Roadside Ethiopia

No pictures for a while since connections are agonizingly slow here. Will put them up asap.

I arrive in Addis Ababa at 3am, so I find a quiet corner of the airport and sleep until morning. Since I was here last in 1973 during the days of Haile Selassie, I think I want to remember it from then and not the teeming, impoverished mass of a city it is today. Visas are fast and easy to come by though, and I buy a bus ticket to head out of town.

Buses to anywhere leave before dark, and since it's the rainy season here, you can bet on a torrential downpour and lots of mud to begin a journey. The bus is full, but everyone is polite, and a guy even serves snacks and water. Two hours in though, the Ethiopian music and videos jolt me awake. It wouldn't be so bad except this music is hypnotic and frenzied, and it doesn't stop for the remaining nine hours.

My journey goes from Addis to Bahir Dar to the northwest, climbing down hairpin turn after hairpin turn from off a plateau and through some spectacular canyonland. Ethiopia has never been seriously invaded--except by the Italians for a while. And so did the British, who launched an expedition in the 1800s to rescue some Servants of the Queen. These poor hapless civil servants were imprisoned in fetters and tortured for two years by one of history's classic nutcase emperors, Theodore, because Queen Victoria failed to take him seriously.

Anyway, what does roadside Ethiopia look like? Pretty squalid. Hovels are constructed of mud and wattle, occasionally you see concrete, but for the most part this looks like a country that has endured famine and war and failed communist experiments. Some sections are so muddy and derelict that the color tones between people and landscape don't change. Teeming hoards of children run alongside the bus, and if you ever wonder where some of your castoff clothes go--that old blue cub scout shirt with den number 12120 or the old high school t-shirt with "Home of the Jaguars"--here they are. At one point I look out the window and a squad of big, pissed-off looking monkeys are charging down the hill and chasing the bus. In another spot there's an old rusted-out tank. Vultures circle overhead.

After what seems forever, we stop in Debre Markos--barely halfway--for lunch. What kind of appetite can one have after being motionless for seven hours? (well, except for the occasional piss break along the road). And that bag of overpriced Italian cookies I bought back in Addis tastes like manna from the Gods out here. I walk around the town and discover there's quite a big Jewish population, if the signs are any indication. Also at the rest stop, I discover there's a girl from Santa Barbara on the bus who has spent the last several months filming a documentary on Kenyan street children. Although the bus journey may be difficult, it's meeting one's fellow travelers that makes it so memorable.

At about nine hours into the bus ride, I break down and plug in my iPod for sanity's sake. Finally, at Bahir Dar, on the 11th hour, the bus stops, and I stagger through the inevitable crowd of touts, and go straight into my $19/night hotel alongside the beautiful Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile.