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Published: November 25th 2009
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Gondar
The Royal Enclosure
Tuesday we spend the whole day visiting some of the sights of Gondar, one of the old capitals of Ethiopia.
Top of the list for me is
The Royal Enclosure which is where all the castles are. The sight of these medieval-looking castles must be one of the most unexpected sights in Africa. Someone makes the observation that they look similar in design to some of the castles in India.
Each Ethiopian king, during this period, built themselves a new castle. There are a total of seven in the compound. The one exception to the castle-building seems to have been
Iyasu, {
I think it was him} who also made sure he built himself a decent sauna.
From here we go to
The Church of Debre Berhan Selassie, famous because it was supposedly saved from destruction by invaders by a swarm of bees. The decoration inside this church is some of the most impressive we've seen, particularly the faces of the angels on the ceiling.
King Fasiladas' Bath, used for baptisms, is also an impressive sight and the scene during the
Timkat festival must be really spectacular.
Time For a
Pint
After lunch we have a fair bit of free time as people are changing money and there are problems with changing some travellers cheques so I decide to try and buy some Superglue to repair my glasses.
My first plan is to walk into what looks like a hardware store and say "Superglue". This doesn't produce immediate results but a young child has attached himself to me and is keen to go all over town looking for Superglue for me. He has no success either but our local guide,
Gitecho* {Getachew}, is able to translate in a hardware store and I find a 20p tube of Superglue before the problem with the travellers cheques is sorted.
{*
Our guide for the day in Gonder was excellent. I'm not certain about his name. He made the mistake of telling us that his name sounded like "Gespacho" when he first introduced himself and it was the "Gespacho" that we remembered and he got stuck with that for the rest of the day}
Baty, our guide for the tour, has obviously worked with groups of British tourists before as he correctly judges, that with so many historical sights
to see in
Gondar, we will want to go and tour the local brewery. So, after a visit to
Empress Mentewab's Palace at
Kuskuam we get our Baty Bonus and head for the
Daschen brewery.
The tour of the brewery itself is disappointing as our brewery guide is very softly spoken, his English is not very clear, and he is trying to talk over the sound of the machinery. I do understand, though, that bags of malt go in at one end of the factory and bottles of beer come out of the other.
The free samples at the end of the tour make it worthwhile, though!! I find myself sat in a group talking with
Getachew - he has been a really interesting guide all day; his English is very clear and he is obviously well-informed and enthusiastic about religion, politics and African history. We talk about the education system in Ethiopia and I learn that, for some strange reason, all lessons are taught in English after Grade 8 and that they have a shortage of teachers who can teach in English - could be tempting!!
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Nick Buchanan
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Empress Mentewab's Palace
It's probably just worth adding in an aside that the visit to the palace was a bit of an add on ... we were running ahead of schedule and decided a quick visit would be in order. The bus took a right onto a steep hill but before long, realised it wasn't going to make it so we decamped and slogged the rest of the way up the hill on foot. Passing through an ancient church compound (with a modern church in the middle which replaced the one destroyed by the Mahdists in the C19th), we came across Empress Mentewab's Palace. Empress Mentewab, to cut a long story short, was a commoner that one of the king's married and who acted as a power behind the throne. When her husband died, she ruled as regent for her son and, then when he died, tried to rule as regent for her grandson, much to the new queen's annoyance! She met with James Bruce, the first European to trace the source of the Nile and we saw his room and study where he stayed in the Palace, ultimately marrying one of the queen's daughters. It was a very atmospheric place and had large rooms, banqueting halls and so on ... the Queen seemed to upset everyone at some point sooner or later, including the local priests who she eventually tried to lord it over by inviting them to a banquet on the promise that none would leave to go to the toilet ... she then plied them with drinks and had them hopping around bursting for the loo to teach them a lesson about who was in charge! In the end, one of the priests asked her a question: "what is 100 x 100?" to which she replied "1000, of course." In Amharic, "1000 of course," is pronounced "shee, na awo", very similar to "sheena awo" (not sure of the spelling here) which also means, "piss all over the floor". With the answer he wanted from the queen, he promptly urinated on the banqueting floor, causing the queen to realise she'd been tricked and she then released the rest of the priests to answer the call of nature. Which seemed an appropriate precursor to our next trip to the brewery! ;-)