16
Kalashnikovs & Customs
EWAN: After a week in Sudan the sound of rain rattling my tent was amazing. Earlier, lightning had struck in jagged bolts and thunder rumbled above us. Rain after so long, rain so heavy it would churn the ground into mush.
Yesterday in Khartoum I’d begun to think about the highlands. It would be cooler for sure which was a blessing – the average temperature this time of year in Sudan was forty-four degrees and in northern Ethiopia it was less than half that. I’d had enough of the heat and was looking forward to some cooler mountain air.
We rolled out of the city around two in the afternoon, the sweat sticking to me. Even on open road at sixty miles an hour there was no respite: normally I’d keep the visor on my helmet lifted and allow the wind to cool my face, but this wind was on fire, way worse than when we crossed into Libya. I’ve never felt anything like it; it sucked my energy and no matter how much I attacked the water in my camel pack I felt more and more dehydrated. I was feeling shitty generally; Charley too for that matter. Later he told me he could quite easily have thrown up his lunch. Never eat from a buffet, that’s the old adage, isn’t it; especially when it’s a hotel buffet in the heat of Africa.
Three hundred and fifty miles to the border, tarmac all the way and I was keen now to get on with it. Yesterday we’d had a lazy afternoon and a relatively lazy morning, but I’d not got to bed before two a.m. and was awake at five thinking about Ethiopia and the pedestal status I’d apportioned it. Those cyclists had kept going on about kids chucking stones and for some reason now that bothered me. The Sudanese had been terrific, waves and hellos wherever we went and when we stopped they’d not crowd or hassle us at all. The north in particular had been great with those pretty sandstone towns and the magnificent brutality of the desert. I was less impressed down here, though, beyond Khartoum. It seemed there was just the road to the border and the manic men that drove it.
CHARLEY: I should have stayed in last night, gone to bed early and caught up on some sleep. Of course I didn’t and I was knackered this morning and the heat wasn’t helping. My hands were hurting: the injuries from Dakar. Day after day in the saddle it was beginning to take its toll. There’s a nub of bone sticking down where I broke my left wrist. The surgeon welded it that way so I could ride a motorbike. It’s fine most of the time but constant riding hour after hour and it really begins to ache. On top of that the muscle at the base of my other hand sort of seizes up and every now and then I have to reach across with my left to use the throttle. The weirdest thing I’ve noticed, though, is how I have so little strength in the ends of my fingers: it makes things like doing up buttons, or undoing my wife’s bra, really awkward.
We wouldn’t make the border tonight, it would be around lunchtime tomorrow, I reckoned. We were travelling south-east towards the town of Gedaref; the road straight and dusty, full of mad bus drivers and road trains, and trucks with enormous trailers hauling everything you can imagine.
The scenery was rocky, not much to look at until we came to an aeroplane graveyard. You know, like the proverbial elephant’s graveyard only this one had planes in it. There were loads of them, ancient heaps that weren’t rusting so much as shredding. The fuselage would be intact but the wings were peeling. The skin hung in strips that fluttered in the wind.
Amazingly we found a whole community living there; they had little shacks and fires dotted among the old aircraft. The planes were pretty old, different types – one had clearly been Russian. Ewan said they reminded him of the plane on Casablanca.
Climbing inside an old crop duster we found a life jacket discarded on the floor and a large internal tank with pipes leading off it. It was surreal: all these dead aeroplanes, their wheels overgrown by sand and those tatters of wings billowing in the wind. A group of men were sitting round a fire brewing tea. We shook hands with them and went back to the bikes. It struck me more forcefully than ever how so much of the world is nothing like what we’re used to in the West. Most people live way below the poverty line. The things we take for granted just don’t figure in their lives. I’d seen it in places like Kazakhstan and Mongolia and now I was witnessing it here.
The driving was getting worse, oncoming buses three abreast would bear down on us so hard we had no choice but to get out of the way. I began to wonder how many accidents there were on a road like this. It didn’t take long to find out; a few miles further and we came upon two wrecked vehicles. There was a great crowd of people gathered beside them and stopping the bikes we asked what had happened. The accident had been earlier that morning and the people had been there ever since. They bunched around us, a hubbub of men having a great time talking up the crash. Using sign language we learned that the driver of a lorry (the cab of which no longer existed) had fallen asleep and careered into an ancient long-nosed truck coming the other way. Amazingly the driver didn’t have a mark on him. The other truck was so badly smashed it was hard to imagine anyone surviving, yet it appeared no one had even been hurt. The weird thing was the trucks themselves though; they were so old the wreckage looked as if it had been there for years.
We were trying to find somewhere to camp and it was getting darker by the minute. We stopped at a village called Wadermazoo, or at least that’s what an English-speaking brickmaker named Carlos told us. It wasn’t a village on the map – rather one of many brickworks we’d seen this side of Khartoum. Carlos suggested we pitch our tents in their camp then checked with his boss. He said it was fine. But when we asked the Arab owner he wasn’t having any of it.
No problem. We’d find somewhere further up the road – that’s if we weren’t wiped out by crazy drivers who got crazier still as darkness began to fall. We passed through a couple of small towns and were back on open highway with buses hammering by when the cops pulled us over.
They wanted to check our papers and the senior officer, a sergeant maybe, wanted to check out the bikes. Ewan and I were talking to another cop about where we might camp when we looked up and saw the top man sitting on Ewan’s bike. Like an idiot I showed him how to start it and the next thing I knew he was high-tailing across the sand. Ewan looked on aghast but helpless: I mean what was he going to say? Hey, copper, get the fuck off my bike!
EWAN: Yeah, right. What was the worst that could happen? He’d drop it; well I’d done that plenty of times already. He brought it back safely enough and suggested we camp at their little compound, but I didn’t want to sleep by the side of the road with a bunch of rozzers. They told us that a bit further along we’d come to a bridge, beyond which was a place where we could pull off.
It sounded great. Charley led until the lights were well behind us and a couple of miles later he turned off the road. We rode into the darkness and deeper into the desert. Hardcore camping, just the two of us: fantastic. We found a good spot away from the road and I could smell the Nile. Familiar now, I knew the river well – we’d crossed her many times since we landed in Egypt. Amazing – a month ago the Nile was the river of the pharaohs, now she was an old friend.
We were up with the sun and as we packed the bikes we saw we were being watched by a young man wearing a T-shirt with a sheet wrapped round him. Then a few more heads appeared and we discovered we were camped by another brickworks and decided to check it out. First the mud was hacked out of the ground, then softened and watered down. Then it was carried by wheelbarrow to a sort of rocky sink where it was pummelled and washed, then fashioned into blocks which were stacked to dry in the sun. Once dry they were piled up and logs were lit, to fire them into bricks.
We were well beyond Gedaref now and heading towards the border. The land was greener with more hills, more trees and, in places, much rockier.
Monkey, monkey, monkey!
A troop of baboons crossed the road right in front of me. Now I knew we were heading south. First camels and now these little creatures; the changing wildlife an indication of just how far we’d come.
As we approached the border the country wa
s greener still. We passed a dead cow and thatched huts with holes in the walls. I could see a metal arch ahead and a herd of goats crossing. We left Sudan, crossed into no man’s land and ahead lay the village of Metema. I could see the Ethiopian flag, red, green and yellow, and above it someone had erected a banner: ‘Welcome to Ethiopia Charley Boorman, Ewan McGregor and the Long Way Down team.’ Our good luck just got better. I might have to talk to my agent about that billing, though.
As with every border everything suddenly changed. There was the smell of rain in the air, everywhere was green and the town was heaving with people. Everyone seemed to be on the street; on foot or riding donkeys or on little carts drawn by donkeys. The houses and shops were higgledy-piggledy and hunched together as if that was the only way they’d stay standing. They seemed to be made of everything you could imagine and were painted in bright colours, green and purple and red. The whole place seemed thrown together and was really vibrant, a real frontier town.
I realised that Sudan had been the colour of sand; the low, open towns blended into the landscape, everyone wore white, and whenever we’d stopped it was only the men who’d come over. It was an Islamic state and the women were covered and very much in the background. Here everyone came to see us: men, women, young boys and girls; the place had a tangibly freer feel to it.
At passport control – a mud hut painted green and purple with one wall of corrugated tin – we were entertained by a tiny girl in plaits and a pink T-shirt who laughed and laughed like a kookaburra. So much for stones, eh.
I shook hands with Charley. ‘Well mate, here we are. We crossed the desert. Can you believe it? We crossed the fucking desert!’
‘I know, I can’t believe we survived the heat. Libya was nothing, was it, compared to that?’
And now it was night and hammering down with rain. The air was cool and refreshing after Sudan. It was so weird, I’ve said it before, but it really does seem as if with the lines drawn on a map the land almost knows when to change.
What I’ve not mentioned yet is that we were thirty kilometres from the border in a compound enclosed by barbed wire with three Kalashnikov-toting guards on the gate. They weren’t there to keep people out; they were there to keep us in.
Getting through immigration had been simple, so easy in fact that David had tempted fate: ‘This could be real quick guys,’ he’d said. ‘I mean real quick.’
We thought we were done and were about to get going when our Ethiopian fixer, Habtamu, explained that we’d been assigned an armed guard. He accompanied us to the next village and the customs compound. By the time we got there it was almost six and customs, of course, was closing. But they’d seen our carnets, how detailed they were and told us they wanted to make a thorough examination of our gear. Everything would have to come off the trucks. It would take hours and it would have to wait until tomorrow. So that was it, our first night in Ethiopia courtesy of customs men and Kalashnikovs.
17
A Cup of Ginger Tea
CHARLEY: It made me wonder about the carnets, whether in fact they were too detailed and that’s why customs were so interested. Maybe if we had less on them we’d be through quicker, but as Ewan pointed out if they searched and found stuff not listed they might think we were trying to sell it.
Anyway, we were up at six and gone by ten – the usual four hours. The guard, the gun-for-hire, stayed; not with Ewan and me, but with the support crew. Apparently travellers needed an armed escort as far as Gonder.
We went on ahead, picking our way out of the village, careful to avoid the hundreds of people on the street; not just people, the cattle, goats, donkeys. I couldn’t get over how different Ethiopia was; almost to the border Sudan had still been pretty arid and brushy, and any trees we saw had few leaves. Across the border the first thing I sensed, apart from the sudden swathe of colour, was rain.
It had rained all night and I’d been wondering how that would affect the roads. I’ve said it before, it takes a day or so to get to grips with how a new country works. Sudan had been dry and empty; this was mountainous, much cooler, with the world and his wife on the street.
The rain had stopped, but the cloud hung like a fog. We were back in our jackets now and after last night I had my waterproofs handy. We were heading for a town called Adigrat and eventually the Eritrean border. Tonight we’d camp at almost three thousand metres.
We were on a high plateau, the land green and cultivated. I could see farmers on their terraces trailing ancient hand ploughs behind teams of skinny oxen. The bulls had massive bow-shaped horns and I was reminded of Sean Connery at our place one time in Ireland. He was with my dad and they were injecting cattle when this bull just turned on him. Sean was knocked down and trampled, his ribs, his hand, his nose broken. He was tossed around a bit and he’s a big bloke. I’ve had a healthy respect for bulls ever since. No doubt so has Sean.
The villages were so different from anything we’d seen in Sudan. Close to the border the houses were circular – a mesh of poles with wattle and daub between them, the roofs pretty roughly thatched. Deeper into the country, however, the structures began to change – they weren’t round but oblong and they had roofs made from sheets of corrugated iron. We crossed bridges that spanned streams, streams that would become torrents, I guess, in the rains. It was June, of course, and the rainy season was supposed to start at the end of the month but already we’d seen the first signs.
EWAN: A completely different world. Just a handful of vehicles and hundreds of people walking or driving cattle, sheep and goats. We passed herders ushering donkeys laden with goods, donkeys that wandered all over the road. Kids would pop up from nowhere with their hands out: ‘You, you!’ they were yelling. Big kids, little kids, tiny boys with shaved heads and top knots, little girls in scruffy dresses, bare feet and shawls. We rode past a watering hole where a man had his animals, another guy hunched on the bridge carrying a couple of leather gourds round his neck.
I was overwhelmed; uplifted. The desert had dried me out, I think, and now I felt invigorated.
We bumped into a guy from the Red Cross and asked him what the roads were like further on. He told us they were OK, a bit potholed and lumpy but nothing the bikes couldn’t handle. No sooner had we pulled over than all these kids appeared. Charley was still on his bike and they flocked around him, their hands out asking for books, pens and money.
We stopped in Gonder for a lunch of cake, coke and coffee. Gonder is the regional capital, and it’s a bustling town. A group of teenagers descended on us and one wee man in a striped T-shirt recognised me.
‘You make movies?’ he said in English.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why don’t you arrive in a big car? Why did you arrive on a motorbike?’
‘Because I’m doing a motorbike programme.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Do you have a bodyguard?’
I held up all of my fingers. ‘I have ten,’ I told him, then pointed to the rooftops, ‘all around, so be careful.’
This was a noisy, bustling place; plastic tables and chairs, waitresses in orange tops, the smell of coffee, people gabbling away on mobile phones, and dozens of kids watching us. Charley was trying the different types of cake, his jacket over the back of his chair. It was much cooler now, not even in the twenties.
‘I noticed this morning,’ he said, ‘my brake lever and clutch were cold: first time in ages.’
After we’d finished our cake I wanted to change some money so we went looking for a bank. We passed a group of women crowding onto one of the blue and white minibuses, vans so full no one had room to breathe, let alone sit properly. I saw a couple of boys shining shoes in a doorway and beyond them a shop where they changed currency. I asked the lad serving what the rate of birr to dollars was. Eight point five, he told me and I prepared to hand over fifty dollars in tens. He then told me the exchange rate was different for smaller notes. Didn’t I have any fifties?
‘No,’ I said, ‘just tens.’
�
��Then it’s different.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘The banks,’ he insisted, ‘give us a different rate for smaller notes. I can’t give you eight point five.’
‘Different rates for different notes?’ I half lifted an eyebrow. ‘Come on.’
‘No, it’s true.’
‘I tell you what, I’ll change them somewhere else then.’
I found a clothes shop a few doors along and they mentioned nothing about different rates for different notes, they just changed the money.
CHARLEY: We were going north now. The clouds swept in low and dull and it was suddenly misty. We passed stands of eucalyptus and acacias. This was a poor country, I knew that. But most people’s image of Ethiopia is from Live Aid in the eighties, whereas this land was tilled. The farming methods may be archaic but the terraces were turned and the soil obviously rich – it was that dark moist colour, such a contrast to the sand of Sudan.
We kept stopping for livestock; the road would be blocked by sheep with fat tails, little goats, or skinny cattle. The higher we got the more the clouds swamped us and it was damp now with the hint of rain in the wind. We’d climb and climb and then the land would plateau and it would be positively cold. We passed a mass migration of people all wearing the same colour shawls and driving their animals ahead of them. Ewan suggested it was one tribe and did I ever get the feeling we were going the wrong way? Everyone seemed to be passing us, not us passing them.
Long Way Down Page 19