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Published: August 30th 2007
Tis Abay
The amazing waterfalls at Tis Abay,'Smoke of the Nile', near Lake Tana, Ethiopia Get those images of barren deserts out of your head. Eliminate any lingering images of starving, hungry villagers. Try to blink away that picture of Addis Ababa as a small collection of mud huts, surrounded by goats. Ethiopia has bad PR officer working on its international image. The reputation and the reality couldn't be more different. The vast majority of Ethiopia is a huge highland plateau, covered in a patchwork of verdant meadows, crashing rivers, and alpine flowers. The cuisine is some of the best on the continent, and great food - and even better coffee - is cheap, available, and comes in huge servings. And Addis is a big, developed, bustling, capital city - the third highest in the world, actually. But yes - there are still herds of goats wandering amongst the traffic.
Arriving in Addis, after four months in West Africa, is a little like showing up in a new continent. This place couldn't be any more different from the other side of Africa. Well, it could, I suppose - if the people practised Hinduism, and wore Polynesian grass-skirts, and spoke Chinese, then it would
Apechild
The waxwork model of an Australopithecus child, whose 3.3-million year old skull was discovered in Ethiopia be even more different - but you get the idea. Ethiopia is something else. It is unique. It has an incredibly defined sense of identity, and it knows it. If the rest of Africa just buggered off and left Ethiopia to it, I reckon the place would cope just fine.
That sense of 'Ethiopianness' comes from many factors. For one, Ethiopia was the one African nation (apart from Liberia, which is a special case) to resist European colonisation at the turn of the 19th-20th century. It also has an incredibly long and illustrious history stretching back thousands of years, second only to Egypt on the African landmass. It has its own script, and its own anceint language, Amharic. It has its own peculiar brand of Christianity, isolated from the mainstream versions for centuries, following the Islamisation of the countries to its north and west. It had an emperor who called himself the Conquering Lion of Judah, and who became the religious icon of the Rastafarians in far-off Jamaica. And it did something pretty much nobody else in Africa but the Zulus did - it beat the Europeans on the field of battle, soundly crushing the Italians at the Battle
Cute kid
An Ethiopian street kid poses for a photo near Tis Abay waterfalls of Adwa in 1896.
I arrived here directly from Ghana, deciding to fly across the broken heart of Africa rather than traverse it by land. I had wanted to do the whole trip cross-country, but any which way I looked at things, I still had to somehow get through the mess that is Big Congo, the chaos that is the Central African Republic, or the tragedy that is western/southern Sudan. I didn't have the time or the balls, to be honest. It is possible, but soaring across the jungle at 30,000 feet, watching awful Chris Rock movies, is infinitely easier.
Addis Ababa, or Addis to his mates, is the shambolic, sprawling heart of this huge country, a city with the population of Sydney, perched in the central highlands at an altitude of 2400 metres or so. When I say 'with the population of Sydney', by the way, I don't mean that the place is full of guys in suits called Hugh, or teens in boardies called Corey, wandering around the city slums looking really confused. I mean it has the same number of people.
Anyway, I digress. Addis is a new city by Ethiopian standards, founded in
Ancient book
The priest at Debra Maryam holding a 900-year old parchment copy of the Gospels - in which he has doodled some smiley faces in biro. the 1880s, so even though it feels more established than the average West African capital, it doesn't have anything like the heritage of a city like Cairo, or Fes. Despite the pollution and crowded slums, the mountain setting lends Addis a cleaner, fresher feel than a swampy lowland place like Accra or Dakar. The changed aroma is one thing you notice here - the air is musty and moist, with undertones of burned coffee and diesel. The most strikingly evident difference is the population itself. Ethiopians look like no bunch of folks I have ever seen. The highland people of Addis bear elements of North Africa, of Arabia, and of sub-Saharan Africa - tall and slender, coffee-brown skin, with - I love this word - aquiline features. That's straight out of the Lonely Planet, and basically means they look like eagles. It's a polite way of saying they have thin faces and sharp noses. You do get the odd Arabian-looking easterner, or Kenyan-looking southerner, as Ethiopia is composed of a dizzying number of tribes and groups, but the aquilines predominate.
This is starting to sound like a cliche, but Ethiopians are one of the friendliest, most obliging bunches of
The Smoke of the Nile
The crashing waterfalls of Tis Abay, near Bahar Dar, Ethiopia people you could hope to meet. Even in slightly edgy Addis, you meet genuinely lovely locals who just want to chat, have coffee, or lend a hand. Out in the sticks, you are treated with a mixture of curiosity, respect and cheekiness - kids gather around and point, shouting, 'You!' You!', and the adults try out their full quota of English on you - whether they know three words or three hundred.
Back to Addis. I spent the first 24 hours in a profound state of culture shock, wheezing up and down the high-altitude city streets, and getting hopelessly lost. I did manage to find my way to some of the main sights, the most interesting being the two major museums. The National Museum holds a modest but interesting collection, the most notable exhibit being the partial skeleton of one of our oldest relatives - Lucy, as we call her, or Dinknesh ('Wonderful') as she is called in Amharic. The fossilised remains of this Australopithecus were discovered by a team of archaeologists in the Rift Valley - sometimes labelled, 'The Cradle of Humanity' - in 1974, and she received her name because 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' was
Fussball!
An Ethiopian fussball fanatic focuses on his game in the Bahar Dar markets playing on the radio at the time. She isn't too much to look at - despite being the most complete skeleton of her species so far discovered, only 40% of her bones have been found - but hell, this 1.1 metre-tall apewoman might have been our great-great-etc-grandmother. She's basically family.
The other cool museum is devoted to Ethnography, and is situated in the former palace of Emperor Haile Selassie, now on the grounds of Addis Ababa University. The palace itself has seen enough major events - it was used by the fascist governor when Italy finally conquered in 1936, and there are bullet holes in Selassie's bedroom mirror, eveidence of a failed coup by his Imperial Bodyguard in 1960. The highlight of the museum was seeing the blue porcelain toilet where His Imperial Majesty, the Conquering Lion of Judah, Ras Tafari Haile Selassie, used to do his morning poo-poo.
After Addis I decided to head northward to the city of Bahar Dar, a relaxed and friendly place on the shores of Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. On the way I met two great English guys, Sam and Alex, who have become my partners in crime
Papyrus boat
Abiut, Alex and Sam try not to move too much, as our flimsy papyrus boat is punted across Lake Tana for a while. We spent a lovely few days checking out the sights, and frequenting the myriad collection of bars and cafes that seem to exist all over Bahar.
The foremost attraction in the area has to be Tis Abay, or 'Smoke of the Nile', a massive waterfall about 30kms from the source of the Blue Nile. The river just collapses over the edge of the escarpement ina gigantic carpet of foam, spray and crashing H2O. It wasn't quite an impressive as it should have been, thanks to a nearby hydroelectric plant which has sucked off some of the river's flow, but it was still a pretty mighty scene. We went off-road looking for a trail to the base of the falls, and ended up being invited into a farmhouse for lunch. The ladies who brought us in only had some stale injera (flat bread), sour milk, and the scrapings of a bowl of lentil stew that the cat had been licking, but it was all very friendly. And none of us got sick afterwards, which was nigh-on miraculous.
The following day we hired some bicycles, and went on a mission to ride to the shores of Lake
Tis Abay
View down to the falls at Tis Abay, near the source of the Nile, Ethiopia Tana, and visit one of the many monasteries that dot the lake. On the road out of town, we bumped into yet another lovely Ethiopian, a man named Abiut, who promptly dropped his day's plans and accompanied us to the monastery as our guide. For nothing. He was purely being hospitable. The trip turned into a real adventure, with us carrying our bikes along rural tracks, as a bevy of locals followed behind us, finding our presence in the area quite a novelty. We eventually found the lake, and took a papyrus boat across to the monastery. The boat was sitting about two inches below the waterline, but we made it to the opposite shore. At the monastery, the priest-guardian showed us around. he was especially proud of his 900-year old copy of the Gospels, written in the ancient Ge'ez language on goatskin parchment. The book was beautiful, apart from the more recent biro smiley faces the priest had doodled in the blank pages at the front of this antique treasure.
Bahar was great fun. I only had one negative experience - but I will put this as one of the worst things that has happened in the past
Another shot of Tis Abay
A black and white shot of the waterfalls at Tis Abay, northern Ethiopia six months of travel. Walking out of our hotel one night, I saw from the corner of my eye a figure running toward me. Before I had time to react, I realised it was a crazy homeless guy, charging at me from across the street. He jumped onto me, wrapped his arms around my neck, and started punching me in the head. He was so quick, he got three punches in before I could push him off and run away; Sam and Alex only just had time to get into defensive poses ready for action. It was all over within seconds. Some locals stepped in and held him back, as he angrily shouted 'faranji, faranji' (foreigner) at us. Now, I don't know what some other western tourist did to upset him so much, but it must have been pretty awful.
The next morning, still a little shocked and wary of homeless Ethiopians, a stark-naked crazy woman appeared out of nowhere and started running right at me. Luckily for me, a great little streetkid, who I had just bought tissues from, saw her coming, so he grabbed my hand and told me to run away. Which I did. there was
Injera!
Sharing some injera, chickpeas and milk with a rural family, their chickens, and their cat. Near Tis Abay, Ethiopia no way
she was going to wrap herself around me and start punching me in the noggin.
I got away, but let me tell you this: I am giving Ethiopian down-and-outs a very, very wide berth.
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Dee
non-member comment
Sounds like fun
Pictures look fantastic - and I'm glad to see you are human enough to enjoy a little luxury. And fast enough to dodge those homeless people. At least our homeless just sit quietly and drink themselves to death. Ahh, the privilege of being a developed nation!