Four years ago I was living in Kenya and my favourite restaurant was an Ethiopian joint called Habesha’s. While we gorged ourselves on shiro wot, an expat friend of ours would gush about Ethiopia. Everything about Ethiopia sounded incredible and I was dead set on seeing it for myself. But life got in the way and I found myself in the UK and then South Africa for work.
Earlier this year I left the same job I placed Ethiopia on the back burner for. Even though I was in gorgeous Cape Town, the work I was doing was repetitive and unrewarding. It seemed little more than a rubber-stamping procedure and its resource heaviness was at odds with the environmental ideals that led to becoming a solar engineer in the first place. Admittedly my life was far removed from those environmental ideals and accounted to an accumulation of possessions. Most of all, my life lacked vitality.
I wrote a post early on about life being better as a visitor; I left out the hidden agenda behind travelling to come alive again. So in a way I decided to travel back in time in drips and drabs, to arrive at a place a former version of myself would approve of. A life more synchronised to a sustainable future. And I decided to go back in time just a little to visit the country I’d put on hold four years ago. All with the support of Andrew.
We occasionally get asked asked Why Ethiopia? Why is it your destination or turn around point? I mention the mystique of rock-hewn churches, the delicious food and the fascinating seemingly hybrid culture of Middle Eastern African that really is its own. As well as some boring details about not being able to travel much further because of the prohibitive Carnet de Passage 100% of the car value deposit for foreign vehicle owners. I’ve never mentioned the trip essentially revolved around being in Ethiopia because it symbolised revisiting old dreams big and small, since it is a rather personal topic.
Now if someone asked Why Ethiopia? I would tell them: Because Ethiopia is out of this world.
Venting sulphur springs in the Danakil Depression
The most visually arresting part of Ethiopia is the Danakil Depression, a desert near the Eritrean border which has the reputation of being the hottest place on Earth. Prior to visiting several Ethiopians who work in tourism told us, “If you want to go to Mars, go to Danakil”. It’s a surreal place. The desert is as flat as injeera, and it is mostly covered by a salt pan occasionally interrupted by salt lakes, sulphur springs, a hill or volcano. While the technicolour sulphur springs were the most dramatic landscape with frothing toxic pools, sulphur vents and remarkably colourful slabs of rock salt– it was the salt mountains that gave me that eerie sensation of being somewhere otherworldly. In an expanse as flat as a pancake to come across these fantastically eroded towers of salt, complete with caves and delicate accordion-ridged valleys. In the distance salt laden camel caravans pad by to remind you it is Earth.
Salt towers of Danakil
We met a lovely young Ethiopian man, Dawit, during our tour of the Danakil Depression. The afternoon before our hike up the Erte Ale volcano we had some time to kill, waiting for the 42°C heat to dissipate sufficiently to start walking, so Dawit generously used his phone battery to play hip hop tunes and draw our attention away from our disintegration. At one point he asked, ‘Sam, what does “I’m freaking out!” mean?’ I responded, ‘It’s like, “I can’t believe this is happening! This can’t be real!” A few hours later we were at the Erte Ale crater watching the lava lake churn itself relentlessly, its lava columns and bubbles bursting left right and centre and sending up the occasional shower of cinders or obsidian bobbles or hairs of glass. We were watching the earth digest itself and spit itself out again while a gleeful Dawit yelled out, “I’m freaking out! I’m really freaking out!”
The lava lake in Erte Ale's crater
The Erte Ale volcano is hands down the highlight of our trip in terms of natural spectaculary. But it was actually the man-made churches of Lalibela that left me dumbfounded. I thought of Dawit as I went about the rock-hewn monolithic marvels, completely freaking out.
It was sheer insanity. They cut trenches down into bedrock, some 12m deep, a few tiny windows at the top of the future building were carved out. Through these tiny windows they excavated the entire interior of the church until they got to the space where the door was supposed to be. Then they created the door. Those tiny bottom windows seemed to be purely architectural and in some churches they let the light in through ornate stone patterns. All still from the same piece of rock. In my favourite church, Bet Maryam (St Mary’s Church) there was an internal mezzanine which had its own tiny windows through which its interior was excavated through. It was sublime. We went around mouths agape with the odd outcry of disbelief as another detail was revealed.
Lalibela's Bet Giorgis (St George's church)
Ethiopia is the most religious society I’ve visited and it’s not just the abundance of churches, or the devout inspiration behind carving them into mountains and situating them spectacularly on cliffs that is cause to think this (some photos of these are in the Gallery). The practice of religious principles, particularly of helping others, is everywhere. A woman with a young baby on our bus couldn’t pay for her ticket so a collection was passed around and everyone else paid for her fare. Ethiopians give to beggars and to children in the countryside. There is abject poverty but low incidence of crime and the trust between strangers is palpable. While Christianity is the dominant religion there is a sizeable population of Muslims, 35%, but the sense of community transcends religion (which shouldn’t be surprising but there are my prejudices, out in the open). It’s a culturally intense country and much of its charm lies in the cohesiveness of the society and the support they provide each other.
Admittedly we only travelled the north of Ethiopia and can’t comment for the three quarters of the country we didn’t visit but an Ethiopian man we met in Addis from the western region also thinks the strong sense of community is nation wide and isn’t tribal or parochial or religious. We met Gital on our first day in the country when we were trying to find our way to a bus ticket office. We were asking some security guards where the office was and Gital overhead the conversation on the way to the bank the guards were guarding. No problem, he said, it’s on my way so I’ll take you there. The guards also slipped me a piece of paper with the destination in Amharic just in case. Gital took us the minibus stop, got on the bus with us, paid for the bus and escorted us to the ticket office to make sure we got the right tickets. Before going back to work he asked us to call him when we came back to Addis.
We did call him and we had a very happy reunion over a Sunday of eating and drinking. Getau took us on a personalised tour of Addis showing us the best Ethiopian (Finfine), the St George brewery and its warehouse pub (50cent beer, anyone?) and introduced us to doulet, the Ethiopian equivalent of haggis served with local cottage cheese. It was delicious. Despite a bit of a language barrier we showed each other bits and pieces of our lives through photos and generally had a great time. It was a special bout of hospitality that is sadly out of place in Australian culture. It wasn’t only Getau who showered us with welcome, it was also the middle-aged man who stepped in when we were getting hassled and over-charged by touts. The ambassador on each bus who translated the Amharic instructions into English for us. The farmer who invited us into his home when we were lost. While the sights and historical attractions of the North were the focus of this trip, and I could go on and on about their merits, I think I found what I was looking for in the random kindnesses of strangers.
