Gina's Ethiopia Reflections, Part 2

  After the Tigray trek, we got a lift back to the small city of Adigrat, and saw the same hospitality and friendliness that we saw before the trek.  We even treated ourselves to juice at one of the many garden date spots frequented by locals.  Then came the harrowing bus ride to Axum, which stopped several times along the way to make a donation to the village churches.  The conductor passed around a plastic bag each time, urging passengers to donate.  Since we were finished seeing the tourist sites in Axum, we spent two days trading our warm clothes (no longer needed) for souvenirs, catching up on e-mails, and finding the one swimming pool in town before flying to Lalibela.

We purposely saw Lalibela as one of our last stops, since it is the pride of Ethiopia.  It’s very large clusters of rock-hewn churches built between 1000-1400AD by King Lalibela and others.  Locals think it should be named one of the seven wonders of the world, and rightfully so.  Any visitor to Lalibela will get a unique experience, not just because of the impressive job of building the churches, but because it is still used as a religious sanctuary today by thousands of Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims.  When first hearing about Lalibela, I expected churches perched way up high in a cliff, similar to the churches in the Tigray region or Mesa Verde in Colorado.  When coming upon them, though I was surprised that 1) They were not up in cliffs, but actually dug down from the rock in the ground, so instead of looking up at them, I was looking down at them and 2) There were villages and villagers all over going about their daily business right in the middle of this monument!

Scott and I began our official guided tour the first afternoon, and then met a friend from the Simien Mountains to watch the sunset over the valley below.  On the bus, he had met an ambitious young Ethipian man who was working as a social worker for an HIV prevention and vocational training for female sex workers in the area.  It was refreshing to meet a local who could relate to my work (at least a little bit) in Zambia and wasn’t trying to sell me another tour.

The second day in Lalibela was a feast day called Mehamid Alam, or “Day of the Savior.”  Different feast days are celebrated at different churches in the cluster, and fittingly, this was celebrated in the church dedicated to Jesus.  I woke up at 5:30 to catch some of the celebration, which had been going on since several hours before sunrise.  When I got to the church, I took off my shoes, covered my head with a scarf, and joined the women in alternating between praying at the side altars and spending time bent over, head to the floor.  The women murmured prayers but did not sing or chant.  That was all coming from the men’s side to the left, where deacons and priests in white robes beat huge drums methodically, moved their silver staff bells representing the trinity in unison with the drums, and chanted.  At various points in the service, the chanting and drums and drums died down and various priests came up to the front to read scripture or preach.  At certain points, the entire congregation would stand and bow halfway down at the waist.  People came in out of the church to pray and make their offering: young and old, some children and a few beggars, as well as the well-to-do and a handful of tourists.  The service moved to its own rhythm like it has been doing for thousands of years.

I went back to the hotel to meet up with Scott (who slept in) and have breakfast, and we found our guide for part 2 of the church clusters.  By the time we got back to the churches, around 9am, the large groups of believers had cleared out and were on their way to school and work.  But, a few priests gathered in one of the smaller churches to chant, beat the drums, and pay homage to Mehamid Alam.  We were visiting the northern cluster, which is interconnected by a series of underground caves/tunnel passageways chiseled by hand into the rock.  At one point, we couldn’t see our hands in front of us and had to trust the rock walls and the guide’s chanting in Thanksgiving to guide us to the next church.  So . . . touristy and overpriced . . . yes, but now I see why they say you can’t visit Ethiopia without visiting Lalibela!

The last afternoon in Lalibela, we took a hike up to a viewpoint where we could see the entire town and the tops of some of the churches.  Unlike the hikes we did before that, the children wouldn’t stop pestering us to either give them pens or buy their trinkets.  Great views, but it made me really appreciate the effort made by TEFSA tours to sensitize villagers on appropriate interactions with tourists.

We boarded a plane the next morning and headed to Addis Ababa for what we thought was 4 more nights in the big city.  After many failed attempts at trying to organize a coffee plantation tour with our short amount of time, we decided to give up on that idea and see the highlights of the city with one small excursion to some nearby hot springs to the southeast of the city.  We purposely booked a hotel next door to the prominent jazz club with the hope of catching a few shows, and were disappointed when checking in to hear that the show that night was for a “private party.”  We didn’t find out until two days later by reading in the paper that it was four of the most prominent rock bands in the city and Bono giving a benefit concert!  Well, at least we could say we heard it a little bit from our room next door.

The next day we took a walking excursion, which was a little ambitious considering the street boys and vendors trying to sell us anything from bubble gum to ripped-off maps of Africa.  We found our way via walking and minibus to the Derg museum, which is a recently-opened museum remembering the people who died during Mengistu’s ruthless dictatorship in Ethiopia from 1974-1991.  The museum asked for donations rather than entrance fees, and the person who showed us around was named Member, one of the victims who was imprisoned and tortured in underground for eight years simply for holding up a protest sign during a student march.  Visiting the museum definitely put tears to my eyes and realized the importance of letting the survivors share their stories and art to remind tourists and locals never again.  For the first part of the trip, I sensed extreme pride when Ethiopians talked about their democracy, and after visiting the museum I could see why.

We found what we thought would be a hole-in-the wall local restaurant which turned out to be a popular Italian lunch place for Ethiopian business people and then briefly toured the Addis Ababa museum which reminded me much of the Yakima museum because of its random collections of random things from random donors that don’t know what else to do with their random stuff besides put it in a local museum.  Scott occupied the street vendors for the good part of an hour with his bargaining skills and left with an authentic coffee pot in hand.  Now the challenge is getting it halfway around the world.  Later that evening, we did get to see a really good band, Addis Acoustic Project, at the jazz club.  It was impressive to see so many instruments, including an accordion and a traditional harp-like instrument thrown into the mix with drums, bass, guitar, and clarinet.

Our last little Ethiopian excursion was eye-opening in that we had to get to a bus station entirely on the eastern side of town.  The taxi ride just to get to the station was over five times the price of the bus tickets themselves, and we drove more than an hour on nice highways, terrible pot-holed dirt roads with donkey carts, markets, and industrial areas.  Since we had been staying near the city center, we had been oblivious until that ride to the bus station just how enormous, sprawling, and crazy Addis Ababa actually is.  Once we boarded the bus that looked like it came straight from the 1950’s, we drove at least another hour through the industrial city suburbs before coming to anything even remotely resembling countryside.  There was an older man sitting right in back of me who in English warned me not to put my pack on the floor for fear that “thieves might get it.”  He ended up walking us to the Sodere resort bus in the middle of the bustling city of Adama, also telling us not to eat any raw vegetables and sleep under mosquito nets.  Thanks, but we have been living in Africa for the past 2 1/1 years J.  During lunch, he explained how he used to live in Texas and now has several sons living in the U.S., but came back to Ethiopia to be with his wife.  And then he paid for our lunch!  It was amazing to see Ethiopian hospitality where we least expected it.

Sodere “resort” was definitely more of a cultural experience than a relaxing weekend getaway.  We saw many well-to-do Ethiopian families try as they might to have a picnic without all the monkeys on the grounds snatching their food.  Some were hanging around drinking coffee or chewing chat (a mild stimulant grown in the eastern part of Ethiopia), and there was definitely more of a Muslim influence than in the northern part of the country.  The majority of the guests stayed in large public showers of hot water or the wading pool, leaving the glorious 50-meter hot springs pool open for people who knew how to swim, since it was too deep to touch the bottom.  We took another dip the next morning and boarded another 1950’s bus next to a cute little old lady who has two of her eight children living in America.  Seems to be a trend around here.  Anyway, her English was the best of any older Ethiopian woman I had met, and she was happy to explain how she was a devout Orthodox Christian who went to church every day, and wanted to make absolute sure that I had a good impression of Ethiopia.  I told her I thought it was more developed than Zambia and she was very pleased with that answer.  As we parted, she said she was very sad she didn’t have a gift for me, so gave me a travel pack of Kleenexes.

On what we thought was our last day in Addis, we went to the Ethiopian Airlines office to confirm our flight only to find that it had been cancelled and re-booked for the next day . . . back in early October!  Of course they failed to notify us of this fact.  Oh Africa.  And I thought it was my last day with you!  After a few tears (good thing for those travel Kleenexes), we realized that luckily we had made very few reservations for Thailand and tried to make the most of the last day by catching up on internet and blogs with the extremely slow Africa internet speed.  After plowing through several blocks of more goods-hawkers, I made a short visit to St. Georges church in the piazza, which was like an oasis in the center of the city, with beautiful gardens and people quietly sitting and contemplating life.

We spent the last day soaking in more hot springs at the thermal swimming pool right in Addis Ababa . . . at the Hilton Hotel.  About 7 times the price of Sodere, and definitely a different clientele (and no monkeys!) and the last night seeing one more jazz show, saying goodby to a continent that we had been in continuously for over 28 months.  Goodbye Africa, on to new adventures!