On the first of February this year we finally escaped Jungle Junction and started on the second half of Africa. It had taken us sixteen months to get from Cape Town to Nairobi, and it was time to get a wriggle on. So wriggle we have. By travelling constantly we have covered the top half of Africa in just three months instead of over a year.
We last checked in with you from Wim’s Holland house in Addis Ababa, and since then we have come a very long way. We completed a huge loop of the north of Ethiopia, taking in it’s most celebrated tourist sites of the rock hewn churches of Lalibella, the stelae of Axum and the city of Gondor. From Gondor we crossed into Sudan, and followed the Nile on it’s journey to the Mediterranean. At the Sudan – Egypt border we put Nandi on a ferry and said goodbye for the sail into Egypt. Once reunited we continued to stay with the magnificent river all the way to Cairo where we are now taking a long, wistful breath before leaving Africa behind.
It’s been very exciting to be in North Africa at a time of such tremendous change, and looking at the governments of the countries we are passing through and wondering who’s next and when. Thinking back over the countries that are most touristed, the ones that are most stable and most visited, there is still scarcely any democracy at all. Stable, stagnant dictatorships are the hallmark of east Africa, in contrast to west Africa whose states are in a perpetual turbulence of power struggles and war.
Namibia and Botswana have had the same people governing them for decades. Zimbabwe is famous for it’s lack of democracy, but Malawi’s leader has also been in power for almost thirty years. Uganda and Rwanda have similar problems with small, stagnant power pools, having had the same presidents and party faithful in power for fifteen years or more.
And our last three countries, Ethiopia, Sudan and until very recently Egypt have all had the same person in charge for the unbelievably long time of close to three decades a each. Sudan’s president is also subject to an arrest warrant from the international criminal court for war crimes; the targeting of civilians and mass killings of Southern Sudanese.
Seeing how positively Egypt has carried out the first part of it’s revolution (I say the first part because at present the danger of the people getting stuck with a military dictatorship seems close) and how hated by the people the governments of Ethiopia and Sudan are made me excited to see revolution catch on there, while at the same time being afraid of what it could mean for us.
As we were preparing to leave Addis Ababa a newspaper was reporting that Ethiopians in America were protesting there, begging America to provide military support to the Ethiopian democracy movement. Wim said that he felt something was in the air, and advised us to keep our fuel and water tanks full, ready to flee at the first signs of trouble. When we woke up on the morning of Wednesday the second of March it was to the sound of heavy artillery fire. My mind began to race – how quickly would we be able to pack up and leave? Did we have enough fuel? After a few heart pounding moments the sleep fog left me, and I remembered that this was a public holiday, a celebration of the Ethiopian’s victory against the Italians, but it made me realise how close revolution really could be.
And today we are in Egypt, it is Friday, the day set aside first to prayer, and then to protest. We are staying indoors, just to be safe, catching up on the blog and watching the news. Travelling so far so quickly means that a lot has happened – I am trying to keep a balance in this blog of keeping you informed of all the big interesting stuff without going on too long – there is an awful lot to catch up on for the last three countries!
Friday, 11th March Bet Abraham Hotel, Lalibella
I knew almost nothing about Ethiopia until we arrived there, just the usual news bites of fly covered children and blighted fields. I had no idea of the ancient treasures Ethiopia contains.
For the “wow” factor, Ethiopia’s rock hewn churches are way up there. More than a thousand years old, the churches of the world’s first Christians are huge buildings carved entirely out of one massive piece of stone. In Lalibella there are thirteen such churches and chapels ranging from buildings as high and impressive as a cathedral to dark, private enclaves hidden in the womb of the earth.
Bet Giorgis, the last church created here, has become the icon of Lalibella. A huge stone slab, at least as big as a football field rests in the mountain. Instead of building walls up, a vacant space around a cross shaped central building was dug down. Then, the insides of the building were excavated, four rooms, three for the laity and one area curtained off containing the “holy of holies.” Columns were beautifully reserved inside and decorative frescoes carved into the walls. In the solid walled areas around the church little rooms have been dug for monks to meditate and sleep in. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Lalibella is not merely this architecture of dedication, patience and faith, but rather that the faith that built them still serves here. These churches are not mere curiosities or tourist attractions. Daily a white clad flock of believers come here to kiss the pillars and revere the saints.
It is quite an odd experience to enter a functioning Church during a service as a tourist rather than as a worshipper. I watch other tourists snap pictures of the devout as they pray and sing. We listen to tourist guides give ever louder lectures to compete with the voices of the faithful. The parishioners here ignore us and are utterly generous and patient, giving us a wordless greeting with a warm smile, a hand over their heart and bow to our presence. I felt very humbled by this warmth and wondered which church in England or Sydney could experience such an invasion and still be so graceful. I think if a Japanese tourist walked into a Sydney church and started snapping photos of the parishioners and the altar during the service they would be coldly ejected!
On our last day in Lalibella we sat in the Bet Giorgis in silence and meditated a little on the wonder of a building carved out of one piece of stone. I thought about the Christian faith, and how it can be that certain ideas can help us to pass through things that would other wise be just as impenetrable as stone, such as our fear of dying. I thought about how belief in reincarnation or an afterlife can help me to be free of the fear of death, so that I can live and enjoy my life to the full.
17th March – Africa Hotel, Axum
The joke about going the wrong way round turns out not to be so funny any more. Ethiopia is no country for a tired traveller. The poverty grinds peculiarly on me; it’s just plain miserable to see people every day with leprosy and deformities caused by childhood polio, to watch children and women breaking themselves with impossible loads, and at the absolute bottom, beneath the poorest of the poor, the beaten and starving animals, horses and donkeys being neglected and worked to death by their suffering owners.
It is confronting being a privileged person travelling in a poor country, because of course I empathise with all of the people I see who are living very hard lives, but I don’t feel like I have much to offer them apart from bearing witness to their sufferings. People ask us for money all the time, and I continually go around a useless loop; should I give to people who beg money from me or not? Does it help that one person to buy something essential for medicine, or does it just further entrench a damaging attitude that begging from foreigners is a viable, and perhaps easier, way to live. To give or not to give; Africa’s eternal question.
Right or wrong, the reality is that white tourists are the face of western wealth and are the targets for wealth redistribution. I used to criticise people who went on package holidays and never left their fancy hotels to walk among the “ordinary” folk. But by the end of our stay in Ethiopia that is exactly what we are doing; sealing ourselves away from the constant stream of requests and begging and harassment in compounds and hotels and restaurants, avoiding walking around as much as we can. Axum should have been remarkable for it’s history and the ancient pre – Christian stelae, as well as the Queen of Sheba’s pool. But with people following us around trying to get money from us from the moment we leave the hotel until the moment we get back, mostly what we think about is how unhappy we are in Ethiopia.
19th March – Saturday
My birthday started out looking like it was just going to be the icing on the I-Hate-Ethiopia Cake. We drove into the Simien Mountains national park, a tiny national park that has been completely eaten up by Ethiopia’s and Africa’s one true obsession and religion – the worship of the human – which is pursued to the exclusion of any other thing. Nothing, not clean water, not education, and certainly not trees or lions or monkeys is more important that being fruitful, multiplying, and filling every corner of the earth with farmland and cows and people.
I wanted to see one wild place in Ethiopia, but as we crossed into the national park I was sickened and saddened to see that it was just more of the same. People, farms, cows and no trees. We have to drive 60km in – practically to the centre of the park, to reach a tiny island of indigenous foliage. They were the only trees we saw that were not the alien species of Pine or Eucalyptus in the whole huge country of Ethiopia. And their indigenous foliage was so unique and so beautiful. In this little island there are strange palm trees that grow in the snow, and a special baboon that looks more like a tiny lion than a monkey. I got to have a snowball fight with Paul on my birthday, and later on a delicious vegan Ethiopian meal and to watch the full moon rise as well (the closest full moon to the earth in 18 years, from the car park while supervising Paul fixing a flat tyre), so it all turned out pretty well in the end.
21 – 24 March
Ethiopia has worn us out, and I have to admit that it is probably the only country that I have ever been to that on the whole, the things I disliked turned out to be more than the things I liked. That being said, there is plenty to like about Ethiopia and I am glad that we went and saw it. Top of the list is the Ethiopian cuisine – they actually have a cuisine, not a mere preparation of food that will stop you being hungry, and on top of that the cuisine includes vegetarians and has a varied and healthy menu for them. Ethiopian people who aren’t tourist touts are beautiful – warm without being pushy, hospitable and gentle. The other huge thing to like about Ethiopia is that it did seem to us like tourist dollars are being used to benefit thier communities. We whinged about how much we had to pay to visit the churches in Lalibella, until the last day there when we saw that actually, virtually every kid was in a school uniform, and there were no kids at all begging from us. And then we said, well, we can’t believe it but maybe the funds here are being well spent.
Stay tuned: I will release the Sudan edition shortly, probably next week. I hope this entry wasn’t too whiney, but we just didn’t have a good time in Ethiopia.
