Country Road (Ethiopia)

Being back in Africa is both refreshing and frustrating.  We know we’ll have some difficulties with technology and banking (which is why it has taken so long for us to post the last few blogs), but things will also be more authentic, innocent and in the case of the extremely observant Orthodox Ethiopia, pious.

For the next week or so we will be following their “historical” route, but we first got some introductory tribal and cultural background at the Ethnological Museum in the Capital, Addis Ababa, housed in the ex-palace of Haile Selassie (now part of the University grounds).  We also visited the National Museum whose pride and joy is “Lucy” - the 2 million year-old homo-erectus anthropological link to today’s humans found in the desert of the rift valley.

Bahar Dar is our first stop, situated on the south shore of Lake Tana.  A couple of hours boat ride allows for a visit to the source of the Blue Nile as well as a series of 17^th Century island monasteries.  These cloistered enclaves are plastered with homage paintings of new and old testament parables although the style looks more caricature in nature.  Despite the testaments of the devout, based on the vivid colours, these have obviously been retouched more than a few times over the centuries.

 

We decided to test the local intercity bus system and caught the 8am mini-bus for the 4 hour journey to Gondar.  If you want to get the full flavor of rural life, this is where the rubber hits the road – literally.  Villages dot the landscape adjacent to the highway, often atop steep cliffs or down precipitous valley paths.  It must be difficult to traverse since so many people just seem to be lying about perilously close to the side of the highway looking spent.  In the distance we could see herding dogs and boy shepherds shorter than their sheep.  At one point we stopped, seemingly for one of the passengers to disembark, but she simply stopped to shop for some vegetables and returned to the bus (what service)!  After a series of swerves to avoid dead animals in the roadway, we slowed for a more novel obstacle, where two men with colourful upside down umbrellas approached from both sides of the vehicle.  We were perplexed until folks on the bus slid open their windows and tossed coins into the convenient alms receptacles being collected for the construction of a new local church (who needs toll booths or Easypass?).

Gondar has been described as the Camelot of Africa (not sure by who other than Ethiopian Tourism) owing to the series of medieval castles, that would seem more at home on an English Moor. 

We travelled a few kilometers out if town to visit a Fellasha (native Black Jews) village and encountered only a few abandoned structures (synagogue, cemetery) with a caretaker selling crucifix necklaces and other Christian paraphernalia.  Perplexed, we later learned that after much domestic discrimination, almost all Ethiopian Fellashas had been given permission to immigrate to Israel over the last number of years.

Amazing what a roll of Canadian Nickels Gets you as a following

Gondar is also a convenient gateway to the Simien Mountains where we hope to go trekking for a few days.