Ethiopia - a long story

At last. Goodish internet access. Let me tell you something of what has been happening inside and outside my head since my last proper posting.

I have been in Ethiopia for two and a half weeks. I have been to:

- Gonder, a mountain town with an illustrious royal past

- Debark, a dirty shanty town reeking of poverty (though not despair)

- the Simien mountains, where (in Marek's words) I froze my ass off, and whilst out walking uphill aiming for 4,400 metres above sea level (and failing) my pulse rate went way, way over the safe limit for a 60 year old man.

- Aksum, where my camera was stolen (lots more to tell you about that soon)

- Mekele, where I had to use a guide to be able to shop successfully for food, and where one of our party was approached in a shadowy bar by a young lady who strangely had remembered to put on her brassiere but absolutely nothing else. It was even stranger that the recipient of her invitation was also a young lady.

- Lalibela, a nice little town with 13 extraordinary churches carved by hand into the bedrock hundreds of years ago and still used. This is a place where I could consider living, and maybe I could change some lives if I had enough time left on the planet.

- and I'm now in Bahir Dar on the shores of Lake Tana - the source of the Blue Nile. Quite a clean modern town by African standards - apart from a couple of slum districts you can see worse in Greece, or even in the north of England.

I have stayed in hotels which Pierre describes with a degree of understatement as "merdique". And some a bit better, although I have still preferred to use my sleeping bag rather than the sheets - and wear rubber-soled shoes in the shower (the electrical wiring is a wonder and a joy to behold).
I have used "showers" which could make a grown man cry, and toilets which could put you off your breakfast.
And shivered all night in a tent at sub-zero temperatures, with an also-shivering and voluble Pole for company*.
I have camped on mountain plateaus and in road construction depots.
I have been delayed by a landslide.
I have bounced for hours on dirt roads until my fillings rattled.
I have swum in mountain rivers, and tried to wash myself under an ice-cold trickle of water deep in a wood, guarded by an armed scout, with his eyes politely averted.
And I have chatted with anybody and everybody who has even the smallest command of English - including a polite and friendly local lady on the hotel terrace. It was only when my travelling companions went off to bed that it became apparent that it was not my sparkling wit and tales of my grandchildren that she was interested in. Analysing this turn of events over breakfast the next day, we concluded that once everybody involved in either side of her industry already has AIDS, nobody has anything to lose, and things revert to normal. Apart from the death thing of course.

* one of Marek's morning greetings, his nose two inches from mine "What the fuck? Now I wake up, you see? Listen by the way. Now it gets better. The sun is coming. No, but last night I totally freeze my ass off. To be honest, it's totally fucked-up here. And this is it for example. Now I am getting up you know. So OK, it's OK" I was originally concerned that it would be my Joycean stream of consciousness which might give a strange flavour to these missives, but now I am sharing a tent with his spiritual heir - complete with a Polish accent.

Look, I'd love to tell you everything, but it would take almost as long to relate as it took to happen. You don't have time for it, so I'll stick to the things that stuck with me - and probably always will.

Ethiopia is the most indescribably beautiful country I have seen or imagined. I will now undertake the impossible by trying to describe it. You may need to exercise your imagination a bit and/or google the whole damned thing. Let me first sum it up by quoting something my youngest companion said to me as we looked out over the landscape: "Chrissie? Can you believe this is real life?" I couldn't.

This land is green and mountainous. That doesn't get us halfway there. This is Abyssinia, formed by unimaginably extraordinarily violent volcanic activity millions of years ago. Subsequent erosion has left great volcanic plugs rearing thousands of feet above the already crimped, scolloped and crenellated mountains, in shapes which could almost make you revise your views about intelligent design.
- "Yeah, yeah" I hear you think "Thousands of feet! Listen by the way. This is bullshit of course. To be honest you are totally fucked-up you know. And this is it."
- "No wait" I telepathically reply "I have marvelled at the Helaba and Heron Towers (google them), so I know exactly what 660 feet looks like and can extrapolate with some accuracy".

There are great slabs and spires and monoliths, so huge and regular you would think them designed and built by man - except that they are so damned big and there are no mobile phone masts on the roof.

Dotted around the mountains are wooden chalets which anyone familiar with the Alps might take for the holiday homes of very rich people. On closer inspection, they are basic agricultural buildings or the most rudimentary dwellings imaginable - with dirt floors and eucalyptus pole walls infilled with mud and dung. Perhaps the most quaint of those Alpine chalets started life not very differently, when the European mountains were similarly the habitat of poverty-stricken subsistence farmers scratching a living from the poor mountain soil. That was before the Alps became the playground of the rich of course. All Ethiopia needs now is snow.

I haven't even started on the rolling countryside, spilling down from the foothills and almost indistinguishable from English pastoral scenes from the days before the internal combustion engine spoilt everything. You know what I mean: haystacks, meadows, people actually in the fields doing stuff, cattle and horses grazing beneath spreading green trees. More of this later.

No I'm sorry. I really can't do it justice. Go ahead, just google it all. Or come over here and have a look. You'll need a bit of time though.

It's all, all too much. I haven't begun to tell you any of the things I promised in paragraph 1, sub-section 2 above. I will. And more.

Aby-bloody-ssinia. You couldn't make it up.

Chris