Travelogue 194 – August 4
The Bridge

8.2 Helicopters circle. Traffic congeals along unlikely avenues. Roadblocks go up. Traffic cops blow their whistles. There’s a kind of hunted look in people’s eyes. Mortality is on the prowl again.

Public disaster is its own little climate system. Within its perimeters, within a few miles from the epicenter, you sweat under an oppressive anxiety. You look over your shoulder. You hesitate and second-guess yourself because nothing feels right. You snap at friends. You’re easily distracted and unsettled.

I circled the site today, traveling from errand to appointment and back to errands, crossing the river several times, and finally passing the place itself. Crossing over the highway, you can’t miss it, a chunk of the roadway thrust into the air where the bridge was wrenched free and fell into the Mississippi. It gives you a shudder and a fleeting feeling of land’s-end.

First word is a phone call while we’re at Steve’s last night. Roxana passes on the news from her call that a bridge has collapsed. Where it was, she didn’t catch. But the concerned calls continue to come. Steve’s got the TV on, and we are stunned at the image. Everyone has a story about their last pass over the bridge. The media voices drone through scarce facts and over limited video. ‘What did you feel when you first arrived at the site?’ she asks the transportation official.

Late tonight, I’m riding my bike back to Wes’s. We’ve made it through the first day of trauma. I have to cross the river. The closest bridges are shut. I have to cycle back to Hennepin to cross and then alongside the river to where my original path picks up.

The site of the collapse is awash in light. Rescue teams are still at it. The glow is forlorn, and it attracts a slow stream of tourists and melancholics. Small groups stand above the river, staring in morbid curiosity and murmuring.

Cars rest at the bottom of the river. Divers struggle against the Mississippi current to shine torches into the windows. I turn away and pedal past cops manning barricades. I’m eager to get away.

8.4 I wake earlier than I had planned. One thing about tent living, you’re exposed to the elements. Elements like jet engines churning the early morning air not too far above your head, taking off from the nearby airport, resounding like dream-shattering, aural mementi mori: ‘your time is coming.’

I get on the bike and work off a few quick miles. As I approach the café, a military helicopter roars directly over us, headed toward the river.

I absorb some caffeine and brood over inconsequential things, and I set out again. Today, I pedal across the university bridge. There are more people than usual on a summer morn. They’re standing at the edge, looking upriver. I assume they’re trying for a glimpse of the new ruins, but they’re not. On a field at river’s edge below, the helicopter is parked among an assortment of emergency vehicles. It’s Bush. He’s come to town to look over the fallen bridge.

Is the copter his ride or an escort? ‘It’s a decoy,’ opines one spectator. Nothing’s quite real here, until it’s time to clean up. Bush spends the afternoon at a fundraiser while the work in the river resumes.

Travelogue 193 – July 26
Red, White, and the Blue River

Life leads to funny places. What do I know about wine? I can discriminate between red and white on most evenings. The latter gives me headaches. One glass of the former makes me happy. Two glasses are likely to lead to faux pas. Three and I might fall in love, or some such other embarrassment.

Stephanie was in Ethiopia just this spring, leading the children in painting exercises. Now she’s driving to Minnesota with her boyfriend, carrying cases of wine in her trunk and stacks of children’s art on her back seat. She put together a fundraiser in her home state of Michigan, fusing art and wine, and making lots of dough. She made cute labels for the Michigan wine from pieces of children’s art.

Just the elegant setting should have been a draw to the Minnesota version of her event. Deneen hosted the event in her loft in a St. Paul artists’ co-op. The building is in a downtown neighborhood called Lowertown, which is a knot of brick relics converted into condos and malls, eerily quiet as only a Minnesota city could be. Deneen’s building is opened up inside so you can look up the tall brick shell and see the stacks of balconies that lead into artists’ lofts.

Ride the elevator and you may notice with a start the scorpion set in the plastic ceiling grate protecting the lights. Your heart jumps though you recognize it for plastic. It’s like the outlines of bugs are hard-wired into our alert systems. I study the menace in his claws and multiple legs and his low carriage, ready to pounce, and I feel like this little creature has been stalking me on this trip. I’ve taken a few stings.

We set the wine on one table, the cheese and crackers on another. We set the children’s art on just about any surface we can find, leaning the small matted pieces against the brick wall – the plentiful, cascading brick of this lovely loft – and lean them into the high windows that overlook the river.

We stand at the TV, watching Stephanie’s video of the kids dancing. The artists stand at the windows remarking on the evening light in the river valley. We teachers stand together and gossip. There’s a tug of war over the chocolate port, far and away our biggest seller. It’s a small crowd, and fortunately I’m not called upon to comment on the wines we’re tasting. That one is red, I say. This one is white. A toast to the little ones dancing on the TV screen. They have a future.

A few mornings later at seven a.m., I’m reciting the pledge of allegiance for the first time since grade school or high school. Mary and I are presenting to a Rotary Club. They meet at the clubhouse of a golf course. Outside the window, beyond the flag, lie the peaceful green hillocks of the course. The Rotarians have fed us a very nice breakfast. The old man next to us tells us about the fox in his yard.

The pledge made, I’m standing before a dozen or so at their tables. I’m referring them to Roxana’s power point and stumbling. It’s a tough crowd. I stop and look closer, from eye to eye, and I see in them how many charitable groups have presented here. I see how far away Ethiopia is. The children are dancing.

We do get one donation. It’s from the man who commented on the madrasas in the Middle East, inculcating radical Islam. He tells me later that a relative of his went to school with one of the Emperor’s family fifty years ago. He writes down the man’s name, saying he must be a minister by now. I agree to look him up.

Travelogue 192 – July 26
Running

Suddenly it’s raining. When I enter the café at two, it’s ninety degrees and mostly sunny. Half an hour later, I look up and notice the rainfall outside.

The weather counts. My vagabond life has moved out of doors. Four weeks into my Minnesota visit, I have to find new digs at short notice. What I’m able to arrange is a tent and a sleeping bag in Wes’s back yard.

I travel by bicycle. Wes’s house is about an hour’s ride from Roxana’s apartment, which is my only regular access to computer technology. There are no internet cafes in Minneapolis. In a pinch, I can stop by the university and pretend to type in a password at the computer lab.

Everybody has a cell phone. I have one, too, but it doesn’t work. I’m guessing someone hasn’t paid the bill.

I run outside to slip a plastic bag over my bicycle seat. I’m wondering how to handle the unfortunate coincidence of downpour with appointment across town. But I see grace when I look above. Minnesotan Zeus, capricious weather-maker of the north, likes a rich palette. His one dome of sky is many stories, blue patches among milky white strata, beside high, black thunderheads, and darker masses to the east. Today’s story is about jarvis’s reprieve from a drenching.

And this is kind of like the tale of Tesfa, after all – Tesfa meaning hope, I remind the reader – a bit of doggerel scratched in sand. It’s an operation with a big heart and big ambitions and an office that roves – from Craig’s basement to car trunks to boxes and tents – with rotating phone numbers and then none, with borrowed and broken computers strewn across three continents.

All in all, I have to be happy at the end of the day, bicycling to the home of the day late at night, zigzagging among silent residential streets in South Minneapolis. The air is still and humid. The moon is up, its lines indistinct in the hazy sky. Crickets sing among the hedges and in the parks. I check in with Wes when I arrive, quick whispered hellos and news, careful not to wake the family. And then I climb into my blue pod of a tent. It crinkles as I crawl in. I lay across the sleeping bag. I unzip the flap that opens my screened window. I can look up at the stars. I fall asleep trying to figure out what piece of a constellation I’m looking at.

In the morning, it’s on the bike again, back into town for work. I spend a lot of time on that machine this month, and I love it. Occasionally, I think my friends are mystified. I ride it to meeting places even when I have a ride. But in a few weeks, I’ll have no bicycle.

One of the highlights this trip: the new ‘Greenway’. That’s a bike path, recently completed, that travels along an old railway line east to west, from the river to Uptown in Minneapolis. I look for errands along that route so I can cruise its smooth course, pedal without stopping. It’s the best meditation.

Travelogue 191 – July 5
Cornici

I have to pre-empt the Tigray series again with another expedition, this one instigated by a crew of friends and believers back home. And that's where I write from today: 'back home'. That means Minnesota -- bright and sunny and clean old Minnesota, my happy and peaceful state picking up the pieces after its raucous national holiday.

I came by way of Rome and London. The latter for business, the former a pleasure required by the return ticket in hand whilst 'back home' in Ethiopia. Ah, Roma: it's like a long and luxuriously slow novel that I pick up every summer.

The Eternal City is baking when I pass through. I'm staying with Ugo, in his flat on the top floor of the mid-century high-rise among blocks of the same in Colli Albani.

Ugo has jump-started his artistic career since the last year's chapter. He's had an exhibit of his photography. He displayed a series about the story of Jesus, but featuring a nude female model in an empty room with brick walls. The exposures are long, so that any figures beside the woman are ghostly. He pours green and red light into the room at various angles. Several shots are very attractive, how ever dark and abstract the message may be.

Ugo wonders what my agenda is this time. I say, 'walk'. And that's just about all I do. I'm a bird released from his cage when I make it to the West. It could be Watts or it could be Rome; I just want to walk all day. It feels like freedom.

My favorite walking route on this trip (after the Metro and a bus) is to cross the river on the Ponte Sublicio and walk through Trastevere to the Ponte Sisto. I stop in my beloved Campo de' Fiori for a long coffee at Le Matte Teste and watch the neighborhood. The cute Romanian waitress is still there, singing along to the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. I've been away too long time; she only half recognizes me.

I return to the river and walk along the bank below street level up to the Ponte Sant'Angelo. It's a peaceful way to go. You don't catch many sights , and you may have to dodge a bike or two, or skirt a homeless encampment underneath one or two of the bridges, but it's quiet. You stroll beside the green water on a broad bit of pavement. Up above are the plane trees along the Lungotevere. Climbing back into the city, I bypass the Vatican and explore the neighborhoods north.

One late afternoon, I end up back in the center. I like the old, winding streets just across the river on the Ponte Sant'Angelo. Without thinking about it, I come upon the Pantheon, one of my favorite spots. I soak in the place, leaning against the fountain in the middle of the piazza, and finding myself becoming an unlikely nuisance to photographers.

I think there are more cameras than people in the piazza. Certainly more lens tourism than naked-eye appreciation. It's that odd ratio that makes me a nuisance. I've chosen an innocuous position, but I'm so absorbed in the sight -- the age and majesty of it, standing since the days of Augustus -- that I attract the notice of the camera people. They are on schedules; they ebb and flow, circle and fidget so furiously that I must look like a statue in time-lapsed footage. They just need the angle at every tourist stop, and they need it quick. This guy's got the angle, they must think. They position themselves in front of me, back into me. Click. Finally, I become the photographer, couples handing me the dream machines to imprint their trips to Rome. I must be a natural dreamer: the structure is framed rather nicely in the digital screens from my spot. Stand there, between the colossal columns of the towering portico. Click: you are recorded and remembered, along with old Agrippa. The monument does its job.

Travelogue 191 – June 27
Muddy Doldrums

Seventh in the Tigray series. Hang in there!

4.17 Adigrat. All the best traveling involves a healthy amount of lingering. Lingering so healthy it would be unhealthy back home. If you drag home-style productivity into the travel experience, you’ll end up being one of those checklist travelers whose chipper litanies after the fact, complemented by volumes of photography, are so deeply alienating. Better you waste some time. Pass an entire trip without a spell of disaffected doldrums, and you know your travel-planning was off. That mid-trip melancholy, feeling adrift and lost, is the best sign that you are loved by the gods of travel. (Who would those be? Hermes? Carolyn, please inform…)

I’ve hit the sweet-trip doldrums. Saba and I can’t decide how we’re traveling to the next destination, Do we take the bus or hire a driver? The dilemma arises from our commitment to visit the historic Debre Damo monastery, which is a ways off the highway. Saba’s family searches for drivers; I interview cabbies in the town center; we wait.

I wake up early and walk down to the Catholic Cathedral – landmark in Adigrat, a leftover from Italian occupation, I believe. It’s a nice-looking building, a simple version of what you might find in Europe, though Spartan in ornamentation. There’s a campanile and a tiled dome. All is tasteful, except for the plaster super-Jesus above the door. He looks friendly enough, though kind of lumpy. It’s the Superman colors he’s wearing that put me off. I know he walks on water but I don’t remember the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet verse. I leave that to the theologians.

Back at the hotel, I’m restless. I decide on a long walk. I’ll head toward the mountain pass in the west. There are two old churches guarding entry into town on either side of the descending road. I brave the western neighborhoods – ‘you, you! Money!’ kids on my tail and old folks staring – until I reach the winding dry riverbed that courses down from the mountains and through town. I’m walking among small farmsteads, finding peace at last, and I’m reflecting on how this wide riverbed must roar during the rainy season – just as massive clouds gather over the mountains and thunder begins to rumble.

The story goes exactly where it must, in accordance with the ironclad logic of the travel doldrums. There are no gentle entrances for bad weather in Ethiopia, no reprieves or wistful mists. I’m drenched within minutes. I follow a few groaning cows down a slippery mud path back toward town. Once in town, people watch me from doorways and windows as I stomp through every puddle mid-road. I have the streets to myself; that much I can be grateful for.

And no less grateful am I for the hot water in my hotel room shower. Right about the time the storm is passing and the last raindrops are falling, I’m stepping under a new and much more pleasant stream. By the time I’m done, long shafts of sunlight are breaking through the clouds, slanting toward the east.

It isn’t long before the sun has consolidated his hold on the big blue sky again, blue growing ever deeper and rays slanting at ever more radical degrees, exaggerating the shadows of our cluttered little world. I want some horizons. I want some space. I ask our cringing landlord if the roof is open to visitors. It is. I’m even able to have a beer delivered to me there. I sit on top of an anonymous block of concrete and I contemplate the mountains in their darkening, end-of-the-day hues.

I’m on top of the city, on top of Africa. I’m on top of fogs of frustration and grief and joy. Minute by minute I rejoice, I reject. I want to leave; I want to stay. For one still moment, we find a truce, the country and I: me and this crazy, arid sunset paradise, land of aquamarine churches hundreds of years old, land of yellow stone and red earth, of magnificent silences and angelic smiles and innocent aggression, of native gentility and bedrock religion, of forever sun and avenging clouds, of ridges long in miles and ages, and of the drifting humanity at their feet, drifting for millennia, many millennia before they had a name for mountains or for themselves. It’s a terrible beauty, and hard to live with.

Travelogue 190 – June 23
Feredeshem!

Sixth in the Tigray series – into the hills ...

4.15 Adigrat. We come to the heart of the journey. For dear Saba, it’s the purpose. We will visit her family outside Adigrat. We will visit ayat, the grandfather who has become mythic in stories at home.

The family meets at a Shell station on the north side of town. There’s no way to Feredeshem except to hire an Isuzu flatbed. Once the driver has completed some important gossip across the street, we load up and rumble out of town: the Sabas and I in the cabin and the rest standing in the back.

We reach the armed men in uniform blocking the highway, and they are quite angry that I and Saba #2 have forgotten our identification, but they wave us on. At the second barricade there is no passing, just a turn right onto a dirt road, a dirt road that diminishes and wanes by the mile, until the ride is quite jarring and at points we are spinning wheels on traces of paths on slopes that are nearly bare rock.

It’s not far before the landscape simply cuts loose with stunning vistas like a Western painter’s dreams. It’s magnificent. Imagine the American Southwest undiscovered and unbranded, developing along its own historical path, far from the Europeans.

Later, I ask Saba’s cousin Hadgu and his mother how long the family has been out there. They recall a few names, but have to wave surrender before the enormity of the question. I joke, ‘since Lucy’. They find that hilarious.

Arrival comes in stages. First, we come to the hilltop schoolhouse under construction, just five empty rooms of cinder block alone on a hill. One of Melesech’s brothers is waiting for us there. I believe it was Gebre-Meskel. Asfaw disembarks and walks ahead. We coast across the hilltop, descending slightly, until we can go no further, parked at the edge of a steep fall.

This is where we hike, down into a glorious valley with a view of hunchback mountains receding into the mist, into far Afar. And all the way down into the canyon, on terraces and jutting rocks, are small homesteads – including Gebre’s. Gebre is Saba’s ancient grandfather. His is a small compound of rock walls and old, twisted tree branches, three rooms around a dirt courtyard that have been there for most of the last century. By the entrance is an enclosure with two bee hives for honey: they look like hollow logs drilled with single holes for the bees, covered with rags and wood.

Part of the courtyard is sheltered by a roof of corrugated iron. Underneath is a low platform covered by eucalyptus leaves and cow hides. Here sits Gebre, beautiful old man, nearly 100, in a brown suit coat and gabi over his shoulders, in shades and a brimmed, brown felt hat vaguely Bolivian in effect. He has a white, Whitmanesque beard, and sits alone in timeless dignity, as though meditating decades of milk, livestock, honey, and barley; meditating on his brood of twelve and the far reach of his progeny now.

The family pours out to greet us, Gebre’s children and their children and children’s children. They lead us to seats on the cow hide. One auntie screams into Gebre’s ear about Saba, his grandchild from Addis Ababa come to visit. Solid Saba seems overwhelmed. I quickly get out of the way and enjoy the show. One of the old uncles parades lambs and chickens by us to see what we would like for lunch. Saba insists they not trouble themselves. Still, we aren’t there long before ti’olo is served. We crowd together and eat with twigs.

When I get a chance, I go outside and walk around our terrace above the canyon, trying to take in the scope and beauty of this place. I pull out the camera, and shy children gather around me. I make them laugh with the pictures that are captured inside. If Pey helps me figure out how to upload photos, I’ll post one.

Before we go, Saba bows at Gebre’s feet to receive his blessing. He makes a short speech that brings tears and laughter from the crowd. He lays a palm on Saba’s head in blessing.

The way back is comic. We hike back to the truck and find waiiting for us a mob of extended family. Saba is beseiged by them; she submits to a half hour of more hugs and chit-chat. I sit in the passenger seat. A very old man comes and shouts a long speech at me, something akin to the city councilman’s peroration of welcome and thanks.

Saba is fried. She abandons the crowd and gives the signal to go. Relatives are hurt that we won’t come by their houses for coffee or meals. They plead with her. She becomes desperate to get moving.

At the sound of the engine, the mobs move on the truck, climbing up into the back until there’s not an inch to spare. The ride back is long and circuitous, the driver patiently making sure everyone gets dropped off where they need to be, and stopping for locals who need a ride down the hill. There are no buses or garis. Few have horses; the only way to Adigrat or Zal Anbessa is on foot. Interspersed along the long road to town, lonely men and women walk. The distance on foot takes all day. We pass a wedding, just a circle of people singing and clapping around the lucky couple.

The crowd in the back gets us in trouble with the border military. These grim reapers stop us and make everyone get out. No one in the back has ID. They must walk. We’re close enough to town that they can catch a taxi, so they still proceed into town. The logic escapes me, but I smile anyway, trying to appease the police-lizards, meeting their unblinking glare with apologies in my humble tourist’s eyes. Their spite doesn’t waver, even as they wave us on.

Feredeshem! The sun sets over Adigrat, and I think of the family we left behind in the hills. History and time and the corrosive anxieties we vainly assemble into stories, all disperse with the daylight. They’re still out there, making a fire, gathering around grandfather.

Travelogue 189 – June 12
The Crossroads

Fifth in the Tigray series – still wandering in the great yellow north ...

4.13 Adigrat. Saba’s family leads us to the Hohoma Hotel, but that establishment is full. We wait in the tiny restaurant while Asfaw checks on another place. I’ll become well-acquainted with this characterless but clean room during my stay in Adigrat. There aren’t many options for hanging out in Adigrat.

What should be a bustling town dominating a major highway and one corner of the country’s map is, in fact, kind of a sleepy frontier town. What bustle there is is military. That major highway I mention, it leads to Eritrea. About a mile out of town on that two-lane road to Asmara, you’re stopped by men with guns. About a half-hour past that, you’ll be crossing the border.

There is a tense echo of war in the air here. It reminds me of the feeling I had in Turkish Cyprus. Lots of uniforms, lots of UN vehicles, lots of memories. These are tough people. When you watch Tigrinya TV, you get martial music, reels of war footage, pop music videos that swell with brassy jingoism – Tigray jingoism, not Ethiopian. Several of the most popular women pop singers were soldiers in their youth.

There’s lots of talk from other ethnic minorities in Ethiopia, and even the occasional bomb, but I’m quite sure that the Tigray people would pick up arms again if challenged – to a man (and woman). I don’t think any other group in Ethiopia is committed this way, top to bottom.

When we visit, Asfaw’s house, he shows us pictures from his days fighting in the hills against the Derg, the Communist regime. There’s an oddly calm atmosphere in these photos: no bravado, no sense of drama or even danger. But there was danger. There’s a faded photo on the wall of Asfaw’s home of his brother who died in the war.

The photos come out after the lot of us have crowded around the table for Adigrat’s most traditional dish, ti’olo, and have eaten far more than the stomach was designed to handle. Ti’olo consists of dumplings of barley dough rolled as you eat by the woman of the house, dipped into a red chili and meat sauce and yogurt. You eat ti’olo with the only native Ethiopian table utensil I’ve ever seen, a wooden two-pronged fork, slim as a chopstick. In the country, that’s just a stripped twig.

Back to the Shewit Hotel. I like this place. Half the price of the Hohoma and a lot more character. It’s a squat old structure, ochre in color, with a square, open courtyard in the center where the pigeons coo in the morning and evening. The rooms are basic, the water hot. The venerable old building was dropped among indifferent, bustling blocks of residence ... and among simple entertainments. Even in the morning, you’ll see the many red lights. They don’t signify what we westerners expect, or at least not as a primary purpose. Those are the t’ala houses, serving cheap traditional brew.

The hotel is a short walk from ‘downtown’: that lazy traffic circle with the dead fountain in the center. It’s another of those 60s-70s oddities you find everywhere, cement with large, bland grey marble tiles, several levels held together with concrete arms. Somehow it does capture the tenuous and shabby nature of the modern town set among history and open land – the land visible beyond in beautiful ridges like Bonanza.

On the other side of the circle is ‘Aratenya Yohannes’, one of the few cafes serving cake. I’m led there by a boy offering lottery tickets. My first reaction to his appeal is to wave him off, but he tags along beside me and says, “You’re handsome.” I believe in rewarding exceptional intelligence, so I offer him cake if he can find me a place that serves it. Thus I discover the Aratenya Yohannes, a very comfortable little venue, run by a big and quiet man who looks to be half Italian. He sits behind the counter being unimpressed by whoever he sees, even faranjis.

And back to the Shewit Hotel. They have a bar below. Day or night, it’s attended by a young woman with one of the most slack and world-weary faces in the eastern hemisphere. I do manage, after a few days, to get one sad-as-Mary half-smile out of her.

One evening, I’m abandoned to my own devices and I spend a few hours in the bar – quite happily, as it turns out, because there’s a championship game on, Chelsea-Blackburn. It’s a great game, going into overtime.

Somehow, one never feels as lost in the wilderness as when one watches football overseas. It’s a dim room with sweating walls in dying pastels and mid-century, heavy tile on the floor, almost black with age. There are several strings of Christmas lights hung above the bar. My Magdalene bar-keep does a slow and labored version of the dance called work, dousing glasses in water, pouring, wiping surfaces.

Halfway through the match, predictably, patrons call for Ethio-pop and our long-suffering Mary mutes the game, cutting off that wonderful lifeline to my soul, trivial British banter. I realize that much of my love for football in Ethiopia is just that voice: frivolous, inane, perky, suggestive of all sorts of comforts. And it’s gone. Mary, another beer, please.

Travelogue 188 – June 7
Dally, Shall We?

Fourth in the Tigray series – yes, we’re back up north for a while....

4.12 Mekele. Saba and her friend Saba (count them: two Sabas) are supposed to be arriving by bus. Originally, that bus was supposed to leave the day before I fly, arriving in Mekele that same day as I do. Then the bus was delayed because there aren’t enough passengers. So last I know, they’re arriving the day after I do.

I call Saba late on my second day in Mekele. It takes me quite a while to get through: the network is problematic up here. “Where are you, Saba?”

Now, pay close attention! This anecdote will teach you much about Ethiopia. “Where are you, Saba?” “I don’t know.” Right. I can hear the bus in the background. Looking out a bus window, one is hard-pressed to name a location. Though, addressing someone who expected you in Mekele around noon-time, a response like “still on the bus” might leap to mind. It does occur to her to tell me it’s raining hard wherever she is. I glance up at the Mekele sky, a little cloudy but benevolent on the whole, with a bit of concern. “Really?” Saba’s done with the conversation. I say, “Okay, well, call me when you’re here.”

I wait; I dally. I watch the sky to see if Saba’s rain approaches. I try to gauge how far the nearest rain is. Well, folks, ... not only doesn’t it occur to Saba to say, “Oh, I’m still on the bus,” but it doesn’t occur to her to say, “We won’t be arriving today at all.” Their bus left late on the first day, making for three days of travel instead of two – information in her possession and transmittable in an estimated three seconds of phone time. It just doesn’t occur to her.

I wait; I dally. I try to call. I worry. I decide she must have stopped in on relatives. She must be staying with them. She has a few in Mekele. She has them littered all over Ethiopia, as far as I can tell. She’ll call, I tell myself. I hang out at the glorious Milano hotel, owned by an incongruously flamboyant Ethiope, back from many years in Italy. I watch him glad-hand locals, his curls dyed orange, prancing about on very high-soled boots. The next day, I wander. I take in the castle hotel described in previous log. I’m a regular in Mekele already. Citizens wave familiarly.

I check in on my hotel at regular intervals. It’s about 2pm when I find them at my hotel. “Saba! Imagine meeting you here!” I don’t bother getting mad. She wouldn’t understand. Instead I listen to complaints about the bus journey. And I register some surprise at the resolution of my two Sabas: let’s go! We were scheduled to press on toward Adigrat; what are we waiting for? Okay, I check out of the hotel, and we walk down to the bus station for the two-hour trip north.

We catch a minibus. There are the usual amenities: three to a tight bench, not an inch to move, windows shut against demon germs, shrieking baby behind me. A couple earplugs and I’m ready to enjoy the scenery.

The first half-hour we climb one of the barren ridges outside Mekele, chugging up switchbacks, up the face of Rushmore, it seems. We finally surmount and arrive on a plateau of tough, dusty desert – not too tough for locals, who walk miles alongside the highway between villages. We pass several quarries for the pretty yellow stone that everything is built from.

The journey greens up in the middle, near Wukro, and the long desert views break into small hills and vales and charming little homesteads. It reminds me of Cappadocia. This geography holds until you reach the famous Negash, site of the first mosque outside Arabia, in the town where some of the prophet’s followers found refuge during his lifetime. Harar-green is the little dome, which you can see from the highway if you’re alert – (not the original mosque, but pretty darn old....)

Just beyond the town is a conical little hill with an old church built on top. It’s so unlikely and pretty that you watch it come and go for fifteen minutes. All the scenery in this region is striking, kind of over-the-top movie-Western backdrop, but settled by age-old farming families in their humble stone houses, many painted with square crosses. This greater region is famed for far-flung clusters of medieval churches carved into cliffs and rocks, the kind that make Ethiopia famous among history buffs.

We descend along the side of another dramatic ridge, greener than the earlier one, and we cruise along a surprisingly lush and cultivated valley, until suddenly we’re in Adigrat, speeding by swarms of school kids in red sweaters, deposited by a crazy 60s fountain, in sight of the imposing Italian cathedral. Adigrat, set in a half-bowl of three high ridges, the one to the west currently swallowing up the sun. A host of Saba’s relatives is waiting for us. They surround us and chatter and grab our bags, leading us to a hotel.

Travelogue 187 – May 28
Fish on the Rocks

Fourth in the Awasa series – pre-empting the Tigray series. The must-see walk.

5.7 Awasa. Pick a sunny morning and devote it to this walking tour. Make your way down to the lake and head south. If you’ve travelled down the main street, you’ll arrive at the jetty for small, expensive tour boats. There will be a Pepsi bar with loud music. Turn left and follow the shoreline path. To your left, there will be a little reedy marsh populated by the gruesome storks who thoughtfully pace.

You’ll have to take a detour: national security. If you miss your dirt road inland, a federal policeman will brusquely inform you. You’ve come to the promontory that divides this shore into north and south. The northern part of this little spit of land is critical to national defense, the southern critical for tourism. It’s there that you’ll find the Wabe Shebele Hotel that I mentioned earlier, the one with the monkeys. But we’ll skip that turnoff today.

We’re headed for the fish market. The dirt road detour will eventually deposit you at the lake again and at the entrance to a park occupying the southern shore of the peninsula facing a green little cove, very pretty, that looks across the lake to the southern hills. You can guide yourself to the fish market by the shouts of the crowd.

The guidebook calls it ‘the fish market’, but don’t be fooled by the formal name into visions of Seattle or Venice. This is nothing more than a mob at the lake shore, milling around the small metal rowboats that are bringing in the day’s catch. Boys are untangling nets. Fishermen are digging through the fish at the bottom of their boats, showing them to buyers. Curious boys crowd around. Other boys are cleaning fish on stones by the water’s edge with their curved knives. Kites are wheeling and swooping overhead. Ugly gentleman storks are wading in, and huge snow-white pelicans make skimming landings nearby.

I stroll back out of the park with a little boy tagging along, hoping for a tip. Rationale for the tip: that he tagged along. I stop for a photo of the far hills among the near reeds. A young man with a receipt book asks for ten birr. He says it’s an entrance fee for the park. I say I’ll be right with him, but in the meantime he can catch the dozen or so locals passing him by at that moment. Several of them laugh. He protests that they’re buying fish. I say I’ll buy one myself. Surely it’s cheaper than ten birr. He gives up, which is surprising. Rarely do I get off so easily when Ethiopians ask for money.

Outside the park, continue on lakeside. You’ll share the path with only the occasional shepherd and his several cows. It’s quiet. It’s short. You run into another resort. But the road curves up toward the hill that you’ve been contemplating since arrival in Awasa, because it’s the only hill visible from town. Tabour Hill is a flat-headed little mount with steep sides. As you reach the incline, choose your type of path: easy-going or steep and quick. I go for the latter. One benefit is that it climbs along the lakeside slope, right above the resort. I’m rewarded with many pleasant vistas, especially right above the resort, glancing at the water through the rich variety of trees planted for the rich.

Up on top, you’ll see the whole lake. The southern half, which you can’t see from town, is very pretty, surrounded by hills. Below you to the left is a village of thatched roofs and farms, and further down, a branch of the city reaching around from behind Tabour. It’s peaceful, but don’t sit until you’ve sussed out where the tykes and their sheep are. They will find you and start up about money. The nice thing about shepherds is, they can’t stray too far from their charges.

Much-needed meditation of beauty accomplished, look for another path down. You have two reasons for that: a different set of views and a shorter journey back into the city. I suggest the side overlooking Awasa. It looks steep, but it isn’t too bad. Once you start down, you’ll come across a path that will deposit you on the southern edge of town. You’ll be twenty minutes from the Pinna Cafe, where sugar and caffeine will revive and awaken your weary body and aesthetically-glutted spirit.

Travelogue 186 – May 22
ja-MI-cah and the Black Waters

Third in the Awasa series – pre-empting the Tigray series. Last we checked in on jarvis he was waving down southbound buses in Mojo.

5.6 Mojo and points southward. “Where you from, mon?” The voice is distinctly Caribbean. The driver leans into his door, and eyes me with a kind of hazy, timeless friendliness I haven’t seen since the 70s in Santa Barbara. We’re idling beside the road, waiting for more passengers. I’m in the front seat, a place of honor. He eyes me across the frozen profile of an attractive young lady headed for Ziway. She will refuse to acknowledge the faranj for the entire journey, a decision that will embarrass her when she falls asleep and repeatedly leans into me.

I laugh when I hear his accent. I should have predicted. Yes, this is the road south, and the tone is distinct from that of the northern roads, which was severe and drenched in ancient, rugged history. Here, you sway for hours along the road among gentle plains dotted with acacias. A blue mountain or two stand in the distance. The lakes appear off port side, off starboard. They’re the color of jacuzzis, salty, pale desert green. Villagers amble alongside the road. Herds cross at will, and our driver swerves or stalls as needed. He seems to know most every other driver on this happy highway, sending off lengthy codes with his horn and giving a thumbs-up.

Occasionally he looks aside at me. He furrows his brow, summons up some rusty English, and he delivers a sentence about places of note, usually something I know already. We cruise to many a stop, as passengers disembark, as we exchange passengers with other vans. Off we go again, among new series of morse klaxon. Some several hours into the journey, the driver winks and rubs his tummy. “Me hungry for some rice and oxtails.” He snaps his finger once to the reggae on the tape machine. It’s Sunday, and everybody in ja-MI-cah be eating rice and oxtails.

It isn’t long before we arrive at ja-MI-cah, the northern suburbs of Shashemene, a luxurious place compared to the town itself. The driver has decided in favor of lunch and flags another van for us, making sure I’m reserved the front seat. We part with promises to hang out in Shashemene one day.

I’ve been traveling for weeks, and I’ve just about given up on seeing anything much different out of Ethiopia than variations on dry and golden. And then, just about the time you pass through the teeming hillside town of Arsi Negele, something happens. I can’t put my finger on it at first. I just sense it, like a new scent. I’m a little uncomfortable, like I’ve crossed a border unawares. I figure it out: green!

Hillsides gather thin coats of grass, like a light patina of moss. Trees proliferate, and with a greater variety. The large fronds of the false banana appear, and the sprawling branches of the fig. The livestock lose their edge of desperation; they get fat and happy. The grass grows and grows. In a half hour’s drive, it’s a new country. And there, at the apex of Edenic growth, you come to Shashemene.

What’s the magic to that name? What’s the secret in the reference to rice and oxtails? For those of you unfamiliar with reggae or twentieth-century innovations in religion, Shashemene represents the promised land – or at least a toehold in the promised land – to practitioners of Rastafarianism, those New World worshippers of Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie,(or Ras Tafari before he was crowned,) those blissed followers of Pan Marley, those One World, Old Testament smokers of sacred leaf and visionaries of a globe united in 70s fashion. An ageing Haile Selassie, though embarrassed to be called God by Caribbean hippies, acquiesced in their entreaties and granted them a large allotment of land north of Shashemene – now called Jamaica. It’s there still, odd Mecca to the stoned of the world.

I pass it this time, with rainbow-tinged promises to return, and continue on toward Awasa. The green fades a little; the Ethiopia of long highland ridges reasserts itself, and not much further, the lake appears below us, green in the sun and inviting.

The road swings around the northern side of the lake. It’s there that the hippos are reputed to hang out, in the tekur wuha, the black waters. You can’t see a thing from the highway. I have vague plans to hire a boat to search them out, but never do it. The boats are too expensive, and I think I can walk from town. I try one early morning, setting out before the sun rises. I don’t get anywhere near the black waters; the shore-side path peters out and dies at the fence of a resort. But the walk is wonderful.

What do you see lakeside at 6:30am? There are men among the rocks washing themselves and their clothes. There are gari drivers washing their horses. There are fishermen drifting among the reeds and beyond. These latter shout to you and sing. Morning people are songsters here. Solitary men walking to work belt out traditional-sounding melodies, though for all I know they’re improvised.

Most of all there’s blessed peace. Delicate, long-legged birds run along the tops of lily pads. A fresh breeze and tattered clouds keep things cool. The crooners go about their business, and in between them there’s lots of quiet walking. I sit beside the lake a long time. Somewhere behind me, one farmer works his tiny plot. A little boy wades in to wash his face. Sunlight creeps down the sides of hills across the lake.

Travelogue 185 – May 17
Monkeys On The Beach

Second in the Awasa series – pre-empting the Tigray series ...

5.6 Awasa. I’m sitting at the Wabe Shebele Hotel on the afternoon of my arrival in Awasa, relaxing. I’ve earned my oh-so-comfy plastic chair on the patio with my Harar beer, earned it with a whole lot of sitting in the morning. In a fit of rueful ambition, I decided to take the entire trip to Awasa in one day. My original plan had been a day’s rest for the hind parts in Mojo. But travel had proven to be so speedy on a Sunday morning, I was lulled into foolhardiness. After a sleepy breakfast at the Daema in Mojo, I strolled across the road to catch a southbound bus.

A note here to future generations of jarves: you will be overtaken by teenage boys who will insist on being your brokers for a ride. Politely tell them that your hand functions just fine, and demonstrate by waving down a bus. They will still insist on a fee. Politely say, ‘Bugger off.’

I’ve opted for the cozy plastic mounts on the hotel patio, rather than their counterparts on the grass by the shore, because I’ve already done my shoulder-to-shoulder time, looking at sights and absorbing Ethio-pop at thunderous levels. Apparently, local tastes in relaxation run parallel to their tastes in travel.

Lake Awasa is about the sixth of the Ethiopian Rift Valley Lakes, counting from north to south. You get to count them down on the trip, as they begin right there beside the southern road from Mojo: Koka, Ziway, Langano, Abiata, Shala, and then Awasa. The Rift Valley and its lakes continue on, of course, into southern Ethiopia, into Kenya and Tanzania, some of these southern lakes being the deepest in the world. Great Rift Valley? you wonder. Just one of the more intriguing geological phenomena on the planet, that’s all – a terrible grinding of tectonic teeth that, indirectly, we have to thank for monkeys standing on two legs and writing novels. But all that’s beyond my province.

The Rift Valley lakes are most commonly a tourist’s destination because of the wildlife, particularly the birds. Once I’m checked into my hotel, I seek out the lake. I follow a path alongside the shore, and I watch. You can’t help noticing a few denizens of the town: the hideous Maribou storks, for one – gawky and huge, stalking around town and perching at the tops of trees in a strange way that seems to defy physics. There are some familiar characters: little kingfishers executing their dizzy dives and yellow weavers looking cheerful. There’s the hamerkop, a water bird with a crazy tuft of hair out the back of its head, perfect for Warner Brothers. And at the hotel, among the high branches of the fig trees, that ridiculous hornbill with a beak a big as its body. It’s most fun to see in flight. You expect it to tilt with the weight of the bill.

Perhaps the strangest genus I’ve seen today is the Amish family gathered at lakeside at the hotel: awkward bearded men in plaid and prim ladies in kerchiefs sheltering hordes of very white and wide-eyed children. I stare and hoist my Harar to them in salute. Did you come by boat?

And yes, I get my first dose of African monkeys. Too much: it’s the chips that lure them out. There are a lot of them. You see them dashing across the roads by the lake in the late afternoon. Once I’ve fed one, I have a family or two prancing around me. They jump onto the chairs and grab at my food with their black nails. Eventually, I set my plate onto the vacant table next to me and let them pick at my chips until they’re gone and one forlorn little guy is left to bend over the plate and lick the salt and grease.

These are vervet monkeys, kind of cute, lanky and brown with white trimming and black faces, sporting long tails. Their eyes dance around in a kind of blank wonder. One big male sits and watches to see if I drop anything. He shows off his robin’s-egg balls and cardinal pecker. I’m impressed, and guess that many of the babes hanging onto their mothers must be his.

Late in the afternoon, I’m blessed with the sight of an extraordinary monkey. He’s bigger and when he jumps around, you feel the weight of him. They call him the old priest, and his face is solemn and grave inside its black square, surrounded by a white fringe. He wears a black square hat, too, in the style of the Orthodox priests. If the head says church, the body says comic book hero. He has a deep black pelt with a cape of pure white in a U pattern on his back. At the end of his long, black tail is a large tuft of white. No wonder the colobus monkey has been hunted for his fur for centuries. He’s thriving in Awasa though, dashing through the trees like a huge, aerial skunk.

Travelogue 184 – May 13
On To the Peaceful South

Sorry, but I must interrupt the Tigray series to report on another, more recent journey – this time south to Awasa. I’ll return north after this burst of enthusiasm, I promise.

I’ve got to begin the story of the Awasa journey with its conclusion. The journey ends back in familiar Mojo, which cheerful little town sits cheerfully astride what may be the most important highway junction outside of Addis Ababa. It’s the choice of northern or southern Ethiopia, east or west, right there beyond the garden walls of the Daema Hotel, which is where my journey ends.

It’s a pleasant garden, by the way. The hotel is an anomaly. Everything else in Mojo is tawdry, dusty, and telegraphs ‘gas up and keep going’. But this place has a bit of polish: CNN, a decent dining room and menu, and the garden. The garden is tidy and hosts a lovely variety of flowers and trees. It features a small quadrangle of grass that is so peaceful that, travel-weary as I am, I can’t get myself to move for several hours, choosing instead to chart the sun’s progress among billowing white clouds and measure the fine shifts in the slight afternoon breeze and watch the colorful and strangely large Ethiopian hummingbirds.

Afterward I walk home. Yes, home in Mojo. I spend my first night in the summer cottage. Because I have so much business in Mojo and Debre Zeit this summer, and because the rainy season in Addis Ababa is no joy, I’ve rented a small house. It features all the luxuries a summer house should: a tap outside in the grass, where I’ll have to wash, a room with a hole in cement for my loo, and a papaya tree in the corner of the yard. The small main house on the property is uninhabitable, made of mud and more mud – and old mud at that. For some reason, several of the tiny service quarters in the back are built to a higher standard and provide the base of comfort I’ll need: cement floors and straight walls.

The first night is a delight – though I find out quickly that I’ll need a mosquito net. I lash out at the buzz in my ears for a few hours and then give up. Instead, I listen to the moans of the cow next door and chuckle of hens on the other side. There’s a rustle of wind in the treetops in Mojo that I find characterizes the place. You’ll see it in the ambling walk of citizens and in the shade of lazy green in the grass. The walk home under the softly rustling leaves is particularly nice, idyllic even. The streets are sparsely populated, and those out walking are not terribly tempted by the sight of a faranj. The most common form of transport is gari, the horse-drawn carts. Second might be the bicycle.

Morning comes early, especially in the bright eyes of the ambitious cock next door. He’s crowing regularly by two a.m. I’m out of bed at five. My aged guard is standing sentinel outdoors by the bathroom in the half-light, draped in his white gabi. At five in the morning it’s a jarring sight, and yet oddly tranquil after the first adrenaline. I wash up and I’m out the gate to scout for a minibus back to Addis.

The day before, it had been five a.m. out the back gate of the hotel compound in Awasa. Even that early, I’d missed a few buses. I caught a small one calling out for Shashemene. It promptly turned back around for the bus station because there weren’t enough passengers. So I resigned myself to the big, slow ride advertising Addis Ababa, spewing out deadly fumes as people climbed aboard. I managed a window seat, though I had the bad luck to draw a big-shouldered lump for a neighbor. Three souls to a seat, bag on my knees, and not an inch to move for four hours, watching a classic bit of Africa spin its story, the land draining of green again, down into the dusty bed of central Ethiopia.

Travelogue 183 – May 5
Triumphant Stacks of Stone

Third in the series on Tigray. Two must-see’s in Mekele:

4.13 Mekele. Just about the time the afternoon begins to cool and the sun begins his downward slide, take the Mekele walk of the churches. Not too far from the traffic circle that I described last time, there’s a road to the base of one ridge. You’ll see a church arch at the end of the dirt road. That church you see is just the first of five practically piled one on top of the other, crowned by the highest – which else? – Maryam.

It’s a lovely walk up the hill, the dirt lane winding steeply among the churches, among the little neighborhoods like villages, and finally above the town. For an Italophile like myself, it can be spooky. The eerie identification with Italy seems only to grow stronger up here, but now it’s combined with a sense of time travel.

It can feel as though you’ve entered a parallel to Giotto’s world: the steep dusty roads among houses of yellow stone, the hay stacks and wandering donkeys and sheep, the people leaning over their low walls and chattering. Of course, the faces are darker. The roofs are made of sheets of iron. The churches are round and painted red, green, and yellow. The religious ornamentation is distinctly Ethiopian. But the illusion still maintains some power somehow.

A pack of children come running, shouting ‘faranji!’ and they mob you with big smiles. Several will accompany you up the path beyond walls and churches, past the last monastery, babbling away in Amharic and Tigrinya, eagerly pointing, explaining, naming while they hold your hands. Here’s the cactus flower bud that’s a delicacy in Tigray, but it’s too early or late in the season. Here are a few of the small yellow berries from the sprawling fig or fig-cousin. Here’s where the hyena took down that cow the other day. Here’s where the rats come from, those little cracks in the cliff. “Ah, yes, rats!” Here’s something I can comment on. We trade stories about how they chew on our clothes. Once you’re up high, look down on the sleepy desert city.

Before you’re in danger of losing the sunset, aim yourself toward the other side of town. You can use that big bowling trophy on the horizon as a guide, the monument raised in the era of our current beloved administration, the monument that nows characterizes Mekele in photos and on TV.

I suppose we can afford a short digression about the monument, a slim tower of curving concrete on a hilltop, crowned by a golden sphere. The tower stands wach over a vast new museum devoted to the intrepid soldiers of the Tigrinya separatist movement of the 70s and 80s – oh, one of whom happens to be our beloved federal prime minister. The museum is quite the pretty complex, and larger than any museum I’ve seen in Ethiopia, including the National Museum in Addis Ababa.

The structure is heroic, and no doubt the soldiers were heroic in their day. Their eventual triumph over the Derg, the Communist regime, is ambiguous, as most glorious victories are. As far as I know, this glorious tale reads like a US-engineered magic trick: a re-routed flight for the Communist dictator and a relatively anti-climatic march into Addis Ababa. But so it goes: the museum is beautiful.

Somewhere on the way toward the great bowling trophy, you’ll come across another traffic circle dominated by another castle, a companion to the earlier one. This one once belonged to a lesser relative of the Emperor Yohannes IV, and I would say the lowly cousin got the better real estate. The castle stands high above said traffic circle, inside a large estate, looking a bit Addams Family. Enter: it’s a hotel now, the Abreha Castle Hotel.

Time your arrival for twenty minutes before sunset. Use that interval to stroll through the gardens that climb the hill. They’re very peaceful and pretty, in a seedy sort of way. You might come across the occasional group of students, but it’s quiet. Atop the hill, the castle is surrounded by a very nice terrace where you can have tea and watch the desert sunset tint the town with its colors.

Travelogue 182 – April 30
Mekele and Yohannes

Second in the series on Tigray. Stay alert: don’t miss one in this award-winning series.

4.12 Mekele. I’m resting from a long walking tour of the city, sitting upstairs in a quarter circle of a cafe that is set astride the top corner of a building. The big cafe windows overlook the most important traffic circle in the city. Off one spoke of the circle, across from the cafe, is the city hall; off another spoke is the nineteenth-century castle of Emperor Yohannes IV, now a museum. Behind both are the two Nevada ridges that are the city’s backdrop.

Don’t be fooled into picturing Piccadilly. It’s a small, dusty town. In fact, I think I can safely conclude after this latest trip that Ethiopia is one real city and a smattering of dusty towns.

Two students are eyeing me cynically. One has African features. The other is classic Ethiope: Hindu eyes and a sweet smile when it appears. They speak in Amharic, but the hard glint in the eye is Tigrinya. They are a proud people, conditioned by the desert, I suppose, by their long history, and the years of war in recent history.

Everyone but the students is speaking Tigrinya. The language certainly has an edge to it. Previously, I’ve heard it most from the mouth of Saba’s mother and her relatives. It’s an odd shift from Amharic. The voice drops into the throat to reach for the Semitic gutturals. Amharic has the same roots, but has dropped these sounds somewhere along the way. It sounds like a warrior tongue.

The women here almost universally wear their hair in the Tigrinya style: tight braids across the pate, dissolving into free, bushy hair in the back. Two, sometimes three braids are stung across the forehead, sometimes decorated with gold jewelry with the same motif as their earrings – which they often wear on the upper part of the ear – the round shield-like design with a convex circle in the middle.

My first impression of Tigray is a spooky hint of Italy. For some reason, I feel like the people and the place are more European. Maybe it’s the aloofness. Maybe it’s the stone houses. Elsewhere in Ethiopia, houses are commonly built with mud walls. All over Tigray, the walls are stone, either loosely but artfully pieced together, or held together by mortar. It’s very attractive. The stone is mostly yellow, like Minnesota limestone. Everything seems cleaner and brighter. Brighter from the outside, anyway; the windows are scarce and small because of the sun.

The castle across the way was designed by Italians. You can see it in the chevrons along the top of the structure that remind me of Verona. When I go to visit the museum, the staff seems surprised. They have to turn on the lights for me. They bluster a bit, as though they have to be reminded of the routine.

The main exhibit, of course, is the building itself: one large hall with juniper ceilings. A steep staircase of juniper to a few small rooms and a door onto the roof, where you can take in a nice view of the city. There are some nice items inside: the usual plethora of medieval crosses and crowns and manuscripts on goat skin, all beautiful. There are a few relics of ancient empire: statuettes and inscriptions in ancient Sabaean, the old Yemeni precursor to Ge’ez, Tigrinya, and Amharic. One fifth century BC housewife or priestess in clay looks like she could be selling spices in the market today: braids and nearly the same costume. On the floor in one corner is a bronze bust of a sneering Mussolini.

Upstairs is most fascinating: costumes and saddles from Yohannes’s time, and in the middle, the gigantic throne carved from one piece of juniper. That includes the steps and platform and the huge crown suspended above the seat with lion’s head hand-rests. ‘King of kings’ is woven into the back cushion.

The reign of the only Tigrinya king of kings was illustrious but ended tragically. He died saving the kingdom from the advance of the Mahdist forces from Sudan in 1889, forces that had already proven too much for the Brits. He won the day, but lost his life, clearing the way for the King of Shoa to take over and become Menelik II.

Yohannes IV was second in a run of three great emperors in the mid and late nineteenth century. The first was the quirky and also tragic figure of Tewodros, who is much beloved by modern Ethiopes. Tewodros was raised in a monastery, and his first career was as a bandit. But he had a chieftain as a father and he was a capable general, so he eventually rose to unite a long-segmented Ethiopia and become emperor. He was a reformer and a rebel, and proud.

The story of Tewodros’s demise is characteristically odd, and even more oddly held in great reverence by the modern Ethiope. Apparently, he put a friendly message to Queen Victoria into the hands of the local consul. Tewodros was insulted that the consul didn’t carry it himself, and even more insulted that the queen didn’t reply, preferring her chances with the Ottomans. Tewodros started taking hostages. One thing led to another, and soon he was facing Napier himself with the bit of artillery he had introduced to Ethiopia as reformer-king, (largely with help from the Brits). When the battle was lost, he swallowed a bullet, plunging the empire into a new round of chaos that opened the way to the Tigrinya adventurer, Yohannes IV.

Well, such are the tales of empire, I suppose. And the brief interlude during which Mekele was imperial city leaves us a few proud ruins to stroll among: the several castles of Verona.

Travelogue 181 – April 28
A Tale of Two Airports

I’m back! Back from two weeks in Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia. Prepare yourselves: you’re going to be hearing a lot about Tigray in the next few weeks. The journey begins with a flight to Mekele, the regional capital.

4.11 It’s mid-morning and I’m sitting in my cafe in Addis Ababa, watching a fine day spoil by fine degrees as grey clouds boil over the northwestern mountains. I’m watching carefully, trying to gauge how quickly the mass will make its way south to the airport at Bole. I sigh with practiced resignation: this is Addis Ababa. I share my tired joke with the waitresses: ‘thirteen minutes of sunshine’ – a play on Ethiopian tourism’s slogan of ‘thirteen months....’

I’m at the airport on time. I’m safely inside, where no clouds can disturb my tea. Domestic flights take off from the old terminal. The new Bole airport is wonderful, the toast of African travelers. The old one, well, it’s old.

I’m sitting at the marble slab of a counter at the Sky Bar in the square, blank, concrete terminal, leaning into the back of my white plastic swivel stool. I’m sipping tea and enjoying the time warp. But suddenly it’s faranji corner. Is it the dashing figure I cut, or do all faranji think alike? There’s a restaurant beyond me that looks perfectly fine; the counter is long and has plenty of seating. But here they come.

First it’s a pair of young German women. They studiously ignore me as they sit next to me, order mineral water, and light up cigarettes. There’s an elderly couple, an Irish priest and his wife who served in this area years ago. There’s an odd trio: a roly-poly, greying Italian man regaling two starchy German ladies with travel stories. Every one of them ignores the rest and me, in perennial fashion of faranjis in Africa, pretending to be there first, and speaks to anyone local with a cringing air of apology.

It’s only a fifty-minute flight, mountains all the way. I read the Ethiopian Airlines magazine – an article about swinging Beijing – occasionally glancing down at the landscape becoming increasingly lunar. By the time we’re approaching Mekele, the mountains have mellowed but become tawny, bone dry. And that’s when you recognize it, nestled under a ridge with verges of green. I’ve seen it a hundred times on Ethio-television, that very ridge. You don’t see the surrounding wasteland on TV, so you imagine it to be a bit of cool Colorado. The plane keeps going, landing somewhere over the green ridge and off toward the desert.

Stride confidently from the plane, enjoying the familiar feeling of having everything on your back. Sling the cap over your head against the dazzling sun, walking across the tarmac toward the tiny terminal. Regain some of the romance sacrificed so brutally to the Germans. They stop to wait for baggage; you don’t. Walk through the two-room airport and outside. Assess the situation. Yes, there are the taxis. But they only go when they’ve got four passengers, unless you want to pay for four.

Quickly re-assess the situation. Yes, there, at the end of a long drive is the highway into Mekele, and there, unmistakably, you see the blue minibus that means cheap travel. Throw that bag over your shoulder and walk. Sure enough, by the time you reach the highway, one of the drivers has mutinied and followed you. Keep walking while you answer his price with some thing half as much. Eventually, you’ll get him, just as the next minibus approaches. But be forewarned, he will whine about the price all the way to Mekele, and that’s twenty minutes or so because his Lada rattles up the hills in second gear. Get him started on Tigrinya lexicon to distract him. ‘Dihandehee. Tseboh.’

We pass my hotel and have to turn around. Sure enough, the Dallas Hotel, recommended by my tour book, and where I’m supposed to meet Saba the next day, has no sign out front. My phone is receiving no signal. All rightie. Welcome to Mekele!

Travelogue 180 – April 6
Shoes and the Cross

It’s Good Friday. Every year, Jesus is nailed to the cross, and every year we celebrate. The churches are loud. The neighbors are loud. They commemorate the event with synchronized moaning. And then, duty done, they crank their Ethio-pop and laugh through the thin walls.

It’s Good Friday. Christ dies miserably again, to rise from the grave in three days. In only two, on Sunday, we will celebrate the resurrection – the point of the drama, if I have understood the gospel.

As if to celebrate the Resurrection symbolically, lyrically, the city is engulfed with choruses of cries of the cockerel. Every family has bought one for the occasion, but the motive isn’t life everlasting but the lusty wring of the neck come Easter and the end of the long fast.

Toward a similar purpose, bands of hawk-eyed shepherds in sandals and long blankets and rude switches have crossed the hills and mountains to enter Addis Ababa behind large flocks of sheep. Tonight they take positions along all major thoroughfares to stand vigil beside their beasts and to haggle with city folk hungry for meat.

A man in a business suit passes you, a parcel of green grass under one arm and a live chicken under the other. He’s grinning with great anticipation, and you wonder what it is about holidays that makes people so happy. The day off work? A day with family? Unconvincing. Food seems the most plausible argument: a resurrection of the senses.

The kite guy returned to Addis for a few days, bringing with him stories of desperate people. He’s been to Chad, where he was determined to reach the refugees from Darfur. It’s not a well-travelled route. He bought one of two astronomically-priced tickets on the market, flew to the capital, crossed the entire nation on a UN plane as a kind of charity hitchhiker. He arrived at the last major town in the east, a place that looked in his photos like scattered mud bunkers among sand and dust and withered, solitary acacias, home to wild men in white and wild men in jeeps with rocket launchers.

He found himself stranded there, behind barbed wire with an odd assortment of fiery Europeans. Among this set, it isn’t ‘how could you have voted for that man?’ It’s ‘why haven’t you killed your president?’ The ‘you’ is personal, and the stare is accusing.

The rest of the trip to the camps proves impossible because of cost and because of time. He ventures out among the local kids. They play a bit rough. They mob cars. They stone him. They swarm over the largest kite when it lands and tear at it with claws and knives.

Here at home, things are tamer. This time through Addis, the kite guy says it feels like Beverly Hills, except the people have manners. I see through his eyes: people are gracious and gentle. The smiles are genuine as they shake your hand. They look at you like children as they struggle with their faded grade-school English.

Last night, we go to a play. It’s a production by Graham’s charity. It’s something written and performed by the teenage sex workers. My Amharic is not up to the task but, with or without language, it’s poignant. It’s a short piece and plot is reduced to a small tableau on the side, where a girl is sick on her couch, attended by her mother. Center stage are the rest of the girls singing together in a series of sad meditations, moving in simple, coordinated lines or circles across the stage, subdued and sincere and almost like church processional. The only dramatic moment is when a man enters in order to push one tender young girl onto the ground. All in all, a beautiful effort. I was touched, anyway. The kite guy was lulled by the darkness and the melancholy voices and the momentary lack of danger into a sleepy daze.

My children in Shiro Meda enter their holiday in new shoes, thanks to Margaret in Minneapolis. Thank, thank you! She sent some money express, concerned that the kids be happy on their holiday, concerned that they have good gear on their feet, but especially concerned that our girls have something pink to wear.

So there they are at our Easter party, beaming in sturdy, blue and pink footwear, lining up to bow to Laura and hand her pages of art they made for her during the week, saying, “Thank you, Miss Laura” – beaming, as I say, like kids will though the occasion is a sad one. It’s still an occasion, still a party, even though it’s time to say good-bye to Laura. She leaves Saturday.

How can they understand? Shoes arrive. They love them. They’re instructed to say thank you. Wonderful people arrive from across the seas. After a few weeks, they’re shouting, “Miss Laura, I love you!” Nobody asks them to. I’m not even sure where they learned the phrase. Then one day, they’re told, “Say good-bye.”

Good-bye, Miss Laura. Thank you for everything you did for us.

Travelogue 179 – March 29
The Bourne Conveyancy

Dreams are funny. In one, I’m crippled beyond repair in an auto accident, disfigured. I have no hands. In the next, I’m Matt Damon hanging out with his buds. Waking in the morning is neither too consoling nor too disappointing. I’ve got hands, but I’m not Matt Damon. I can tie my shoes, but the ladies are still indifferent. So it goes.

I may not have Damon’s paparazzi at my door, but I still generate some buzz. At the bus station, the shouting wayalas gather around and tug at me. Once I’ve boarded one of their buses, the proud wayala struts away, advertising that he’s got the nich-so on his bus, the white guy. He’s riffing in the brassy, high-pitched rant of these boys who spend a lot of time on the street. He’s making a good joke out of it, and everyone in the van laughs and turns to look at me – though in a kindly way.

It’s a tight fit. A row of broad-shouldered men share the back bench with me. Still the wayala is trolling for more passengers as we bounce along through the southern Addis suburbs. We find one, a young woman who sits in the fold-out aisle seat directly in front of me, pressing back into my knees. I’m wedged in tight for the rest of the trip, which might be a good thing. It might help with motion sickness, which I find almost inevitable on these Ethiopian buses, what with the exhaust that pours into the bus, and what with the Ethiopian superstition against opening car windows. The breeze will give them a cold. Everyone draws curtains against the sun, so we bump along in a sweaty cocoon.

The bus driver is talking to himself. He’s a stout old man who appears to put a lot of muscle into the steering wheel. I can see his round face in the rear-view mirror. He’s put on an Eastwood grimace. He’s narrating a noir tale from his days on the force. The wayala sits after a while. He keeps glancing back at me over his shoulder. He’s trying to come up with a crack about me and regain some of his glory, but seems cramped by the restricted theater.

An older fellow in a green plaid sports jacket is telling stories. He’s turned in his seat so he can address the people behind him. I wonder how he has space to do that. en his neighbor speaks, he listens with a spooky intensity. I think of the kite guy’s observation about Ethiopes.

We’re having beers at the old Hotel Taitu and spinning theories. He says, “Even the Rastas here, they’ll say, ‘Take it easy, man,’ but it’s not, ‘Take it easy, man.’ It’s TAKE IT EASY ... MAN.’ You know?” And he imitates the stare.

I remind him of the long, proud history. I remind him that it’s almost as much a Middle Eastern culture as an African one. I think of the impressive stares of the Arabs, stares that could be visitations of the old souls of warriors who rode for the Caliph. Indeed, they would have to be to justify such a gleam of pride.

We arrive at the outskirts of Debre Zeit. The Addis end of DZ, the west side, is the upscale area, where the town’s nouveau riche can’t put up houses or offices or hotels fast enough. I call out for a stop and somehow dislodge myself. Outside, I stand at the side of the highway, sweaty, woozy. I take a deep breath and straighten my clothes, my knees, my back. I still have my hands. That’s a plus.

I take a seat at the Pyramid Paradise, my preferred hangout in DZ these days. They have a pleasant courtyard, spacious and cultivated with a nice variety of flowers and trees. They have a tasty egg sandwich. I call Saba. We’re supposed to meet at the station but Saba’s always late, and you never hold still in Ethiopia, so I board. Saba says she’s on her way. She’ll be here momentarily.

At the next table sits a local businessman. He has a belligerent look about him, a scowling brow and a heavy bottom lip. He has a mobile phone ear-piece that makes him look even more menacing. It’s 8 a.m. He starts with a beer. Once that is down, he orders a black coffee and adds three spoons of sugar. A few minutes later, he’s off to his day of cracking knuckles.

What is it that makes people happy? Matt Damon just wanted peace on his tropical shore with Run Lola Run. This guy looks like he wants to strike terror into the hearts of peasants – just another backwater tyrant. A Cheney without missiles.

Baboons organize themselves in cozy and violent hierarchies. If it weren’t for the language barrier, Cheney would find a sympathetic community in the hills around the Blue Nile. It sounds like he needs one these days.

I haven’t heard of many baboons that enjoy leisurely strolls in quiet places. I’m obviously one of the failed mutations among primate evolution. When our morning meetings are done, and Saba has left to check on a few things around twon, I opt for the walk along quiet dirt lanes, a chance to scrutinize this resort village that might, if all goes well, become home for the summer.

I like it. It isn’t Damon’s beach town, but it’s something of a paradise for a guy of lesser genetic virtues. Everything is ambling and genial: the clouds, the cows, the old men in green plaid. Even the occasional ‘money’ boy is amiable and shy and unconvincing. There are no crowds to navigate, though a fair share of dust. I find a broad lane that doubles as a gully during the occasional rains, and I aim for the next lazy curve in the road, there beyond the cows hanging their heads, where the shrubs and palms overcome the view of where we’re going.

Travelogue 178 – March 23
The Kite Guy

The spring mini-rains have set in. The timing is almost disastrous. The kite guy has arrived. I’m watching the skies anxiously. Mornings are bright and cheerful, but clouds move in quickly, crowding the heights all day, and getting darker as the afternoon advances, letting loose by 5:00 or so. If kite day follows this pattern, we’ll be okay, getting the kids out in late morning.

The kite guy comes from Minneapolis. He’s friend of a friend, and we met at a party once upon a time. The kite guy has been around the world; he’s worked in Peru and Rome. He’s been in Ethiopia before. He’s made some money in the last year that he wanted to spend in a fun way. He founded a charity that brings good cheer and healing to kids who have gotten a rough deal in life – whether from disease, poverty, or loss of parents. He brings them kites. He’s working on a plan whereby local families earn a little by manufacturing kites for his project. On this trip, the kite guy has been through Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania. Next, he goes to Chad.

Fortune brings us a kite day hot and breezy. The clouds are big and friendly. Rather than muddy clothes, I get sunburn instead. We pile the kids into four mini-vans, and we dash off down the hill toward Jan Meda, a series of wide open fields. This may be the kids’ favorite part of day, laughing at each other out their mini-van windows as the drivers weave in and out of traffic, and among each other’s vehicles, to every adult’s distress and the children’s glee.

The kite guy pulls out the big ones first, and every time a big set of wings lifts off, the children scream and run behind. One of the large kites has the kids’ colors all over it, pictures of hands and cats and vegetables that they drew the day before, all amid balloon letters that spell ‘Tsegereda Memorial School’.

Some of the teenage boys loitering in the fields join in the act, and, all in all, they act the gentlemen, helping the children along, holding kites while the kids get a head of steam. When the little ones get a crack at child-sized kites, the boys entertain themselves with the big ones.

The kids line up patiently for their chance at the little kites. The kite guy is donating one for each child. They are tiny square kites with a long spool of string. Though they’re watching with great fascination, each child has to be briefed again by teachers. That briefing runs like this: ‘Run!’ Some stare back. Some turn and take a step or two and turn around, dragging the kite. Eventually, they get it and take off as fast as they can, charging ahead across the grass without looking back. ‘Look up!’ I cry futilely. They don’t. But they’re grinning anyway as they run back. Success!

I’m sure you want the rat update. It’s a mixed report. Jackie has failed as a rat-hound. The two animals have reached some kind of detente. She gets a quiet night indoors, and the rat roams free, as long as it doesn’t disturb her sleep. We resort to Plan C or D: poison. Sad to have to turn to violence, though vengeance feels good. Bakalech leaves enough poison among some bits of bread to take out a village, and in the morning, the entire feast is gone. We hold our breath and there is indeed a hiatus of a few days from rat turds and holes in my socks. But if one has died, another one found the trail indoors. The next step might have to be a kitten.

Everyone has been sick this week: Laura, Linda, and even my favorite waitress, Tigist. Tigist is my favorite because of her professional attitude ... and her gorgeous smile. She’s had a cold and a bad stomach. I tell her to drink tea. No, stomach problems, she says in rat-a-tat Amharic. Tigist has great faith in my genius. She speaks not a word of English. And every day, she asks if I’ve learned Amharic. No matter what I answer, she launches into long streams of pleasantries. I nod and enjoy her sweet smile. I suggest lemon. No, bad stomach. How about ginger? No, bad stomach. Doctor? No, Jesus. Jesus and bad stomach must logically relate, though I don’t know which came first. Her solution, I see later, is a glass of holy water mixed with dirt from a church floor. Cheers, Tigist.

Travelogue 177 – March 15
Beware

It’s the Ides of March and there’s nothing much to beware, except maybe sunburn. Jackie trots after the ball at half-speed at midday, her head hanging and tongue lolling. Bakalech drags her feet as she slouches across the bright courtyard.

Sophie called yesterday from Awasa, and I had no answer to “What’s new?” I tried to think of something for today’s call. All I could come up with was, “Did you hear about the rat chewing on my head?” She enjoyed that story, as all my Ethiopes have. There’s something of the sadist in many Ethiopes. Is it something about a culture shaped by suffering?

It’s a true story, too! I awoke one night last week with the sensation of someone munching on the hair on the back of my head. A little bed-time nibbling I’m not opposed to, depending on the bed-mate – though hair seemed an odd choice. But memory eventually dawns: I have no bed-mate, and I’ve played fortunate host to aggressive rodents lately. I turn over and, sure enough, there she goes, in an unconcerned waddle across the floor. She’s a big one, with a long tail.

Watching her go, I almost feel regret and pity. The poor thing wants a little company, or maybe she needs some protein. She has to fill her belly, like any creature. But I do change rooms then and there. God knows what she would have fed on if I had been turned the other way.

The next night, Jackie gets indoor sleeping privileges. And the little mutt performs well, standing guard while also keeping quiet enough for sleeping humans. I’m pleasantly surprised. Perhaps she knew that Plan B was a cat. To save her place in the food chain, she must be versatile. This morning I observed her cleaning herself like a cat, licking a paw to wash her face.

Okay, so there are man-eating rodents to beware this Ides, and sunburn. And I might mention that crafty old devil, Death, who seems craftier in his work here than he is back home. Or maybe it’s more blunt.

Graham calls this morning. He has to postpone the parenting workshop scheduled for Friday, the infamous parenting workshop that’s been rushing forward like the next Ice Age since its conception last fall. It seems there’s been a death in the family of his assistant. It’s a case of fine one day, dead the next, which seems very common in Ethiopia. They were driving somewhere. Said relative entered the car under his own power and exited in the arms of his family. “He was about thirty!” Graham exclaimed.

I asked if there were a cause of death, knowing full well the likely answer. None. “You know how it is,” Graham says, “trying to get details out of these people.” I do, though, to either of us, cause of death would hardly be a minor detail. “Wasn’t your friend in the car with him? How did he die?” I ask. Again, no details. He’s dead.

Coincidentally, another one of my Shiro Meda parents died yesterday. Cause? Unknown. He’s dead. I’ve only worked with sixty children at that school! How many parents or guardians would you imagine, in three years, could keel over? It’s mind-boggling. In Abraham’s family, it’s been mother, then father, then grandmother. He’s with an aunt now. Now it’s little Yabsira’s father. Cause unknown.

It makes you think about the Western idea of death. Graham says, “People don’t just die!” Well, until recently, they did do just that. Now, in the West, it doesn’t simply happen; it always has a Reason. We may not be able to stop it, but every darkness has its label, and every rat its hole.

I can report that Death, that bitter old angel, hasn’t had his wretched way with everyone in Ethiopia. There’s one crusty old survivor he’s still chasing: Saba’s grandfather. We’ll be shaking hands with this Methuselah next month when we travel north into Tigray, into the homeland of Saba’s family. Upon every report, this gentleman increases in longevity. The first word a few years ago was that he was just over a hundred years-old. But this morning, Saba insisted he was 125! I tried to reason with her. How can Melesech, who’s only a few years older than I, have a father who is 125? Saba’s retort: Melesech’s eldest sister is in her 80s! Well, what can I say? I can’t wait to (gently) slap this old soldier’s back. “Say, how have you kept the rats away?”

Travelogue 176 – March 8
You Go

It’s another in an amazing string of brilliant cloudless days. The morning ritual has returned to its old, peaceful custom. I never tire of the same breakfast, and Bakalech never tires of the same jokes: no dinner today; she’ll give my food to Jackie; she’ll take Jackie home one day. But there’s a surprise for her today, the enormous rat that found its demise on my dining room floor, finally taken by the trap. The poor thing is growing stiff in the trash out back. I didn’t have the stomach to extract the thing from the trap, so Bakalech has to buy me a new trap. She laughs a long time over that one, but I notice she doesn’t volunteer to do the job herself.

As I leave for the day, as I click the gate shut behind me, a man passes muttering to himself as though chanting. His shirt is unbuttoned to his belly. His eyes are concentrated on the road ahead. The sandals on his crusty feet slap noisily. It sounds like he’s saying, “You go. You go. You go. You go.”

I stop in Piassa to see the boys. They sit in a long line roadside, where the taxis stop. My dembenya, or regular guy, is busy, so I sit in his neighbor’s chair. He starts in on my shoes while the dembenya complains. When Laura and I come around, there’s always an uproar. The boys fight for our business. There’s the trouble-maker, a charming guy with a big mouth, bossy and sarcastic. There are the two little brothers whom Laura favors. My dembenya is one of the quiet ones. Everyone gets into the vaudeville of this moment, including the tea lady who serves out of thermoses, and the newspaper guys. Everyone is a comedian.

Today there’s a tiny, barefoot old woman with a face marked by a million lines. She’s so busy trading remarks with the boys that she neglects to beg. One of the guys directs her toward me, and when she sees me she breaks into such a smile, like she’s being introduced to her child’s best friend. She could be reaching out to pinch my cheek, but there are coins in her palm. I can’t resist – though usually I’m a difficult mark – and I hand her fifty centime. She hangs around with a dazed smile, and the boys tease her. I’m guessing it’s all good-natured, though she’s provoked into a quick battery of blows on the back of my shoeshine boy. They all laugh. Another boy shouts something provocative so that she’ll chase him in circles. A minute later, she’s beaming again.

In Piassa, I go in for the daily internet lottery: will it work? How slow is it? A-OK. Pete has emailed with an impatient reminder about information I’ve forgotten to send. Later in the day, he calls.

“Graham is no Peter,” I’m reminded of John’s famous quote, famous among the latest ephemeral expat community I have gathered – so fragile a community it’s already dispersed – who have decided that Graham and Peter represent the opposite poles of British manhood.

John has left with his wife Tayat for England. They’ll be back by summer, unless, as John muttered to me apprehensively, Tayat should discover while they’re in England that they have a bun in the oven. Then all bets are off. John wants to stay in Ethiopia. They’ve been married for over a year now. I was witness in their wedding back in the fall of ’05, some time after the street demonstrations. It may be time for babies.

Laura and I have been made very familiar with their chances of conception. They relish their sex life and don’t hesitate to share. Neither Laura nor I encourage these confidences, but they flow without check, and to our chagrin, often come illustrated. Tayat pulls out the digital camera which doubles as a video recorder.. I can report to you, dear reader, that John is a rare specimen of manhood at 78. He has the physique of a man of ... 50? I don’t know, but apparently it functions as it should, except when he drinks too much.

This we toast at their going-away party. Which ritual Tayat watches with a grimace of disgust. But John’s alcohol levels matter little at the moment because it’s Orthodox Lent, which is a manic fifty-five days in length, and which enumerates sex as one of those temptations that thou shalt avoid. This the couple has informed us, as well. So John and I raise our glasses and wink, and down goes the spirit of male joy and impotence, glug-glug, past my yellowing middle-aged teeth and past his white false ones, on to work its magic. Cheers!