The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  Elegance of a different kind came 170 miles (273kms) north in the Cedarberg Mountains. I could not fault the billing of Bushmans Kloof as a ‘wilderness retreat’ but any suggestion of a vigorous regime of devotion and a diet of gruel should be immediately dismissed. This was a retreat from humdrum life and harassing schedules. Here was pampering on an industrial scale, comfort in voluptuous proportions and attentiveness where just a blink attracted staff to your elbow. I exaggerate only a little but do so to emphasise my minority view that excessive luxury in a natural environment are uncomfortable partners. Nevertheless, there was a waiting list of those whose idea of wilderness came with down feathers, starlit Jacuzzis and celebrity chefs (whoever they are). The guests seemed to come in two sizes, petite and gross; whether these two sizes cohabited elsewhere was not for me to ask, but it made for spicy conversation.

  Taking a break from another round of signature dishes, we headed off to visit the Moravian Mission at Wuppertal – an hour’s drive over a couple of craggy passes and across a valley verdant with peaches and almonds. At the end of the road, shaded by huge and ancient trees and watered by a wide stream, stood 20 or so single-storied, thatched, whitewashed, stone built cottages that lay along the lower contour of a little valley. This being Sunday, there was no work on the vegetable plots or sheep pens nor drying of onions or tying in of vines. This was the Lord’s Day and little groups of the coloured community were dressed in floral dresses and straw hats or suits, ties and felt hats. They clutched their Afrikaans bibles and after paying their respects on bended knee to departed friends and relatives at the gate of the cemetery, they dusted off their clothes and entered their church – 1858, gabled, simple, wood-lined and cared for.

  Staff at Bushman’s did not have Wuppertal on their suggested itineraries and with good reason; innocent fundamentalism could not be allowed to prick the conscience or kick the bum of extravagance. Who knows, guests might return wanting only bread and cheese and a glass of water.

  In the rush-hour traffic en route to the airport, buses and minivans were crammed with black faces, older cars with Indians or Coloureds and new cars with Whites. In our travels across the country we had been cushioned from political reality, the struggle of daily living that the black majority had to endure and distanced from conversation with any colour other than white. We did not visit a black township nor stoop through the door of a Zulu home. South Africa gives the privileged white population an uncomfortable conscience but looking at our fellow travellers, they all seemed reasonably content to be sharing the same road, chatting on the buses or, in the shiniest cars, calling from mobiles. Each may occupy their own band of The Rainbow Nation but, at last, at long last, most seemed to have a voice that was heard and a dignified place in a unified and prospering country – so far.

  Ethiopia II

  December 2006

  ‘If you come to a fork in the road, take it’ – Yogi Berra

  Bradt puts it concisely:

  ‘South Omo is a remote zone tucked against the Sudanese and Kenyan borders where a dozen or more ethnic groups live and decorate themselves in a manner that scarcely acknowledges the twentieth century. Travel is as tough as it gets: erratic and bumpy transport, lousy accommodation and indifferent food. Around Mago National Park, the black cotton soil is treacherously sticky and often becomes impassable after significant rainfall.’

  I was going after the heaviest rainfall in living memory.

  The airport bank was closed so a suburban bank was needed to obtain Ethiopian birr. I had expected that $100 notes would have been snatched out of my hand in gratitude, possibly the manager would have shaken my hand. I was mistaken. Of the six banks we tried, only one was prepared to consider foreign exchange. Outside each bank was a guard to frisk customers; some had a rifle which was handled with alarming casualness although the guards would in any case have been more adept at wielding it as a club. Most wore an attempt at a uniform, if that is what you call a matching jacket and trousers, and one had a hat that said ‘Ritz’ on the brim. Inside, customers sat patiently on benches in orderly rows clasping a numbered metal token. Foreign exchange, where it was transacted, was not so ordered. First, the dollar bill was minutely examined for tears, held to the light for a check on watermarks and its issue date and the number was noted (a pre-1996 bill is unchangeable). It was intended to be fed into a dusty machine that shone an ultraviolet light but the machine’s cord was too short so it was taken to a teller’s booth but the booth was locked, and to authorise it to be unlocked required an official to sign a form and pass it to another for counter signature. Once this procedure was completed and the $100 notes accepted as genuine they went slowly down a line of other officials who, with another form, each added a signature. The last one examined my passport, added his own scribble and then it was taken to the teller’s booth. But the teller’s booth had been locked…! Throughout this charade, Melkanu (more of him in a moment) was magnificent. He shouted, waved his briefcase, his jacket and his arms, drummed the counter and urgently tapped his watch as though his express train was already hooting. None of this had the slightest effect. I stuffed the wads of notes into my pocket like a bookie at a northern race meeting and ran out past the guard – one saluted. Changing dollars at Chipping Norton post office was going to be tame stuff in the future.

  Melkanu was a weasel. His arms swirled, his hands fluttered and his fingers twitched. Agile on his feet and quick in mind, he scurried around generous with his smiles and courtesy and anxious to inform. “These are pelicans, they eat fish.” I hoped this enthusiasm could be tamed before I grew weary of it. His English was good but his pronunciation was obscure and his accentuation eccentric. Teckle, my driver, was older, larger, slower and steadier and seemed to be the only driver obeying the rules of the road. They would make a good team – provided they did not swap jobs.

  Passing down an avenue of pepper trees towards Nazaret, we stopped at Dreamland, an unlikely lump of breeze blocks painted in two shades of knicker pink overlooking a grey crater lake. A Chinese man in a neatly pressed blue suit was busy negotiating with earnest Ethiopian businessmen. With smiles all round, they stepped into the dusty dirt street; another road to be built perhaps, another factory estate developed. Chinese money is now reaching into some small and remote corners.

  My hotel dining room had a blaring television and seven unlaid tables. On a wall was an unframed print of an Edwardian lady in a ball gown who was either scratching her left ear or coyly shielding her face and looking uncannily as though she had just taken a call on her mobile phone. As I was to learn later, this is what all dining rooms look like. In the gloaming of a 25 watt bulb I contemplated the menu. ‘Fryd fish. Fryd stake. Fryd veal (this was clearly a lie). Fryd liver.’ I risked the fish with a ‘mixt saled’. The starter of onion soup turned out to be a powerful brew composed uniquely of garlic: friendships would be scarce for a day or two. The local beer was St Georges and had a label of a fully-armoured, mounted medieval knight spearing a crocodile. As I tried to write up my journal in the dim light the waiter asked what I was writing. I replied, “The dinner is delicious and is served by an expert waiter.” Not a muscle of his face moved and he slouched away. I slouched away too, leaving the room as mournful as I had found it.

  I have two words to offer on Ethiopian food: ‘Eat spaghetti’. I ate the best food available and it was somewhere between awful and inedible. The meat would have soled shoes; the fish was overcooked, overbattered and always tilapia and vegetables were boiled – just. Ethiopians eat injera. To the uninitiated this rolled up, blotchy, grey, foam rubber mat can present a problem; do you put it under your plate, on your lap, clean your shoes with it, clean the floor with it or has it just cleaned the floor? It tastes as it looks, horrible. If you were an Ethiopian, you would unroll it, tear off a chunk with your right hand, scoop up some sauce or plunge it into a greasy stew so that it becomes a squashy mess, stuff it in your mouth with an urgency that suggests that the next meal may not be on time an
d then splutter half of it out as conversation continues uninterrupted. It is not a pleasant sight.

  But amid mud, squalor and the detritus of a people careless of neighbourhood and with poor eating habits, the Ethiopian values the cleanliness of his shoes and his vehicle above all else. Shoeshine boys squat at every street corner equipped with a tub of water and a selection of jumbo sized tins of Kiwi polish. It is a competitive market but a brisk one. If shoes are not muddy, they are dusty and shiny black leather commands respect. Lorries, minivans, pickups and rusty wrecks are driven axle deep into rivers and lake shores to where the Ethiopian carwash is a dozen boys with empty tins and bare hands. In the midst of the inefficiency, the effort of daily life and the inability to maintain the simplest of equipment, there is universal optimism and a touching wish for friendship. Ragged fellow citizens will be greeted with the same warmth as a neat and clean farangi. To a starchy Englishman this is awkward rather than endearing (Ethiopians are embarrass ingly tactile) but cast aside national characteristics and there are warm hearts to be found everywhere.

  The time, as well as the day itself, puts the country somewhat at a disadvantage in any dialogue with rest of the world. Adhering to the Julian calendar, it persists in having thirteen months in each year and is seven months and eight days behind the rest of the world. The day is reckoned in 12 hour cycles so that on a daily basis it is six hours ahead of the rest of the world – breakfast is at 12 o’clock and lunch at 7 o’clock. But none of this matters much as no one has a watch.

  Swaynes Hotel at Arba Minch sits on the edge of a forested escarpment looking out over the Bridge of Heaven – a hilly division between the two largest lakes in Ethiopia, Abaya and Chamo. Behind the lakes were three ranges of high hills, each higher as they receded and each a paler shade of violet. Thick tree cover serrated their silhouettes and to the south the growl of thunder was momentarily trapped in these enclosing hills before it ricocheted off the etched surface of the lake. A flock of red-billed quelea, hunting for seeds in the grass, fled up and away to safety but pied crows in the palms dropped to the ground. The rain fell like bath-waste. For miles around the roads became rivers, the desert a flood and every mountain a cataract. Where was the dusty, desiccated ground parched to a crisp that I had planned and packed for? The worst drought for 50 years had turned into catastrophic floods.

  Leaving the valley, the fun began. Rocks and ruts bounced and twisted the car while my body groaned and my bones rattled. Chirpy goats, indolent cattle, and hurrying market goers slowed travel to a tortoise pace. From time to time short but drenching rain turned the road to oil and the riverbeds to cascades. As the road climbed, dipped and twisted through the mountains, small boys appeared gyrating their hips, bending their knees and waving their arms with such energy and abandon it seemed that they may well have stumbled into an ants’ nest. This dislocated dancing was a local form of amusement and the boys had discovered that since it seemed to amuse travellers too, it could be worth a birr or two for a photograph. These writhings were accompanied by cries of, “Ireland,” or so it seemed. In fact, they were shouting, “Highland,” a variety of mineral water whose plastic bottles are prized as containers.

  This is an active country of muscle and sinew, of walkers and of workers. The walkers are fast and purposeful but often they run (this is a country of marathon winners). The workers carry immense bundles of firewood, huge bales of hay, calabashes of water and young children. Donkeys strain in shafts of overloaded carts, ponies are whipped into greater speed and bullocks are yoked to wooden ploughs to turn dry and stony ground. Men direct these operations – or so they think.

  Mission churches abound. Of utility corrugated sheet construction, they are scattered liberally. Gospel, Pentecostal, Adventist, Rastafarian, Children of God, Jesus Christ International Gospel Ministry, Believers in Christ. Believers in Anything if it brings with it a bowl of soup and a Sunday sing-along. In a country that claims the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant and traces its Christian heritage back to King Solomon, it is astonishing that such diverse offshoots from the root and branch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church can flourish.

  At Jinka, the last town before Sudan to the west and Kenya to the south, I looked forward to The Resort Hotel and all that the name implied. The reality was damp sheets (moderately clean), damp spirits (temporary), a dripping shower (all night) a flickering light (not for long) and a wickless candle. Over warm beer and goat goulash, I engaged the only other guests. They were a forties-plus pair from Edinburgh who had arrived by public bus. Unable to find a dry patch to pitch their tent they had checked into this £14 per night luxury establishment. “It’s such a treat once in a while.” I slunk humbly away. I was reading Robert Byron’s ‘The Road to Oxiana’ and he had just arrived at Herat after two days in a public bus and was suffering from dysentery. He had carried with him the 1834 Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society and Dietz’s two volume Churasanische Baudenkmaler. He wrote:

  ‘Dawn like a smile from the gallows, pierced the drizzling, gusty night.’

  If you write like an angel, pretentiousness and overweight luggage can be overlooked.

  A group of 4x4s rolled in, suspensions groaning, with their roof racks piled with tents and jerry cans and weary women and bearded men stepped out and called for beer. They had come from the Mago River, my next planned destination and they made gestures of disappointment and difficulty. They were Swedish missionaries and told me that the rains had made the roads so impassable that they were stuck in mud for two days without food and water and walked seven and a half miles (12kms) to find a vehicle that could pull them out. The Mago River will not be my destination after all. The drivers boasted of their adventure and displayed that typical Ethiopian characteristic of broad smiles and cheerful acceptance of whatever life throws at them. If you have nothing, anything is welcome. This is bush country, untamed, little travelled, home to some of the most remote tribes in sub-Saharan Africa and there is a pioneering swagger about those who have ventured this far.

  Evengadi Lodge sat in a grove of spreading acacia trees. The birds that called to each other all day were superseded by a generator that coughed and spluttered all night. This was not a lodge but a tented camp with a dozen patched, darned (or sometimes not), grey canvas homes creased with age, some with a plastic tarpaulin thrown over them where patching was no longer an option. Once, when zips had worked and their nets were without fist-sized holes, they might have deterred mosquitoes. They were probably bargain hand-me-downs from a refugee camp. Still, they were spacious enough for two iron bedsteads and a bamboo chair. I took the chair outside, poured a whisky, listened to the last call of the birds in the setting sun and feeling like a pasha on a rickety throne, contemplated the comings and goings of the campsite. We had picked up a cook in Jinka and when my team of three were not laughing, they prattled away like a cageful of parakeets. The cook’s name was Gezacho; naturally I named him Gazpacho. With scarred cheeks he looked like a savage but was gentle, sweet natured, soft spoken and never without a knitted scarf in the national colours of red, yellow and green tied around his head and knotted under his chin. When he smiled, which was often, white teeth split his shiny black face in half. It was as though the lid had been lifted off the keys of a Steinway. He was trying to educate himself, studying by night and cooking (learnt from his mother) by day. At 28, he was in fifth grade (usually reached at 15), but he was a poor country boy with no father and only two sisters to run the farm. While here he lodged in a shack in the town and the day before had walked the two miles to the tents at three in the morning. He had no watch and was anxious to ensure that he was in time to cook breakfast and make up the lunchtime picnic; I adequately rewarded such conscientiousness. His chicken dish the previous night started off live in the market and I had just seen that night’s kid stew trot by on the end of a string. There the cooks have to be butchers too.

  The Omo Plain stretches widely on each side of the river, its western side reaching into Sudan and acr
oss its surface the gravel road to Omorate was straight and level – a welcome change from the bone-jarring, chassis-twisting, rutted, bouldered, corrugated tracks of the past few days. Along the way were black backed jackal, dik-dik, gerenook, vulturine guinea fowl, quail dusting themselves in the dirt, and storks, vultures and other assorted raptors perched with menace and anticipation in dead trees. The town was a dump; a couple of dozen shacks and a few breeze block dwellings bordering a dirt street full of the litter of uncaring inhabitants who exhibited even greater listlessness and sedentariness than other southern towns. A branch thrown across the road marked the town boundary and details of my passport and the car were noted in a torn exercise book. 30 miles (50kms) from the Kenyan border, smuggling was the local business.