Think you've got a little something on your lip there...

The slice of lip separated from the rest of her face sways around as she shakes her head at me, wrinkled in its limp, un-stretched form. The crescent-shaped hole under her jaw gapes with its big, empty space. I want to punch my fist through to see if it will fit, but the look in her eyes doesn't seem so welcoming. With that, she takes her left hand to her mouth and stretches the bottom lip outwards and down. Her right hand places a 20cm in diameter clay disc on the edge of the lower lip, carefully laying the flesh down in the groove running around the side of the plate, snapping the top of the disc in place right under her lower set of teeth. Quite impressive. The Mursi tribeswoman shakes her head again, the disc bounces back and forth now firmly in place. That thing is the size of my face, but probably bigger. Fascinating, mind-blowing, and awe-inspiring. This is the kind of stuff only National Geographic photographers get to see.

I'm down here in the Lower Omo Valley visiting the Mursi tribe, staying in the village of Jinka which is a couple hours drive away. The drive south to Jinka from Addis took two days of extremely rough driving. So rough in fact, there is no public transportation around the Omo Valley if you are trying to track down these amazing tribes. And calling it "driving" would be generous, as "off-roading" was really more what we were doing in some areas. Jos and I were thinking to hitch our way around the villages and tribes for a week, but after some further research back in Addis realized it is really not possible. There are no truckers coming to these tribes, and these tribes aren't living in accessible villages off the main road. Our only option was then to hire a private jeep with a local driver to take us around for a week, which was not going to be cheap. Luckily when we got back to Addis from the north, we asked around and found a Japanese guy and an older Italian man who were interested in doing roughly the same trip. So together with a virtually mute 27-yr old Japanese guy and a 60-yr old Italian traveler who wears his shorts shorter than I do, we hired a jeep for the week and here we are.

We drove two days from Addis down to Jinka, a small village which serves as a natural gateway to the Mursi tribes in the western area of the Omo. Jinka (which Jos keeps calling 'Yinka' which really annoys me) itself is a rather quiet village. Internet connection is a joke, there aren't many options for food (spaghetti twice a day), but there is a large field which was once used as a small air strip. Local guys gather here every day around 5pm for a few games of football (alongside grazing cows), and this is how we spend out time in our evenings back in Jinka. van Nistelrooy and I are of course once again famous here, but this time I get all the attention while I watch the guys play as cheerleader from the sidelines. And obviously, Jos loves coming through after the match, all sweaty in victory, taking my hand and dragging his wife away yelling "Sexy China!" trying to sell me for all that I'm worth. He's kept it relatively in check though after one night when he had laughing, yelled out "How much?" with his arm around me... a guy approached us later and meekly asked "what did you mean earlier, when you said 'Sexy Asian'?" For a second there I actually got to feel like a real live harlot. Jos felt bad and has been very sweet to me since then.

Upon entering the Mursi's land, you are stopped by scouts and encouraged by your driver to take one with you. We didn't really feel it was necessary to take an AK-toting scout as we didn't feel we needed protection from anything, but you are forced to take a scout. So nevermind, by "encouraged" they mean "mandatory." And you know when you hear stories of primitive people who think camera flashes steal their soul? Yep... that's here. When visiting Mursi, you are also encouraged to do so in the morning before they get drunk and "volatile" in the afternoon. I found this hilarious. So these tribes are not accessible by public transportation, have no real roads leading to their huts, and don't have stores around to buy things. Yet somehow, they have plenty of nice guns and foreign liquor.

The Mursi tribe at around 6,500 inhabiting this area of the Mago National Park speaks not Amharic (they can't communicate with our driver) but another one of the 90 tribal languages spoken in Ethiopia. Only 15% of them are Christian, the rest being Animists, and are pastoralists that practice flood retreat cultivation. They live in simple huts made of what looks like just hay or straw. Their men participate in fierce stick-fighting, a strong Mursi tradition. Both sexes engage in scarification, a process by which they cut their flesh and rub gunpowder in to engage infection to yield raised scars. These raised scars are supposed to be make you "desirable." Mainly though, their claim to fame is the wearing of the clay lip plates by some of their women. As these discs cause quite a bit of discomfort, the women only wear them for part of their time. The girls get their first incision in their early teens and from there gradually stretch the wound further and further. There have been lip plates 25cm wide reported but most of them seem to max out at 15-20cm. Aside from these tribes here in Ethiopia, wooden lip-plates are also worn by tribes in Brazil. To be honest I can't seem to pin down the explanation for these lip-plates. One person told me it was a symbol of wealth for the family. Another told me it was meant as protection against slavers and evil spirits entering their bodies by way of the mouth cavity. I'm not sure what to believe, but now as I try to imagine us ripping a 25cm wide holes in our mouth to prevent against being snatched of into slavery, modern-day braces to keep our teeth shiny and straight don't seem as big of a burden.

As we were leaving, we walked past a blindingly white baby wrapped in the arms of a Mursi woman. It was a very strange spectacle and as I sat there staring, my driver told me that it was rumored to be a mixed baby of the Mursi woman and a white researcher who lived in the area for awhile. It was obvious to me though that it was definitely not a black/white mixed baby but an albino one. (Interesting fact: in much of East Africa, albinos are hunted and their body parts sold as "luck charms" for businesses etc.) I tried explaining to our driver and our scout (who I'm pretty sure would have proved to be absolutely useless had the entire male population of the tribe become enraged in drunkenness and decided to gun us down with their superior firearms) that this was not the baby of a white man, but was a baby of a medical condition that produces humans with little to no pigmentation. I'm not sure he believed me.

Back in a shitty hotel room later that night, we got a knock on the door. It was our driver and a white guy, who I later learned was the researcher the Mursi knew. He had been on vacation back in London for the past couple months and only knew the woman when she was still pregnant. The guy was scared shitless and asked to see my picture of the baby. He was extremely glad he heard about our excursion out because now he knew he couldn't return. Apparently the tribe would kill him if they thought he fathered a Mursi baby. Yikes.

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