(The story of our adventure through the eastern and northern sides of Africa overland in our Landrover in 2007)
Sunday 12th August 2007 Greenland Hotel, Dessie.
We have been warned that internet peters out a bit further north, so they might not be so up to date in future. We are getting tired of the noise assault on our ears and the noise pollution from the kids who yap and beg, the mosques which wake us up every morning, the orthodox Christian church which wails for hours on end and broadcasts sermons from loudspeakers on top of the churches, the noisy people and the continual traffic. At least further south the people seem to go to sleep at dusk. Here they carry on all night.
Maybe it is the hard day we have had today, because it is physically and emotionally exhausting when you think you are making headway and find yourself in the same city TWICE!!
We left Dessie heading for Lalibele via Woldia and Gashena. The road is difficult as it is being renovated and we had to by-pass the newly constructed bridges of which there are many, two of which are already cracking and one is washed away. 80Km on there were two busses which had tried to pass on a narrow section and nearly went off the bridge on either side, but blocked the road completely. Busses and trucks backed up three abreast for kilometers on either side, and the tow truck couldn’t get there. No problem for the locals, they just sat in the shade making use of the chat availability from the panicky chat transporters, others started to sell the wares they had, others just begged. Nobody took control and tried to clear the road. The tow truck eventually got through and then promptly got stuck itself. That was when we decided to go back to Dessie and take a different route, directly to Gashena. Chat has to be chewed within 24 hours of being picked and the hawkers were panicking that they couldn’t get their large quantities to the market in time, so were running it through the blocked place to transporters on the other side.
What a magnificent pass, similar to Sani. They cultivate (and plant teff here) or graze every inch of the precipitous slopes. This is what Nev imagined Ethiopia to be, along with the desolate hot area. We got 30Km and an hour later, we came across a section which had been washed away so had to turn back to Dessie, so feel really tired. There were 1000s of cattle in the valley grazing, a valley of at least 10Km long.
When Chip and Bessie Turner told us there were ‘wall-to-wall’ people in Tanzania and Kenya they hadn’t got to Ethiopia yet, although Rwanda is even worse than this.
We are staying in a different hotel tonight for only Birr70. It is 7.30pm and the streets are still crowded and the shops are still open.
Saturday 11th August 2007 new Fasika Hotel, Dessie
In Harar the price of meat was as follows: Birr30/Kg for camel, 35 for beef, 40 for goat, 23 for scratch chicken and 38 for ‘farm’ chicken (which is difficult to get).
In Awash we met 2 French people our age who have spent 28 months traveling around mainly Africa on their motor bikes. Quite interesting how we could communicate with neither of us able to speak the other’s language. They don’t explore quite as much as we do though. They had spent 10000Km in three months in South Africa and really loved it.
We left Awash and made our way towards Miele, which is on the road to the border of Djibuti. An excellent road through the middle of the Rift Valley, which means it is low-lying, hot and drier as we traveled north. At first we cried again at the man-made erosion, overgrazing and over stocking. Then drove through the Alleghedi Reserve where there is grass, trees and indicates what the country could or should look like. Then we got to the real Ethiopia of the media. Dry, desolate, hot, rocky with very little ground cover and the odd herd of camels and goats with the notorious Afar tribe, who used to welcome strangers by slaughtering the men and lopping off their testicles as souvenirs.
That doesn’t happen any more, or at least didn’t happen to us.
From Miele the road started to climb out of the rift Valley through spectacularly faulted and tilted rock structures up 1000m, then to Dessie. Dessie is in the mountains in a beautiful setting, but must be the ugliest city we have seen so far with rusty corrugated iron roofs piled right next to each other. We see throughout Ethiopia the many new roofs around as if someone has donated corrugated iron and everyone has fitted a new roof to their houses. Rusty roofs look terrible.
Kids here bark you, you, you, like yappy aggressive dogs.
We stayed the night in the very pleasant New Fasika Hotel for R110Birr.
Friday 10th August 2007, Buffet D’Aouache Hotel, Awash.
We went west on a good gravel road, passing hundreds of donkeys and camels carting firewood and charcoal to Dire Dowa market. The country is getting denuded of all trees leaving only small acacias, which are now being eaten by the goats. The subsequent erosion and desertification leaves us feeling angry, frustrated and helpless with in the first world’s ignorance, misdirects aid, which exacerbates the situation. Locals are planting less edible crops and the amount of chat growing must at least equal the amount of maize planted.
We came across an oasis which had irrigation canals which were half working, but the men were sitting in the shade of a tree, chewing chat.
The road then changed from good to very poor and we were only able to average 70Km/hr for the last 70Km. We went through many dry river beds whose bridges had been washed away (at least 30). They were full of silt and those that had water, looked like thick chocolate, as the water was full of silt.
With 36Km to go to Mieso (the beginning of the tar), following the railway line all the way, there was an old abandoned and broken fort (?) on a hill. The French built the railway to Djibuti from Addis (It isn’t in use from Awash because it is submerged by the expanding Beseke Dam).
We passed a camel caravan loaded with the belongings of a nomadic family. Their mats, semi-circular poles and cloths of their dwellings loaded high on the backs of the camels.
The prickly pear is invading the area.
We arrived in Awash. The first Hotel recommended, the Meridian, no water. Second hotel, a little water. This is Ethiopia.
Thursday 9th August 2007 Ras Hotel – Dire Dawa
We went around the old city of Hara, which is walled, with a guide and found that UNESCO had donated Birr35mil to repave the whole city streets with cobblestones. We also found the wheat donated by America, USAID, selling for Birr250/50Kg. Explanation: corruption. The town had narrow little streets, was clean and neat and painted, all ready for the “New Millenium” in Ethiopia, on 11th Sept. The old town does not have tapped water, and it is all trucked in from 50Km away. There are 37000 people who live in the walled area, 90% are muslems.(1Birr= 80SA cents.)
We passed some lepers in the town, and there is a Leper Institution on the way to Harar.
The French cars which are the taxis in Addis and here in Harar are 30-year old Peugeots 404s. Our guide’s sister is pretending to be a Somali and is in a refugee camp in Kenya. She has one more month to wait, and then can get a green card to work and live in America – clever little thing. We went to the museum and looked at 110-year-old photos of Harar and the surrounds, and very little has changed, from the dress, to the traditional dwellings to the food they eat.
We traveled to Dire Dawa from the highland of Harar we dropped from 2400m to 1100m in a matter of 5Km and the temp rose from 23 to 32 deg C. The terrain changed just as dramatically, from lush cultivated maize and chat to semi desert. The hillsides had been terraced with stones and cultivated sometime in the past, but now all that remains is stones and rocks, with the mountains of topsoil lying as silt in the wadis (dry river beds) below.
Dire Dowa, in a sentence is clean, neat, paved, walled and tree-lined. Dire Dowa is very different from any other Ethiopians city. The streets are also divided down the middle, and although it is the second largest city, it is hard to believe as there are very few people sitting around idle. The main streets are tarred, and the side streets are cobbled. They have recently built neat stone houses right up the mountainside behind the city. We stayed at the Ras Hotel, and did our washing in the bathroom. In the dry air it was bone dry overnight. Recommended Hotel. Although it is semi desert, it rained, as August is the wettest month getting an average of 130ml in that month.
Heille Sellase, an emperor of Ethiopia, was called at birth Ras Tefare. Hence the Rasteferian following from Jamaica whose 8year drought was broken the minute he touched Jamaican soil, or so the legend goes.
Wednesday 8th August 2007 Ras Hotel – Harar
It was getting a bit boring traveling through fertile valley after fertile valley, and suddenly 130Km from Addis we came to drier Karoo type and camels. Then we came across volcanic cones and chunky sharp-edged black volcanic rocks the size of a 20l drum strewn around 5m thick with hardly anything growing on them near Metahara. There were typical volcanic mountains all around and the roads were made of the volcanic ash. This road is tar and in excellent condition. We could have sped along but for the Isuzu haulage trucks. Here the Amharic word on the back of the truck looks like gigwil, so that is what we have nicknamed these trucks. We proceeded up into the mountains to over 2100m, and followed the windy road along the ridge of the mountain with spectacular views on both sides as far as the eye can see. It is heavily populated with village after village and subsistence farmers cultivating to the top of the hills all around. There is a lot of erosion and by the look of the crops (sorghum, maize, chat) the soils look tired.
As we neared Harar more and more chat was grown. Chat is a small bush. If you chew the leaves, swallow the juice and spit out the cud, it gives a high like dagga and the subsequent down with accompanying aggression. Just as addictive, and legal here. A man was walking totally naked through one village chewing his chat and totally zonked out. The saying is that the only fast thing in Jijiga is the chat truck, because chat has to be chewed very fresh and the bulk of the crop is exported by plane to Saudi Arabia.
One question puzzles us. Can agricultural production be increased here, and if so, how? Our gut feel is that commercial Agriculture has economies of scale and is more efficient than subsistence farming. But will it solve the problem of starvation in Ethiopia?
We went to see the famous ‘hyena man’ outside the walled town of old Harar. He has been feeding the hyenas all his life, and his father before him. These are wild hyenas which have been habituated to humans. They clean up around the abattoir and all around the city at night. This man calls them, and feeds them with meat held on a stick between his teeth. There were 20 spotted hyenas there and all behaved like domestic dogs. However they were timid, and the locals claim that they never attack people or domestic livestock or pets because there is always enough food around for them to scavenge.
Tuesday 7th August 2007 Mojo – Hotel Soloman
Baro Hotel last night was awful. No water because Addis had run out and it was like a rabbit warren. We collected our Sudanese visa and went to meet the others. They had decided not to go to Sudan at this time, nor to Harar, but to do the northern circuit and to decide again when back in Addis. So we said our goodbyes and now we are on our own.
The computer still doesn’t work, so I will take it home and hope Brian can recover the data.
We headed east for Harar through 30Km of industrial area, very slowly in heavy traffic. This is the main road to Djibouti and the only available port since Eritrea is closed to Ethiopia and they are at war with Somalia. In Addis there are many old VW Beetles, some in good condition. The taxis are all a French make all in excess of 30 years old. All painted blue at the bottom and white at the top.
We went through flat valley after flat valley and arrived at Mojo. The room was surprisingly nice. Here in Ethiopia the bathrooms consist of a basin, toilet (often without a seat), a shower (never enclosed) with a drainage hole in the middle of the room, and no goose-necks to keep out the smell. There is always a basket for all paper (ALL paper) and a bucket with jug to flush as water is unreliable, as is the electricity.
The Hotel Soloman has the most beautiful flowering garden we have seen for months.