Ethiopia

You know how when people visit a certain place, they sometimes say, “I felt like I stepped back in time”? Well, when we visited Ethiopia we literally did step back in time because Ethiopia is the only country in the world that still follows the Julian Calendar as opposed to the Gregorian Calendar, which means they are officially 7 and a ½ years and 6hrs behind the rest of the world. It’s no joke, you have to make sure, when making plans with a local, that you ask whether you are meeting at 2pm local time or farenji (foreigner) time because they probably mean 8pm. It’s very odd, but then again Ethiopia seems to have spent their entire history choosing the road less traveled.















We arrived in the Capitol of Addis Ababa after an amazing trip to Egypt, unfortunately though, Lynn had just heard that her grandmother had passed away so the next day she flew to Scotland while I hopped a flight to Gondar in the Ethiopian Highlands. Just before we left Egypt I began reading a new book called ‘The Chains of Heaven: an Ethiopian Romance’ by Philip Marsden, which is an extraordinary account of how he walked from the famous city of Lalibela to the even more famous city of Aksum. Along the way he enjoyed many tales from locals and visited more than thirty monasteries, of which Ethiopia is famous for. Ethiopia actually has over 130 monasteries each one distinct in its own way. In Lalibela they are carved right into the mountains and in other places they are perched high on cliff tops that require hand over hand climbing of chains or ropes with no safety mechanisms and hundreds of feet of nothing but air below, hence the name of the book. I did not make it to Lalibela or the mountain top monasteries, but I was able to visit several monasteries in Gondar and on the Islands of Lake Tana some of which were built in the 13th century and still have original paintings inside that look like they were just painted.


















I think the combination of being away from a big city, reading this book and visiting monasteries gave me a unique perspective of how genuinely faithful Ethiopians are to their respective religions, especially the Christians who make up 45% of the population. Being someone quite cynical of religious faith, I found it interesting that I was very much aware of their devoutness even the subtleties of it, such as a priest blessing random people on the street as he walks to the store. And, although I am a cynic, at the same time, I love history and the history of Christianity in Ethiopia is fascinating.


















Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in the early 4th century right around the time Constantine had declared the Roman Empire to be Christian. The powerful Aksumite Kingdom took to it right away and it became the state religion. Here is where things begin to differ from the rest of the religious world, because as Europe and the Middle East fought religious wars for the next 1000yrs, Ethiopia isolated itself and practiced its own form of Orthodox Christianity for a millennium. One ruler, who was clearly a bit crazy, even introduced the branding of crosses on peoples foreheads and wrists and to this day certain groups of faithful still tattoo crosses on their foreheads and wrists using ash from sacred fires. The biggest celebration in Ethiopia is called Timkat and is celebrated every January 19th. This wildly popular festival commemorates the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In every city, every church elects a group of priests to guide the chosen monk, who carries a piece of the Ark of the Covenant on his head, on a long procession typically to some pool of water where the entire town parties all night and then, at dawn, jumps in the water to baptize themselves. The next day they proceed back to their respective churches. I was able to witness this celebration in the tiny village of Gorgora where they only have one church and, hence, only one parade, but that allowed me to get an up close and personal introduction to this great event.

















I spent a day and a half in Gondar visiting some old ruins and monasteries and then took a short drive to the beginning of the Simien Mts. to see some gorgeous views and the famous Gelada baboons before heading south to Gorgora on the north shore of Lake Tana (refer to previous blog entry for bus ride story). My plan was to check this place out for a day or two and then continue south to Bahir Dar, but I had missed the weeks only boat and was not about to get on another bus just yet. I hired a boat to visit some monasteries on the local islands. The monasteries were built in the 16th century and some of the monks who live there have been on the islands for 30-40 years. They subsist by growing their own food and fishing and I was able to sit down with some of them and eat injera while they boiled pumpkins for a later meal. On my second day I was lucky to meet a guy from Addis who turned out to be a building contractor working on a traveler’s lodge being built by a Dutch couple about a 20min walk down the coast. We chatted for a while and then he asked if I wanted to see the jobsite so we walked over to Tim and Kim’s Village.

All aboard the TB express!

Now I’m not saying that I have tuberculosis, but if it turns out that I do sometime in the near future, then it was definitely from this bus ride.

My intention was to simply mention my bus ride from Gondar to Gorgora as part of my larger story of my trip to the Ethiopian Highlands, but the spectacle that ensued became a story all its own. Our often handy, but sometimes horribly mistaken, Lonely Planet said that the 67km bus ride to Gorgora, on Lake Tana, was a cheap 1.5hr trip which sounded great so off I went. I arrived at the bus station and was directed to the bus headed to Gorgora. I was surprised to find quite a few open seats and for a fleeting moment thought I might get to ride a bus in relative comfort for a change, but in true African fashion, my fleeting moment was snatched from me as we were moved to a smaller bus. This bus, of course, filled up over the next hour and when we finally departed we had already consumed the Lonely Planet’s hour and a half. It still was not too bad as we headed off because we were only at full capacity and I had the very back seat next to a large window that I could keep open. However, as soon as we cleared Gondar we made our first stop to load on extra people. I thought it was a joke, that first crowd of people who ran up to the bus, but they all managed to cram on and my big window proceeded to be the entry and exit point for all newcomers’ stuff including bags of clothes, food, jerrycans, and very small children. For the next four hours I watched a scarily overloaded bus drop some people off but always manage replace them with even more people as half the goods in Ethiopia moved across my lap and, without fail, at every stop the folks who needed to get off would be all the way in the back of the bus with me. After more than five hours, having devoured an entire stalk of sugarcane and watched 3 million Ethiopians, many whom were coughing and hacking, get on and off the bus, I was literally the last person to disembark. My day ended well, though, as I was able to sit back with a cold beer, a big plate of goat & injera, a TV airing the BBC news and slowly digest another day in Africa.

Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor

After surviving our initial contact with the Nile we hopped a flight to Cairo, the biggest city in Africa. Unfortunately, we had to endure a brutal 10hr. overnight layover in Addis Ababa and even though the good folks at Ethiopian Airlines had 10hrs. to make sure our bags were on the right plane, we still showed up in Cairo sans luggage. The whole luggage debacle was actually a very strange sort of Twilight Zone situation that Lynn and I have yet to figure out. We showed up on a full flight of about 150 people, made it through immigration and bought our visas in under ten minutes (which is a miracle in itself) and then went straight to the baggage carousel. While Lynn went to the bathroom I saw one woman from our flight walk up and take the one bag that was on the non-moving carousel. Aside from her, not one other passenger from our flight was anywhere to be seen. We stood there for 15-20 minutes hoping people and bags would show up, but neither ever did. We finally asked for help and while the guy ran around trying to locate our bags, I couldn’t shake that mysterious feeling and kept pestering him as to where the hell all the other passengers from our flight went. His limited English left it a mystery and we, thankfully, received our fully intact bags about 12hrs later. I have concluded that the other 147 passengers from the flight are either still missing or they were all, coincidentally, very light packers.

We were very lucky to be able to have a place to stay in Cairo with my friend Kathi who is a math professor doing a 2yr stint at the American University in Cairo. She had joined us down in Uganda for Christmas and was now poised to show us around her part of Africa. Cairo is worlds away from the Africa that Lynn and I know and, in fact, the more reading I do the more I come across references of the real Africa, Nubian Africa, beginning with or south of Khartoum, Sudan. Cairo reminded me of New York City, minus the kraut dogs, much..much cheaper and full of Mosques. It’s a city of 12 million people deftly dodging 12 million taxis while presenting an impressive infrastructure and first rate manners and customer service. I am now keenly aware of customer service because, sadly, the rest of the African service industry, as far as we have encountered, tends to eagerly ignore or dismiss you as a nuisance to their goal of becoming the champions of laziness.

Our first day in Cairo we visited the overwhelmingly artifact filled Egypt Museum where we witnessed the famous mummies of the Pharaohs and their Queens, but the highlight of the day was perusing the Khan al-Khalili bazaar that evening in Islamic Cairo where traders have conducted business continuously for the last 1500 years! The buildings that the bazaar weaves its way through are astounding works of art.



















The next day we went to Giza to see the Pyramids & Sphinx. Kathi had set us up with a guide for a half day tour which turned out to be a great idea. Tamer was a well educated, budding Egyptologist and practicing Christian which made for some very interesting discussions. He explained to us his ongoing Masters Thesis which involved a discrepancy between the Bible and the Koran and how he was trying very hard to conduct unbiased research so it was amusing when Lynn asked him which book was correct and he immediately said, “Well, of course, the Koran is wrong”. His lack of bias was as clear as the Nile waters. He was a mountain of information though and also just a really nice guy as he treated us to lunch and sugarcane juice (my new favorite drink) after the tour. The Pyramids were, of course, phenomenal as was the Sphinx and I was a truly proud American to see that KFC and Pizza Hut shared my enthusiasm for history by setting up shop right in front of the Sphinx…almost as great as the Starbucks in the Forbidden City. Seriously, these monuments along with all the ruins we saw in Luxor are so ridiculously enormous and aesthetically pleasing it makes you wonder if ancient Egyptians were actually freakishly giant, exceptionally skilled artisans who could carry 5 ton stones on their backs. Of course, the 5’3” mummies at the museum totally contradict that theory, but who knows, maybe you shrink when you’re mummified.


















Lynn and I took the train to Alexandria for a short 24hr trip. The shortness of the trip was a shame as Alexandria was the quaintest city of 4 million people I have ever visited. Our hotel overlooked the waters of the east harbor and our taxis scraped side mirrors as they wound us around the narrow streets of this famous city. Alexandria is famous for many reasons, but mostly because it was home to the ancient Alexandria Library which it is said, at its height around 1st century BC, contained all the known literature in the world. Today there is a modern library in its place that sets a standard for libraries that I think will never again be matched…unless, of course, those freakishly giant Egyptians reappear and then all bet are off. We took the bus back to Cairo, picked up Kathi and flew to Luxor.














Luxor is not only home to the Valley of the Kings, but also to Karnak and several other dramatically beautiful temples. We chose, what I feel is the best way to see all these spectacular sites, to rent bikes for the day. We immediately jump on any chance to avoid mingling with typical tourists and a typical tourist would never dream of breaking a sweat or getting too dirty. For example, the Valley of the Kings has incorporated six-car golf cart trains to haul lazy tourists the apparently unbearable distance of 500yds from the ticket office to the beginning of the tombs.



















Anyways, bikes are definitely the way to see the west bank of the Nile because, unlike the more built up east bank, the west bank still provides a sense of what the area looked like 2-3 thousand years ago. It only takes five minutes to clear the town and soon you are riding past cultivated fields and sheppard’s tending their goats. Within 15min you are treated to your first massive monument, the Colossi of Memnon, thousands of years old and just sitting next to the road seemingly inviting you to continue on to the tombs in the Valley of the Kings deep in the distant mountain. Being able to descend into the tombs in the valley is very impressive, but what was even more impressive to me, however sad and inevitable it may be, was how the ancient tomb robbers were able to burrow themselves into these “impenetrable”, grand burial chambers and pilfer a majority of the treasures. In the end I left Egypt awestruck by the brilliance of the engineers, laborers, and skilled artisans of the time and, once again, humbled by the fact that I was lucky enough to witness more of history’s momentous achievements.

White-Water Swimming???

Because you can’t really call it white-water rafting when your raft flips in every rapid and the crew emerges from the other side having to swim back to the raft. It reminds me of the days before my wife taught me how to really surf when I would tell friends that I had just gone “surfing”, but technically what I had actually done was gone paddling, falling and swimming for several hours.
Even though we did not professionally navigate the rapids on this day, we still had an amazing time with a great group of people, although, it was a bit ironic that one of the guys in our crew was a less than confident swimmer. In the end his timidity convinced him and the other two girls to walk around the last rapid of the day leaving me, Lynn and one other guy to forge the turbulent waters on our own. Witnesses from the shore said we went into the enormous rapid cleanly, but then our raft bent in half sending us flying in all directions and so we finished the day swimming just as we had started it, but had a great time nonetheless.

Winter break

When Lynn and I began the planning for our big three week winter vacation we did not purposely use the Nile River as a theme, but when you live in the vicinity of the longest river on earth, it somehow creeps in to your plans anyway. We chose to visit Egypt to satiate my hunger for history and we chose the Ethiopian Highlands to quench Lynn’s desire for remote, natural beauty.
About two weeks before the trip Lynn had the brilliant idea that since we were flying to Egypt out of Entebbe, we might as well go a day or two early and raft the Nile in Jinja. Now, most people have heard that the Nile is the world’s longest river and that it is somewhere in Africa, but many might not know that there are actually two Nile Rivers, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which merge into one giant river in the city of Khartoum before continuing north to the Mediterranean Sea. The source of the White Nile is in Jinja at the north end of Lake Victoria in Uganda, while the source of the Blue Nile is Lake Tana in Northern Ethiopia whose waters I am listening to lap against the rocks as I lay in my tent writing this passage. So even though we did not plan it this way, our trip has allowed us to start at the source of the White Nile, visit the mouth of the Nile in Alexandria and end at the source of the Blue Nile, something I feel not many people have done in a single trip.
Sadly, however, Lynn’s Grandmother passed away while we were in Alexandria so Lynn flew to Scotland to attend the funeral leaving me to explore Ethiopia on my own.

Please stay tuned for the chronicles of Lynn and Danny’s excellent Nile adventure!

Rafting, pyramids and monasteries

After a busy holiday period, we finally set off on January 4th for our much anticipated trip- Kampala (embarrassingly my first trip to the capital in 5 months!), Egypt and Ethiopia.
We took the bus from Mbarara to Kampala, the highlight of which was the pharm sales rep who junmped on on the outskirts of Kampala and gave us a thrilling 30 minute lecture about his deworming medicine in a flowery combination of English, Runyankole and Luganda. It worked. He sold about 10 packages of overpriced anti-helminthic meds.
We arrived at the bustling bus station, and were greeted by a crowd of energetic taxi drivers- even before the bus stopped moving. After picking the closest driver who wuold charge us a reasonable price, we headed off for the Red Chili hostel in a quiet neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. The following morning we were picked up and taken to Jinja- the town at the head of the River Nile and the site of some incredible, world-class, white-water rafting. The experience was absolutely awesome. While there were about 20 of us rafting that day, we were lucky enough to be in a boat with 4 other really interesting people: a Candadian who was teaching for a year outside of Masaka, her sister, and 2 Indian soldiers who were on leave from the UN peacekeeping force in the DRC- having been deployed following the CNDP's approach on Goma 2 months ago. It was a really fun day, about half of which we spent in the water. The highlight was the last rapid- a grade 5 which looked too daunting for half the boat, so Danny, myself and one of the Indian soldiers braved alone. The best description I heard from the banks afterwards was that our boat launched vertically then made a complete taco. Awesome. I came up about 40ft downstream and spent much of the time at the barbecue later trying to get the Nile out of my sinuses... The barbecue was delicious and the 2 large beers went down well before we jumped back on the shuttle to Kampala.
The next morning we caught a ride to the airport with another Red Chili guest (an interesting woman from Ireland who had spent most of her adult life abroad running preschools in places like Jordan, Saudi Arabia and now in Azerbaijan). I can't bear to write about the journey from Entebbe to Cairo because it brings back memories of Addis Airport... Suffice to say that on this evening I spend the first 10 of about 30 hours spent waiting in the departure terminal over the next 3 weeks!

Queen Elizabeth National Park

Having taken my friend Kathi to the park last week, both Lynn and I have now visited this beautiful place and wanted to show you all some pictures. We are yet to see lions, but will keep trying.