezzin calling Islam to prayer, and the bustle and clatter of a market that seems far more middle eastern than African, perfumed with spices and citrus fruits. This city of 120,000 sits above a fertile green valley which has long been the country’s best coffeegrowing region, but which is now being changed over, field by field, to the more lucrative crop of “chat” (a coca leaf-similar mild narcotic and hallucinogenic that is enormously popular throughout Africa and the mid-east, and is apparently still legal. There are chat bars (not chat rooms), and lots of men (and occasionally even goats) chomping away on the stuff in all the markets and squares. Apparently for full effect one must chew it like a cud for 5 to 7 hours. I am not trying it, as I am unsure of the interaction between it and my anti-malaria RX and my current cold medicines. The entire area feels different from the rest of the country, not least because of the adequate year-round water supply. Though equally shabby and dirty, the painted plaster walls, the vestiges of French and Italian commercial activities, and the many mosques make it seem exotic. It was the main Islamic thrust point into Ethiopia and all of highlands Africa, for 300 years the main trading city inland with the port at Djibouti, a 2-way route that took chat and coffee and slaves and whatever else there was to sell down to the port, and in return brought weapons and Islam and Richard Burton (not Liz Taylor’s) and Artur Rimbaud to live here. Rimbaud, far the most curious ever inhabitant of the place, after his scandalous break-up with Paul Verlaine (who landed in prison for shooting his under-aged lover) came her at 19, gave up poetry and tried to give up men to please his maman, and became a trader of coffee and weapons for a French company based in Cairo. He lasted 12 years, mostly in a small house that is now a bar, but with offices in a grand , 19th Century Kerala Indian style wooden mansion that is now a museum to him, after having been used as his house in a movie about his weird life. It has ornate wood shutters, balconies with tall thin columns, stained glass windows, and more physical clout and evocative ambience than any other building in the entire country. The curator is a charming multi-lingually fluent chap who was absolutely thrilled that I asked to see some of the encased books of photos, and spent almost an hour (actually rather more than I really and truly wanted) walking me page by page thru photos, some by Rimbaud himself, of old Harar. One often had a sense that little had changed in 120 years. We then stopped at a Franciscan church and school, where 90 or more uniformed, scrubbed, bright-eyed, spontaneously friendly, no-runny-noses, no flies on their eyes, no beggarly demands for money or pens or candies, kids came running out to chirp greetings and to systematically shake all our hands. It was a stunning contrast to all the other kids we had seen everywhere, and their English bird-song was happy and delightful. Perhaps we respond best to the familiar.
Muslim Harar is clearly prosperous despite the removal of the rail line to Djibouti and the construction of the country’s second international airport 1 and ½ hours away at Dire Dawe (which has eclipsed Harar in size, reaching 200,000 and in European trade-office dominance). We stopped briefly at Haile Selaisse’s boyhood home (his father was governor of the province), a tall, wood-columned, latticed, once-grand mansion not unlike Rimbaud’s in size, but now patched with corrugated tin and home to a faith-healer who throws his garbage in the courtyard. I find this odd considering how Haile Selassie is universally venerated. Basically this is not touristic except for its mood but then I have concluded that that is the truth of tourism throughout Ethiopia. There is scenery, some of it quite world-class. There is trekking and birding, which are not really my things. On the night ride from the airport, our paths were crossed by 3 hyenas and 2 mongooses, which added to the hippos, monkeys, baboons and one klipsspringer do not add up to the San Diego Zoo by a very long shot. Goats and donkeys clog the streets. And there is not the oppressive sense of scrawny, hungry poverty in Harar that is ubiquitous in the parched, rural North. So one manages to feel a little less guilty here about being as lucky as one is.
Back to Addis, where the Hotel Ghion, its 24 hour a day hot water, its BBC world in the room, its fresh papaya and pineapple at breakfast, make it seem the Ritz Carlton wrapped up in the Royal Cipriani. It is ideal timing. I have caught a miserable head and chest cold, I suspect on the Lalibela/Harar flight where a Muslim child/mother coughed and wheezed all over her infant and all the rest of us without ever covering her mouth (though she was a zealot about covering every other body part). It was like a germ-warfare suicide-attack on our group. So I have holed up in relative comfort, slept for 11 hours plus a 2 hour afternoon nap (partly due, I think to an O.D. of cold and flue medicines). I did rouse myself enough to join the group for a last supper, hosted rather graciously by the local agent, at a typical Ethiopian cabaret. There was injera, ca va sans dire, and a constatnt, brain-numbing repetition of 3 notes on drums, flute and 2 zitherish thingies for 3 solid hours while 2 men and 2 women leaped spastically up and down, jerked and twitched violently and rotated their heads in ways not seen since Linda Hunt in “The Exorcist” (fortunately here there was only demonic possession, no projectile vomiting). The entire display wore very, very thin after about 10 minutes; so I spent most of the evening sitting outside in the cool breeze, watching a fascinating parade of business-men and Parliamentarians (the Pan-African Parliament is meeting here; and the hotel and all the restaurants of choice are filled with a brilliantly colorful melange of tribal costumes from Nigeria and Mali and Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal and Zimbabwe and the like, mostly emerging from chauffeured limos and talking in English on cell phones). The lingua franca is clearly English, which makes sense given the fragmentation of the continent. Ethiopia alone still has 70 languages in use; but then Ethiopia also has its own calendar (it is now 1998 and they are looking forward to their very own millennium) and its own time system which incomprehensibly measures from 7 to 7 each day, instead of 12 to 12. Thank God the tourism times, such as wake-up calls and airlines flights, have switched over to the Western clocks. I am, it may be readily apparent, quite happy to be leaving. My expectations of what I would see here were far too high and grand….founded, admittedly, in my own factual ignorance and in some excessively enthusiastic travel books who seemed to muddle the glamour of the history/fable/legend of Ethiopia with the desire to sell books, encourage tourism, and tell a good yarn. It is making me think my preliminary, ill-formed notions about further travel to sub-Saharan Africa unless it is someday to take the grandsons to game parks, if they get old enough before I get too old.
Check-in was unexpectedly easy and uncomplicated. There was X-ray equipment and it was working. But then it was also 3:40 AM. The flight was late. But then this is Addis Ababa. And it was delightfully half-empty; so I snatched 3 seats across and snoozed for 2 of the 3 hours to Alexandria where we refuelled and filled every seat as well. Having steaming coffee at 30,000 feet over the hypnotically bleak but patterned sands of the Sahara, following the green ribbon of the Nile snaking through all that inhospitable land and distance, I realized that I had just added a new perspective to my failing memory bank of Nilotic impressions…the view from the Southern sources. Not only did the Nile support the extraordinary civilization of Egypt (how extraordinary its achievements underscored by Ethiopia’s minimal artistry). Not only did the vast insulation and protective shield of the desert spaces give the blessed Egyptians peace and time and prosperity to develop by keeping all predators at bay. But the Nile was also a two-way trade-route and information canal, which Egypt utilized to brilliant advantage. One has to wonder why Ethiopia, rich enough, protected nearly as well on its plateau, with adequate water, equal in population and mineral resources, did not rise as high, invent as much, become as influential. Suddenly the desert vanishes and all becomes a green, beautifully laid-out geometry of agricultural parcels that sprawl out from Alexandria and the Mediterranean for at least 100 miles. Irrigation canals, highways and a perfect visual orderliness that is strikingly European in feeling. Then suddenly there is the huge-jetty-sheltered, bustling port, and outside it a weird mixture of curlicue-encased fish-farms adjacent to horrifically discolored oil-refineries and their dump-sites, not a grand idea for fish-eaters, I would suspect.
Landing at Heathrow, calling Sonia and Robin, renting a National car, recovering from the sticker-shock of the Pound being equal to almost 2 US$$ and prices here still being in pounds what we pay in dollars, I managed to drive on the left without too much bumping into curbs (it is my first time at this in 22 years), find my way out of the construction tangle surrounding the airport, make it onto the motorway system (which I find far easier to negotiate than the small country roads or the in-town tangles of streets), and finally arrive into the extravagantly hospitable and generous arms of the Woolvens, good and patient friends. Now to sleep and cure this cold. I feel at home though I am still an ocean and 2 weeks away. At least I am “Out of Africa”.