araptirop

Washington, DC Photographer - Dallas Lillich

2010-09-07T21:00:00.005+03:00

I don't know if anyone's out there is still reading this ole blog, but during my extended absence from East Africa, I've gone pro with photography. Here a link to my website:

Washington, DC Photographer - Dallas Lillich

Please submit any feedback through the contact form.

Thanks!

From the Archives: The Stoning Begins Now

2007-09-20T11:44:00.000+03:00

Since moving to DC, I've been confronted with outlandish rumors alleging daredevilry in the Horn of Africa. The source of these lurid tales is, unsurprisingly, Joshua Cogan--the evil photographic genius and monger of drivel. So just to set the record straight, here's the story that seems to suffer from the rudest hyperbole. All the way back in January 2007...

I've been a bit backlogged on my posts and placing the blame on the exorbitant cost of Lalibela's Internet cafes and a nasty case of the flu. I've been trying to fill in the lacunae chronologically, but last night I had an experience that begs relation while freshly plowed in my mind.

I can say, even conservatively, that I have never been so thoroughly in the cross-hairs of danger; nor have I ever been party to so bloody a fracas.

So fast-forward: I'm convalescing in Gondar, the site of a 17th century castle complex and one of the more atmospheric cities in Ethiopia. For a week now, I've been tagging along with a professional photographer by the name of Josh Cogan, a fast friend and willing tutor. Yesterday I began lusting for a bit of adventure as most of my time has been spent catching up on sleep--a scarce commodity in Lalibela--and hacking my way to a clean pair of lungs. So I suggested to Josh that we scale the nameless mountain of the ritzy Goha hotel and suss out the scene.

We walked a couple of kilometers, forging our way through the hassle heaped on faranjis, when we spied a horse-drawn cart, a gari, led by an erratic young colt. It zoomed past us, only to double back, the colt capering wildly and bucking about. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. We settled on a price of 5 birr to convey us to the mountaintop, but bailed out about halfway once the horse began zigzagging on the switchbacks with scant regard for the margins of the road. After half an hour, we walked through the gates of the Goha and into a wedding.

Having been wedding guests a week before, we were versed in the chants, songs and antics of an Ethiopian wedding and comported ourselves magnificently. Before long, we were as much a part of it as anyone else. The body heat rose, the singing climbed the decibel ladder, the beer flowed in cascades and everyone had a right good time. As the night wore on and we realized that all the town's taxis had been commissioned by the wedding, Josh and I wondered how we were to get back to the Circle Hotel. The answer came in the form of a flatbed truck loaded with 30 drunk Ethiopians.

Josh had success earlier that day hitching a ride with a similar vehicle and bounded into the truck bed without reservation. I followed suit. The truck itself was in poor repair, composed of a closed cab and an uncovered cargo hold bisected by a shoulder-height pole. The bed, as mentioned above, was bustling with some 30 rowdy Ethiopians between the ages of 12 and 20, all despicably inebriated.

"Where you go?" asked one of the crew.
"Circle Hotel."
"Ah, Circle Hotel."
"Ou." Yes.
"Chigger yellum." No problem.

Our destination settled, we proceeded to get down. Nothing, not even the sordid spectacle that followed, could undermine how hard we partied with this crew of Habashawoch. The call-and-response patterns peculiar to Ethiopia were trotted out with unusual gusto. Our facility with them enlivened our Ethiopian friends who swung heartily from the pole, danced in a rapturous flurry of limbs, and yelped in appreciation. Josh executed his Thriller-era Michael Jackson moves and roused everyone into a screaming rendition of "I Like to Move It, Move It." I answered by emceeing a vicious version of "Who Let the Dogs Out," complete with a schizophrenic proto-breakdance. As our truck lumbered down the mountain with the rest of the wedding caravan, our party wailed and barked like a portable junkyard.

The party rose to one pitch and then another, the cultural bounds of the passengers less appreciable by the minute. It was a supremely beautiful moment, the kind vaguely imagined when one undertakes a long stint of travel. But it was too labile to last. It turned ugly in an instant, and the joy came crashing down like a wall of fine china.

"Okay," Josh screamed. "Where is it? Where's my camera?"
The barking doghouse fell silent, and the writhing dancers froze.
"This isn't funny!" he yelled. "My camera is my life, my livelihood!"

With that, he tore into the crowd, laying hands on every benighted article he could, ransacking his way to the pilfered camera and flash. He recovered them but kept scouring for a missing camera battery. It happened so quickly that I turned to my own camera bag a bit late. I rummaged through it to find the front pocket unzipped and my little notebook missing. I frisked myself and felt my passport and wallet in my shirt pocket. So far so good. Josh returned to the front and double-checked his belongings. We exchanged a few words; I had recovered his notebook and handed it back to him. Satisfied that I had made off pretty well, I turned to the scene at the back of the truck.

A menagerie of bodies and shadows converged on the two thieves caught in flagrante delicto, one with a flash in his hand, the other with a camera. Emboldened by drink and enraged at the fact of our special fraternity blasphemed by treachery, our Ethiopian friends commenced the most spirited beating I have ever seen. With the truck still chugging down the mountain road, I saw one thief, clad in a crisp red shirt, get his face pummeled into a pulp. One of the huskier Ethiopians, with whom I had exchanged a number big-hearted back slaps, held the thief by his neck, hissed imprecations into his ear, and repeatedly slammed his face into the guardrail. The foe's teeth spilled out like beads from a broken necklace. At one point, the avenger pushed the bandit's head as far over the rail as he could, trying to mash it against the cliff face as the truck scraped by. The thief, delirious from the beating, fell to the ground, and everyone uninvolved in restraining his sidekick began stomping him furiously.

It was a total beat down.

Josh, meanwhile, had rushed back into the mêlée, still trying to find his camera battery. The truck stopped abruptly at a perilous mountain switchback. I followed him in, trying to have his back in one way or another. As he berated the bleeding, sobbing remains of the thief, I felt a little kid tug on my sleeve. I shook it off, taking it for misdirection. He tugged again. I swung around and hissed

"What?"
"Dallas, get down!" he quavered.
"Why?" I demanded.
"The stoning begins now!"

Sure enough, a volley of stones arrived, crashing into the truck bed. I ducked down and covered my head. Apparently more than just two thieves were in on the scam; they had escaped in the fray and started hurling rocks at us, aiming to free their co-conspirators. I crawled into one of the corners and turned back to see Josh obliviously shaking down another shady character.

"Josh, get the fuck down! They're stoning us!"
He turned to me, his glasses atilt, "What?"
"Get down! They're throwing rocks! Big ones!"

He clambered up to the front and took cover with me. The rocks fell like hailstones and sent everybody scrambling. The bloodied, half-dead thief leapt over the side of the truck and ran to the front. I looked through the back window of the cab to see him holding a stone in each hand, crying hysterically. With gore surging from his nostrils and oozing from his punched-out mouth, he wound up, aiming a rock at the windshield through his imbalance. Just as he pitched to throw, he staggered into the road and right into the path of an overtaking minibus from the wedding party. A rock whizzed over my head, and I fell to the ground hearing a dull thud and what sounded like a skidding body.

"Holy shit!" Josh exclaimed. "The thief just got hit by a minibus!"
"Is he dead?"
"I don't know...No, he got up. Man, he got totally plowed! He flew like ten feet!"

Josh stood up to get a better look just as another fusillade of rocks landed in the truck. One hit him square in the small of the back.

"I'm hit!"

And so our ride back to the hotel turned into a hard-fought battle between good and evil with full air support. I remained covering my head in the corner; one of the stones grazed my shoulder. Again, I was exceedingly lucky. The small boy next to me, the one who had warned me of the barrage in the first place, was clutching his stomach and crying. Josh and I attended to him; there was no bleeding or contusion of any sort. In all likelihood, he was more scared than anything else. As the truck raced down the mountain, we asked whether there was a clinic or hospital nearby. The good Ethiopians sloughed off the suggestion.

"He okay. We are fine."

The truck stopped in the Piazza, and our companions admonished us to get off. They still had one of the thieves detained; he too was bloody, swollen and crying like a baby. A fight broke out between a contingent that wanted to beat him further and another that felt he had had enough. Josh and I took the stance of the latter. After all, we had most of our possessions (Josh lacking only a camera battery--as I reminded him), one of the guilty parties had been run over by a bus, the remaining hostage was sufficiently smothered in blood, and everyone was drunk enough that a fatal lynching was a real possibility. Vigilante justice had been served, a bit illiberally perhaps.

We hopped off the truck, thanking our friends and protectors. Back at the hotel, I flushed Josh's wound with providone-iodine, and that was that.

In retrospect, hopping on a flatbed truck with over two dozen soused strangers intent on having a rowdy freakout down a darkling mountain road was probably not the best idea. But that's how you acquire experience; you have to risk it to learn a bit. Increasingly in Ethiopia, I'm finding that those risks pay off in my best and worst experiences ever traveling, with very little in between. And sometimes, like last night, studded as it was with minor heroes and petty thieves, the best and the worst arrive in tandem.

Ethiopia's Christian Historical Circuit

2007-08-21T04:12:00.000+03:00

I found an excellent article detailing the popular northern historical circuit and its Christian pedigree. Written by Joshua Hammer, the author of Yokohama Burning, it travels from the early days in Aksum to the Zagwé installment in Lalibela and also covers the embattled Solomonic days in Gonder.

Ethiopia Opens its Doors, Slowly

Timkat in Lalibela

2007-08-12T21:54:00.000+03:00

Here's an audio slideshow from the Guardian showing this year's Timkat, the celebration of Christ's baptism, in Lalibela.

Timkat in Lalibela

Simien Mountains Geology

2007-08-11T20:36:00.001+03:00

Wading through the tangled hyperlink skein today, I came across a very fine article by Simon Winchester about "one of the most remarkable geomorphological spectacles existing on our planet." It concerned Wulingyuan National Park in the Hunan province of China. Mr. Winchester deploys his considerable geological background to explain the weird, otherwordly formations that give the park its pedigree:

"Sixty million years ago there were tropical seas there; sometimes they were deep, leaving soft and fossil-rich limestones, sometimes shallow, leaving hard beach-sandstone. Then the land rose under tectonic pressure...[the] limestones dissolved over millions of years into fissures and immense caves, the sandstones cracked into knife-edged pillars, some them needle-shaped mesas, gully 1,000 feet high."

With Ethiopia perpetually on my mind, it won't come as a surprise that my thoughts turned to the similarly singular pillars of rock in the Simien Mountains. I became curious as to whether the Simiens--whose dramatic escarpment serrations are, at first perception, nearly rejected by the mind--had anything in common with the needle-shaped mesas of "China's Ancient Skyline."

First things first: much of the Simien Mountains' most dramatic scenery centers around an escarpment many kilometers long where a blade of lofty peaks falls 3,000 feet. You could move from the frigid Afromontane belt to arid lowlands in a matter of steps, should self-preservation not be on your shortlist of favored pastimes. The escarpment, like much of the massif, is carved by deep river-bearing gorges. The end result is spectacular and something like this:

What exactly would produce such a precipitous drop over so short a distance? From my limited understanding of geology, I inferred that there must be some kind of erosion at work...

I raced around the internet in search of geological references to the Simiens, keen to find out if sandstone and limestone were at work as in Wulingyuan. As with almost everything I find interesting about Ethiopia, little had work had been done on the matter. After a couple hours of dredging, the only pertinent information I could come up with was from a tour company called World Expeditions:

"The Simiens dramatic topography is a result of the erosion of basalt lavas which have been calculated to be nearly 3,ooo meters thick. The rocks beneath the lava spread were horizontal layers of sandstone and limestone. Here and there weaknesses and cracks developed, opening the way for points of erosion. The cracks in the hard, resistant basalt once begun were widened and deepened by floods that poured into them, creating deep trenches and leaving hard cores of volcanic outlets from which the surrounding material has eroded away. Thus leaving an incredible array of jagged carvings, reminiscent of America's Grand Canyon." [sic]

I remembered previously reading that the Simiens were technically a massif that predated the creation of the Rift Valley, the Abyssinian arm of which cut through the landscape a couple hundred miles to the east. Some 40 million years ago the area was host to violent primeval volcanic activity that left behind a 9,800 foot layer of lava.

But I still didn't get to the bottom of what precise processes were responsible for such awe-inspiring spires of rock, such as these below:

Where is He Now?

2007-08-06T15:30:00.000+03:00

Last seen in a kamikaze minibus running the smuggler's corridor from Harar to Addis Abeba, the author is now believed to be unhappily moored somewhere in the Middle West. Reports indicate that his willpower expired under the protozoan persuasion of dysentery; his mind, moreover, is believed to have been permanently mishmashed by the social use of catha edulis, known colloquially as qat. Nearly seven months and sixty-three pounds after arriving in Ethiopia, the author is reputed to have found God, lost his girlfriend, endured a near-death experience in the Awash desert, started an export business in Africa's largest outdoor market, purchased an Abyssinian canine, developed a taste for Muslim headscarves, passed out in Tewodros Square due to Cipro complications, made off with a payload of digitized Harari Qur'ans, upset his previous no-sleep record, and otherwise rearranged his psyche.

Rumors of a reinvigoration of his erstwhile blog have gained momentum, but precious else is known. He is supposedly planning a return to the land of the Lion of Judah complete with a daring Red Sea-crossing to the city of Sana'a in Yemen.

Dorze

2007-05-21T17:22:00.000+03:00

Flash Slideshow

Here are some pictures from a photo project I did in Dorze, Southern Ethiopia.

Intermission

2007-05-05T15:09:00.000+03:00

Hey yall,

I'm living in Harar right now, the fourth holiest city in Islam (after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem). I'm lucky enough to have fallen in with a Sufi Muslim who's teaching me the history of Islam and Harar. It's pretty enriching and, needless to say, fascinating. Anyway, I'm not in a position to post much at the moment. The book is coming along, however. I'm also working on turning this humble blog into a photo rich guide to the region; this is taking up a lot of my time. So I'll leave you with an ellipsis for the time being. Check back in a couple weeks and you'll see something new and deeply interesting, to be sure.

...

"I've got my pills and my problems man. You can keep your traditional medicine."

2007-04-21T15:00:00.000+03:00

It was a Thursday evening and Hassan was snorting some local concoction of herbs. "It makes you sneeze!" I looked at the traditional medicine. It was a loose collection of pungent spices in a plastic bag.

Assuming that the main property of the medicine was its efficacy in the production of sneezing, I said, "No shit it's going to make you sneeze. Why buy this schlock? Just get a spoonful of beriberi and bump it."

He looked at me as if I had just stabbed his mother. Three roots were hanging from his loaded left nostril as he said, "No! This one ma--"

And he proceeded to sneeze with such violence that the adrenaline kissed my blood. He stood up and staggered around the hut, sneezing with the rapidity of a machine gun. He sneezed into the heavens, against the wall, on himself and sprayed a salad of roots and snot on the mirror.

A fine spray of mucus particles hung in the air. He crouched to the ground hanging his head between conjoined arms and legs. Slowly, he lifted his flushed face, looked me in the eye like a rival general and said,

"This one makes you sneeze."

From Kabale to Kisoro

2007-04-17T15:16:00.000+03:00

Uganda, Rwanda and DRC (sort of)

Lake Bunyonyi proved to be a most halcyon retreat. Beth, Lauren and I spent four days sharing a rustic cabin, gorging ourselves on the outstanding food, and relaxing over a growing army of empty beer bottles. I passed the days reading volumes from Boonya Amagara’s extensive library, awkwardly coexisting with the other backpakers, and drilling the wonderfully informative Beth on the legal minutiae of Limited Liability Companies (LLCs to the layperson).

Things did get a little strange now and then. Beth and Lauren were fast approaching a toxic saturation level of Larium, the malarial prophylactic notorious for provoking deranged dreams and psychiatric disorders. The first time I visited Africa, I had taken Larium only to notice a strange spike in the significance of colors and a multiplying pixelization of my visual field. I switched to Malarone which instead of disturbing my labile brain diminished my bank account.

Given the general onset of Gothic horror attending protracted Larium use, the cabin was ill-suited for the girls—especially Lauren and her personality’s mixture of OCD and arachnophobic qualities. In other words, the cabin was absolutely infested with spiders. The amount of spiders crawling, spinning webs and slowly descending into Lauren’s hair was truly remarkable. On Monday, the day after the afeared ‘Larium Day’, I spent the evening bravely dispatching spider after spider to insect limbo while Lauren trembled inconsolably. My valiant efforts came to aught. The foes were simply too many for me.

Lauren took solace in her dwindling supply of unnamed Tanzanian spirits. I busied myself walking around the grounds of Boonya Amagara. If you’re ever in Uganda, you should really make an effort to visit this not-for-proft organization. Otters swim backstroke in the lake, strange birds call mellifluously from the trees, and Jason—the American coordinator—huddles behind the desk scoping out the internet and nursing the contents of ‘the Box’. It’s a scrupulously eco-friendly place with composting toilets, locally fashioned furnishings, and a wonderfully competent staff. The food is among the best I’ve had in Africa; the profits are all re-invested in the community (which has access to the library and computer lab); the location is stunning and tranquil. It’s basically a workable utopia—not to mention fantastically cheap. I wondered why nothing of the sort had been attempted in Ethiopia where every tourist hotel seems curiously indifferent—even downright hostile—to the local community.

Not much of note happened, the true measure of Byoona Amagara’s pleasant remoteness. My admiration for Lauren and Beth grew steadily until we parted ways. They headed back to Kampala en route to Cairo. I was westward bound trying to see Rwanda and the Congo. I hugged them with unusual warmth as they boarded the bus. They were really good friends.

On the road from Kabale to Kisoro, the earth undulated into clusters of green hills. Some of the vegetation was so green and rinsed in the sun that it appeared an iridescent blue. Prodigiously rumped women busied themselves in the agricultural plots, slamming hoes into upturned soil, some with slumbering children cradled on their backs in kangas. I was headed to Mgahinga National Park on the border of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo. As the bus swayed its way into Kisoro, the cloud strewn-peaks of the Virunga volcanoes came into view.

I spent the night in Kisroro and got things together for some mountain hiking in Mgahinga, the densely forested habitat of one of the world’s last troops of mountain gorillas. As the taxi belched along a horrendous 14 kilometer stretch of road to the park gates, I saw a small girls’ school with this heartening scrawl smeared across it: “Moving alone is not safe. You could be defiled.” Indeed, this part of Uganda had been the site of some terrifying fall out from the civil war in neighboring Congo. A couple of years back, the self-styled Mai Mai militia—noted for its espousal of cannibalism, wanton slaughter and other nihilistic delights—had crossed the border at Bunagana and wreaked havoc on the hapless country folk. As anyone conversant with reports from the many NGOs in the area knows, rape had been widely used as a weapon of war to devastating effect. I was assured that there was no longer any danger—the UN had driven the rebels back into the jungles, and the Mai Mai leader was now part of the DRC’S power-sharing government.

I arrived at Mgahinga Community Camp, another model community-oriented tourism initiative, and began pitching my tent. While struggling with the poles, a brunette Swedish woman walked out of one of the bandas, looked at me with a blasé expression, and threw back a swig of water.

“Hello,” I offered with a smile.
She glared at me cooly, turned around and walked back inside.

I learned later that her name was Louise and that she was studying the local Batwa community known more commonly—and pejoratively—as pygmies. Improbably for an agrarian backwater in southwest Uganda, Kisoro was literally crawling with bonny Swedish women in the early-twenties age bracket. They were there taking part in some sort of government-sponsored school program. I started wishing I was Swedish.

I found what I thought was an outdoor urinal, a wall of thatch enclosing a couple of bricks and apprehensively used it. After four days of camping at the MCC and
pissing in the same place, I still didn't know if it was a urinal. But my transgressive urination aside, I did spend four magnificent days in and around the
the park.

More on that soon.

We Rafiki Three & Lake Bunyonyi

2007-03-30T13:24:00.000+03:00

We awoke early, terribly early, and took a taxi to the Post Office. In Uganda, the Post Bus is perhaps the only mode of transportation reliably short on near-death experiences. One regularly plied the road to Kabale, our drop-off point for a jaunt to Lake Bunyonyi. We were excited; the lake was purportedly free of bilharzia and situated in a cool climes. After three months of siphoning Ethiopia’s Biblical suffering, the quiet lapping of a high-altitude tarn sounded deliciously inviting.

We sat around in a maze of paint-chipped P.O. boxes as the city’s sallow haze lifted and the sun peered over the skyline. When the time came, someone would ostensibly direct us to the bus. As I sat nodding off on the belly of my backpack, a middle-aged man with a curly shock of whitening hair climbed out of a taxi. We began to chew the fat. He was going to Gulu to work on some species of academic work.

“I used to study African History at Madison,” I offered.
“Oh, and who are you,” he crooned.
He asked the question with such a nauseatingly cloying intonation that I had to check my gag reflex. I glanced at Lauren and Beth, seeing both of them shudder. What did he expect me to say? “I am Dr. Wanker McShithead,” passed through my mind, but instead I said, “My name is Dallas. I’m nobody.”

He quickly lost interest after oozing out his name, first and last, and turned to Lauren and Beth. “And what about you?” Lauren gave him a short, standoffish bio. Beth told him she was going to law school. “Mmmm,” he purred, “and what school are you going to?”

“Harvard.”
“Oh.”

That shut him up. His school was a few ratchets down the academic totem pole. I attempted to make further conversation, but once I admitted that I was unfamiliar with his work, his face, which had the self-conscious mold of somebody perpetually peeking in a mirror, began to tune out. We had some mutual acquaintances, and just as I began to talk of my professor who specialized in pre-colonial Buganda, he turned away from me mid-sentence.

A slender man dressed incongruously, for Africa, in an effeminately striped form-clinging shirt and jet black tapering trousers sashayed over to Dr. Wanker and initiated a ritual of schmooze. He sported a ruthlessly manicured mustache set off against the cadaverous white of his upper lip, an eyelash-thin strip of wispy fuzz that he caressed lewdly as he talked. He was a bizarre sight for this part of the world. All in all, he looked like a hybrid of Eurotrash and professional pederast. He extolled Dr. Wanker on the strength of a recent paper. The academic hero’s head grooved smugly to the tune of his deification. It was appalling; the whole thing reminded me of the gay bar pick-up scene in Traffic.

We split ways, I absolutely thrilled at my abysmal failure in the hallowed halls of academia. It helped me remember why I was always so depressed at University. I was glad that I would never have to act as if I held either of them in esteem.

We were misdirected until we finally happened upon the bus to Kabale and pulled out of the lot. I can’t give much in the way of scenery because my only moments of consciousness involved the splashing of drool on my hand and one embarrassing jolt during a nightmare about insects. My entire spasm was watched with bemused detachment by Beth.

“Sorry, I thought I was covered with bugs.”
“It’s okay,” she returned. “After three months in Ethiopia, I can only imagine there would be bugs in your dream world.” (Not verbatim--Ed.)

After seven hours of drooling and several stops wherein roadside hawkers jabbed spears of rancid nyama choma through the window, the bus finally trundled into a rain-soaked Kabale. We disembarked to the raucous solicitations of sundry taxi drivers. The girls had reserved a car through Byoona Amagara that was supposed to convey us to the boat launch. Unfortunately, for us, every driver claimed that he was Dennis the driver, not one of the half-dozen impostors. To make matters worse, each claimed that he had come to pick up ‘Monica.’

“You are Monica?” one of the men asked me.
“Yes, despite appearances, I am a full-blooded woman inside.”
“Who sent you?” Lauren countered.
“I sent myself!”
Wrong answer.

At length, we decided on the most insistent Dennis who quoted the same price that the girls had been emailed. He was an affable enough fellow, and the months of travel had deranged me enough that I deemed myself capable of gallant violence should he try to hold us for ransom or whatever people worry strangers will do to them in Africa. We dragged our bags into the car and began lurching through pot-hole puddles.

I had noticed a couple words of Swahili in the hubbub of and decided to bounce some sentences off Dennis.

“Unasema Kiswahili?”
“Yes!”
“Kuna majira ya mvua sasa? It’s the rainy season now?”
“Yes! I must pick up some pineapples!”
The girls snickered at the non sequitur. I fell silent.

We pulled into a sorely pockmarked road where we indeed picked up some pineapples and moved on.

“We have very bad drought here,” Dennis said motioning toward the farmland. Was he out of his mind? The congestion of vegetation was spilling from leafy hillsides onto the road. An Ethiopian drought and Ugandan drought were evidently two very different things. Uganda, so far, had been eminently more arable than Ethiopia where gray dust was the general farming medium. Here, banana trees flourished in eruptions of green propellers, avocados hung heavily from trees, and rich red mounds of soil teemed with young vegetables. Plus it was raining.

We pulled up to pier where we were greeted by a phalanx of dock workers. I ducked into a drop toilet whose previous users were apparently unfamiliar with the concept of aiming. When I returned to the launch, a dopey-faced madman in raggedy wardrobe appeared ex nihilo and performed a sad, bow-legged dance without the benefit of rhythm. He then asked me for a cigarette. I made the mistake of giving him one. This launched another inscrutable series of dancing movements punctuated by the aimless jabs of his walking stick. After his second disquieting performance, he rattled on about how much he loved to dance.

“I am dancing! I am dancing!”

Then, of course, he asked me for money. I denied him remuneration for the spectacle of debasement. He grew quiet and sidled up to me conspiratorially, nodding toward an African woman standing a couple of feet away.

“You want?” he asked brandishing his walking stick.
“What?”
“You can!” he yelled as he began to pantomime beating the woman with the stick.
“You beat her? You shouldn’t beat her.”
“No, no, no!” he returned indignantly. “But you…” and he recommenced his stick-beating charade.
“You think I should beat her?” He nodded eagerly.
“Why would I want to beat her? Besides, it was International Women’s Day two days ago. I don’t think it’s really in the spirit of the holiday.”
He gave up this course and began pursuing another, again in reference to the hapless African woman. He put his fist to his mouth and made the universal fellatio sign in a display much more graphic than it needed to be.
“No,” I said to his slurping. “I don’t need that.”
He looked dejected. Then he asked, “You have friend?”
“Yes, I have two friends,” I said pointing to the girls. They had detached themselves from the pageant as soon as it began.
“Hawa ni rafiki zangu.”
“Rafiki?” he said salaciously.
“Ndiyo, rafiki wa tatu, sote.” Three friends, all of us.
“Rafiki?” he muttered in amazement.
Lauren looked over to him and said, “Yes, all of us rafiki.”
At this the madman burst into a teary-eyed joy, his arms outstretched in triumph. “All three of you rafiking!”
“Yes,” Beth replied, “we are rafiki.”
“F--ing! You three f--ing!” he blurted out.
“Yes, we are rafiki…” I began with hesitation. “Are you saying rafiki or…”

But it was too late. He slapped me on the back, waved his arms in the air, and capered around the launch point in a state of euphoric delirium. I turned to the girls, both of whom were averse to idea on some pretty intransigent principles, and sighed,

“I think rafiki became f------g.”

News Flash!

2007-03-25T13:15:00.000+03:00

My traveling companions of one week are writing about our experiences on their blog! It's weird to see me detached from my own keyboard. Anyway, you can see how much hyperbole is involved in my writing by cross-checking it with theirs.

Girlsgoneworldwide.com (click it)

(not to be confused with GirlsGoneWild)

From Ethiopia to Uganda...By Air!

2007-03-25T12:55:00.000+03:00

Coming from Ethiopia, Uganda looked green—obscenely green. The watercourses of Southern Ethiopia were parched dry. From the airplane above, I could see only the claw marks of sunken waters, riverbeds without rivers. This began to change when we entered Ugandan air space. Immediately, a handful of forested mountains rose from the lowlands. As we grew closer to Kampala, neatly terraced hillsides popped up, growing in frequency until they outnumbered the patches of scrub. By the time we circled around Entebbe National Airport, the world below had matured into a rich carpet of red soil and luminous verdure.

I had been informed by a Ugandan sitting next to me that, compared to Ethiopia, Uganda was unencumbered by bureaucracy. I rejoiced at the prospect. The bureaucratic morass in Ethiopia had been truly unbelievable. You can’t give a birr to a beggar without having to wait for a receipt. My parting memory of the country was an abortive attempt to get a police report for my stolen camera. I went to the Mercato police station where I was shifted between four different offices and mistakenly taken to jail. There an unusually jubilant mob of prisoners greeted me with hoots and howls. Everyone wanted my mobile number.

After an hour or so of acquainting myself with every inch of the station, an English-speaking policeman wrote down everything I told him in Amharic. Then he did this again on a more ‘official’ form. After two hours of this, he informed me that it was forbidden for him to write in English and explained that I had to go to the main station near St. George’s Church. There, he said, I would be given a form to take to the U.S. Embassy where I would receive another form to return to the police station. Then, apparently, something would happen. He estimated the entire process would take three days. In any case, the form for the main station took another hour to write up. I left Ethiopia with about one-eighth of the undertaking complete.

My Ugandan visa took no more than two minutes; my Ethiopian one had taken no less than one hundred. Perhaps what I heard through the grapevine was true: Uganda is an easy country to travel in. I walked out of the terminal in high spirits. Having mastered fidel, the Ethiopian alphabet, and perfected the pronunciation of Amharic’s glottal consonants only to run into a brick wall when it came to verb conjugation, I was anxious to flex some of my Swahili. I encountered a taxi driver as I exited the terminal and decided to start right away.

“Hujambo bwana?”

He looked at me like I was retarded. I learned quickly that Kampalans, for the most part, eschewed Swahili in favor of Luganda. They also drove at speeds unfathomable for Ethiopia. As the taxi hummed along at 120 km an hour past bicycles and purring motorcycles, Entebbe gave way to Kampala. During three days in Uganda’s capital city, I noticed several tangible differences from my beloved Addis Abeba.

First of all, the cityfolk didn’t convulse into abject hysteria at the sight of an mzungu. I felt a bit let down at the lack of throngs and screaming children. Indeed, I felt like I had gone from being Brad Pitt to Dallas Lillich in a matter of hours. Secondly, Kampalans were glaringly free of disease. They seemed, on the whole, in much better shape than Ethiopians, many of whom suffer from creepy eye diseases and ringworm issues. Moreover, I didn’t see a single leper or unfortunate on the verge of starvation. But despite these happy absences, I found Kampala to be a much less walkable city than Addis. My difficulty in getting around probably owed as much to my tenderfoot status as it did to the hill density; less ambiguous was the constant stream of screaming cars at every intersection where I invariably waited for five minutes before hurtling myself kamikaze-style into traffic. At least, it seemed, Kampalans were aware that walking obliviously in the road was insalubrious.

I checked into the Red Chilli Hideaway which had been recommended to me by a number of people. They only had self-contained cabins available for $30. I had some extra money from leeching off of Hannah Maryam for two months, and I desired something like comfort—a condition I couldn’t find in Ethiopia in the $20-$30 range. (The ‘nice’ hotels I stayed in when I was sick always seemed to have a throbbing club scene directly underneath my room and a major surplus of gap-toothed whores.) I was dead-tired from staying up all night eating chat with Meki and wanted to sleep, so I committed myself to the expense.

The amiable guy at the desk walked me to the room. We chatted in Swahili on the way. I ended up completely confounding him because half the words came out in Amharic. As we neared the cabin, it looked preposterously large. “This is all mine?” I asked. He nodded, opening the door.

At first sight I was completely awestruck. I had in my possession not a mere room, but a fully functional babe lair. There were three overstuffed couches, a mahogany dinner table with candelabrum (and candles), silky curtains rippling from capacious windows, a double bed, bathtub and en-suite bathroom with—gasp—toilet paper! “Are you sure this is 60,000 shillings?” He told me it was and left. I walked around the cabin akimbo a couple of times and then passed out face down.

I awoke submerged in a tremendous puddle of drool. I rolled over, disentangled myself form the mosquito net, and walked to the on-site restaurant and bar in search of recruits for the babe lair. Upon entering the premises, the guy at the desk told me that a girl by the name of Lauren had noticed my name in the guestbook. “She knows you,” he said. “She went to the same school as you!” I neglected to remember that I’d signed my address as ‘University of Wisconsin-Madison’ and began entertaining thoughts of a pulchritudinous secret admirer. Perhaps she knew me from my band Johnny and the Church Camp Rebels and was trembling in the presence of a bona fide lady-killer. The name Lauren rang sonorously in my mind conjuring up unlikely visions of an exotic beauty wholly devoted to my every whim. I suppose I was pretty lonely. In this way I sat around drinking until I noticed a comely young woman with a wireless card sticking out of her laptop.

“Excuse me,” I said suavely as she passed by. “Do they have wireless here?” “No,” she said wistfully and a conversation was born. Before long she told me that Lauren, her girlfriend, had seen that I was from Madison where she had gotten her B.A. And so, as is often the case with me, the spider had not caught a fly but instead idiotically entwined itself in its own web.

This ended up being just fine, as I made two fascinating new friends whom I bored with my endless blathering about the ex-girlfriend who I clearly hadn’t sweated out of my system. They also had with them a large supply of Tanzanian swill, a resource that I exploited into extinction. Lauren was a documentary filmmaker with a history of NGO work; Beth was a young New Yorker politico on her way to Harvard Law. They were traveling around the world for a year before returning to their sure-fire, power-couple existence on the eastern seaboard. They moved into the babe lair with me for two nights wherein the most erotically-charged moment ended up being my early-morning sighting of Beth’s bare back.

We got our plans together for an excursion to Lake Bunyonyi and had some excellent conversations in which Lauren gleaned a number of regrettable quotes from me for their website’s exhaustive ‘Quotes’ section. I seem to remember saying something alone the lines of “The Qu’ran isn’t very chill.” (See girlsgoneworldwide.com for the incriminating evidence.) We spent a couple of days in Kampala before boarding a bus to Kabale en route to four days of easygoing eating, reading and sleeping on Itambira island.

Ethiopia Whirlwind

2007-03-08T15:45:00.000+03:00

Flash Slideshow

Some highlights from a couple months in Ethiopia.

I am starting to look crazy

2007-03-08T14:59:00.000+03:00

Update Uganda

2007-03-03T12:39:00.000+03:00

Wow.

The outpouring of comments from that last entry has lit a fire underneath my chapped backside. I would feel guilty if I didn't tell all a yall what changes I'm making to my plans. I didn't think anyone even read this old thing.

Some species of parasite has amorous feelings for me. I can't kick it. After finishing the antibiotics, I started strutting around like the cat's pajamas. I was flexing in the mirror, ruminating on chat, high-fiving everyone. Then, one night, that surly brown foe began roaring in my entrails again. The last three days have been a lesson in aiming a shower head's flow of sewage into the meager opening of Meki's drop toilet. So, even if I haven't left the homestead for a couple days, I've been pretty occupied.

Anyway, given my advanced decrepitude, I've decided that Northern Kenya isn't the best idea. I can't imagine traveling through such harsh territory with total gut rot. I hear great things about Uganda all around, so I'm going to try to take a flight to Kampala and see the 'Pearl of Africa.' I'll meander around, perhaps breach the border with Rwanda. It all depends on whether I can, in fact, recover.

After that, I'm planning on returning to Ethiopia and opening up an antiquities venture with Meki. It's too good an opportunity too pass up--roving the bush, having a permanent base camp in Africa, traveling the globe with my web catalog of goods--not to mention bedding jewel-eyed maidens the world over. I'll keep people posted on how that comes along.

For now, I have a treasury of photos from Northern Ethiopia that I'll upload as soon as I have them organized on my laptop and can find something approaching broadband (a word with an utterly different connotation in Ethiopia). This Flickr/Blogger slide show hybrid is pretty cumbersome, so the photos might end up linking to a .Mac page gallery. To those of you who have mentioned publishing, I have been working on what could only be called an experimental travel novel set in Africa. It has to be just about the weirdest travel literature I've ever read. The first three chapters are in development; the first one I've nearly finished--bizarre. Sort of like a Mevillean invocation of the muse. It's coming along, maybe I'll put some of the chapters on here.

I'll keep working on this blog. If nobody objects, I'll start posting entries without regard to chronology. Thanks for the support, everybody. It really does mean something over here. Keep putting up comments and I'll keep posting.

I have to go to the bathroom.

The State of the Dallas

2007-02-28T17:21:00.000+03:00

To my loyal readers:

The last month or so has been action-packed with epic battles of will. To those of you who have been kind enough to inquire about my well-being, I’m please to report that it is back, after something of a rough patch. Once in Lalibela, I acquired what I think may have been dengue fever but was just as likely a monstrous case of the flu. As my last entry indicates, I recuperated in Gondar just long enough to get myself nearly stoned to death. From there I made my way to the Simien Mountains where I again encountered adventures in stone throwing, was mauled by a mule and plagued by a case of what may best be called heinous anus with supplementary vomit.

I alighted in Aksum after a sweltering day in the cab of an Isuzu and enjoyed my time there as much as I could in the circumstances, which were darkened by an unforeseen visa deadline owing to the ineptitude of a petty clerk. Once the airline servers were back on-line, I sullenly flew back to Addis to renew my visa. Whilst there, I began to get my bearings back a bit and feel the faint stirrings of confidence. I moved back in with Hassan, my macchiato brother, only to find him in the middle of a religious revival. The hut had been converted into a Muslim prayer center. I tried to keep the beer bottles from clinking during the homage to Allah and finally quit drinking altogether.

Together we made a pilgrimage to the Wolkite area of Gurage-land, the land of his birth. It was a revelatory and inspiring experience that I hope to address in a later entry. My wholesale eating and drinking of questionable fare continue, and by the time we returned to Addis, I felt a bit rearranged. The next morning I was awoken by a thunderous burst of intestinal purée and absconded to a hotel. I spent three days there dodging the advances of enterprising hookers, reading the Qu’ran and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and attending to the ministrations of my dyspeptic bowels. As the bell continued to toll, I finally made it to a clinic where the jolly doctor informed me that I was hosting a gala of dysentery, Guardia and hookworm. The hookworm came as a surprise and something of an insight. I’d spent a number of hours laundering everything amenable to soap, thinking that the scabrous welts on my legs were evidence of fleas. This was not the case; they were the staging-grounds of a hookworm fleet burrowing its way to my innards.

I’ve finished my course of antibiotics and also received my laptop, a maddening process worthy of Kafka novel. I intend to get to work straight away. The dreary and excruciatingly slow Internet cafes need not delay me anymore. My camera, however, is in a state of disrepair, so mere words will have to suffice for a month or so.

I’m leaving Addis and lumbering south in a couple days. My visa is again a cause of worry, so I’ll have to see Ethiopia’s nether-regions on my way back. For now I’m focusing on the desert regions of Northern Kenya. I hope to make it from the montane oasis of Marsabit to the jade seas of Lake Turkana. This is in the Northern Frontier District, a name that suggests a paucity of web access. Whatever happens, we’ll meet again in the foothills of Mount Kenya. I’ll continue forging ahead on my laptop and updating the blog haphazardly for now. Wish me luck.

Peace!

The Stoning Begins Now

2007-01-15T10:48:00.000+03:00

I've been a bit backlogged on my posts and placing the blame on the exorbitant cost of Lalibela's Internet cafes and a nasty case of the flu. I've been trying to fill in the lacunae chronologically, but last night I had an experience that begs relation while freshly plowed in my mind.

I can say, even conservatively, that I have never been so thoroughly in the cross-hairs of danger; nor have I ever been party to so bloody a fracas.

So fast-forward: I'm convalescing in Gondar, the site of a 17th century castle complex and one of the most atmospheric cities in Ethiopia. For a week now, I've been tagging along with a professional photographer by the name of Josh Cogan, a fast friend and willing tutor. Yesterday I began lusting for a bit of adventure as most of my time has been spent catching up on sleep--a scarce commodity in Lalibela--and hacking my way to a clean pair of lungs. So I suggested to Josh that we scale the nameless mountain of the ritzy Goha hotel and suss out the scene.

We walked a couple of kilometers, forging our way through the hassle heaped on faranjis, when we spied a horse-drawn cart, a gari, led by an erratic young colt. It zoomed past us, only to double back, the colt capering wildly and bucking about. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. We settled on a price of 5 birr to convey us to the mountaintop, but bailed out about halfway once the horse began zigzagging on the switchbacks with scant regard for the margins of the road. After half an hour, we walked through the gates of the Goha and into a wedding.

Having been wedding guests a week before (entry forthcoming), we were versed in the chants, songs and antics of an Ethiopian wedding and comported ourselves magnificently. Before long, we were as much a part of it as anyone else. The body heat rose, the singing climbed the decibel ladder, the beer flowed in cascades and everyone had a right good time. As the night wore on and we realized that all the town's taxis had been commissioned by the wedding, Josh and I wondered how we were to get back to the Circle Hotel. The answer came in the form of a flatbed truck loaded with 30 drunk Ethiopians.

Josh had success earlier that day hitching a ride with a similar vehicle and bounded into truck bed without reservation. I followed suit. The truck itself was in poor repair, composed of a closed cab and an uncovered cargo hold bisected by a shoulder height pole. The bed, as mentioned above, was bustling with some 30 rowdy Ethiopians between the ages of 12 and 20, all despicably inebriated.

"Where you go?" asked one of the ruffians.
"Circle Hotel."
"Ah, Circle Hotel."
"Ou." Yes.
"Chigger yellum." No problem.

Our destination settled, we proceeded to get down. Nothing, not even the sordid spectacle that followed, can undermine how hard we partied with this crew of Habashawoch. The call-and-response patterns peculiar to Ethiopia were trotted out with unusual gusto. Our facility with them enlivened our Ethiopian friends, who swung heartily from the pole, danced in a rapturous flurry of limbs, and yelped with appreciation. Josh executed his Thriller-era Michael Jackson moves and roused everyone into a screaming rendition of "I Like to Move It, Move It." I answered by emceeing a vicious version of "Who Let the Dogs Out," complete with a schizophrenic proto-breakdance. As our truck lumbered down the mountain with the rest of the wedding caravan, our party wailed and barked like a portable junkyard.

The party rose to one pitch and then another, the cultural bounds of the passengers less appreciable by the minute. It was a supremely beautiful moment, the kind vaguely imagined when one undertakes a long stint of travel. But it was too labile to last. It turned ugly in an instant, and the joy came crashing down like a wall of fine china.

"Okay," Josh screamed. "Where is it? Where's my camera?"
The barking doghouse fell silent, and the writhing dancers froze.
"This isn't funny!" he yelled. "My camera is my life, my livelihood!"

With that, he tore into the crowd, laying hands on every benighted article he could, ransacking his way to the pilfered camera and flash. He quickly recovered them but kept scouring for a missing camera battery. It happened so quickly that I turned to my own camera bag a bit late. I rummaged through it to find the front pocket unzipped and my little notebook missing. I frisked myself and felt my passport and wallet in my shirt pocket. Josh returned to the front and double-checked his belongings. We exchanged a few words; I had recovered his notebook and handed it back to him. Satisfied that I had made off pretty well, I turned to the scene at the back of the truck.

A menagerie of bodies and shadows converged on the two thieves caught in flagrante delicto, one with a flash in his hand, the other with a camera. Emboldened by drink and enraged at the fact of our special fraternity blasphemed by wanton treachery, our Ethiopian friends commenced the most spirited beating I have ever seen. With the truck still chugging down the mountain road, I saw one thief, clad in a crisp red shirt, get his face pummeled into a pulp. One of the more lusty Ethiopians, whom I had exchanged a number of back slaps with, held him by the neck, hissed imprecations into his ear, and repeatedly slammed his face into the guardrail. His teeth spilled out like beads from a broken necklace. At one point, the avenger pushed his head as far over the rail as his could, trying to mash it against the cliff face as the truck scraped by. The thief, delirious from the beating, fell to the ground, and everyone uninvolved in restraining his counterpart began stomping him furiously. It was a total beat down.

Josh, meanwhile, had rushed back into the melée, trying to find his camera battery. The truck stopped abruptly at a perilous mountain switchback. I followed him in, trying to have his back in one way or another. As he berated the bleeding, sobbing remains the thief, I felt a little kid tug on my sleeve. I shook it off, taking it for misdirection. He tugged again. I swung around and hissed,

"What?"
"Dallas, get down!" he quavered.
"Why?" I demanded.
"The stoning begins now!"

Sure enough, a volley of stones arrived, crashing into the truck bed. I ducked down and covered my head. Apparently more than just two thieves were in on the scam; they had escaped unnoticed and started hurling rocks at us, aiming to free their co-conspirators. I crawled into one of the corners and turned back to see Josh obliviously shaking down one of the thieves.

"Josh, get the fuck down! They're stoning us!"
He turned to me, his glasses atilt, and yelled "What?"
"Get down! They're throwing stones!"

He clambered up to the front and took cover with me. The rocks fell like hailstones and sent everybody scrambling. The bloodied, half-dead thief leaped over the side of the truck and ran to the front. I looked through the back window of the cab to see him holding a stone in each hand, crying hysterically. With gore surging from his nostrils and oozing from his toothless mouth with every pathetic whimper, he wound up, aiming a rock at the windshield through his imbalance. Just as he pitched to throw, he staggered into the road and right into the path of an overtaking minibus from the wedding party. A rock whizzed over my head, and I fell to the ground hearing a dull thud and what sounded to be a skidding body.

"Holy shit!" Josh exclaimed. "The thief just got hit by a minibus!"
"Is he dead?"
"I don't know...No, he got up. Man, he got totally plowed! He flew like ten feet!"
Josh stood up to get a better look just as another fusillade of rocks landed in the truck. One hit him square in the small of the back.
"I'm hit!"

And so our ride back to the hotel turned into a hard-fought battle between good and evil will full air support. I remained covering my head in the shadows; one of the stones lightly grazed my shoulder. Again, I was exceedingly lucky. The small boy next to me, the one who had warned me of the barrage in the first place, was clutching his stomach and crying. Josh and I lifted his shirt and attended to him; there was no bleeding or contusion of any sort. In all likelihood, he was more scared than anything else. As the truck raced down the mountain, we asked whether there was a clinic or hosptital nearby. The good Ethiopians sloughed off the suggestion.

"He okay. We are fine."

The truck stopped in the Piazza, and our companions admonished us to get off. They still had one of the thieves detained; he too was bloody, swollen and crying like a baby. A fight broke out between a contingent that wanted to beat him further and another that felt he had had enough. Josh and I took the stance of the latter. After all, we had most of our possessions (Josh lacking only a camera battery, as I reminded him), one of the guilty parties had been run over by a bus, the remaining hostage was sufficiently smothered in blood, and everyone was drunk enough that a fatal lynching was a real possibility. Vigilante justice had been served, a bit illiberally perhaps.

We hopped off the truck, thanking our friends and protectors. Back at the hotel, I flushed Josh's wound with providone-iodine, and that was that. In retrospect, hopping on a flatbed truck with over two dozen soused strangers intent on having a rowdy freakout down a darkling mountain road was probably not the best idea. But that's how you acquire experience; you have to risk it to learn a bit. Increasingly in Ethiopia, I'm finding that those risks pay off in my best and worst experiences ever traveling, with very little in between. And sometimes, like last night, studded as it was with minor heroes and petty thieves, the best and the worst arrive in tandem.

The Pilgrim Bus to Lalibela

2007-01-13T13:18:00.000+03:00

We awoke at 4:30 am and traipsed over to Debre Birhan's bus station, intent on advancing as far as Dessie. The bus stop was surprisingly astir with activity for so early in the morning. Ethiopia's buses embark at ungodly hours; I came to view them with weariness, being the vampire that I am. Hassan, my traveling companion, went in search of water while I attempted to load my backpack on the roof. A disturbed-looking man clutched my arm and began babbling about the astronomical price such an novelty would incur. He was resolute in his quote of 30 birr, repeatedly shoving his open hand at me in demand of payment. Everyone else projected a variance of opinion. As it turned out, he was wholly unconnected with the administration of the bus and not even a passenger. My backpack was shoved in a lower compartment, I wedged myself into the front of the bus, and threw a couple pills of Immodium down the hatch. Soon we were off.

A heavy mist hung over the mountains that morning, a condition completely unacknowledged by the bus driver. Given the high fatality statistics of road travel in Ethiopia (the highest in Africa I'm told), he didn't inspire me with confidence. Now overtaking a truck on a blind mountain pass, now arranging his purple towel of a headdress in the rear view mirror, now craning his neck to carry on with his friend in the back of the bus, the rheumy-eyed driver seemed unprofessionally distracted from the zero-visibility of the road.

By far the biggest distraction was the tape deck. In a country where technology tends to be sadly outdated, the tape deck of the Pilgrim Bus was the saddest of all. The entrance of a tape effected a hideous, earsplitting screech . This did not prevent the driver from focusing all of his attention on it. As we jolted over a road like an exploded mine field, he boxed the tape deck repeatedly, rewound the tapes by hand with a ballpoint pen, inserted them into the tape deck, punched it, ejected them, bashed them against the dashboard, and inserted them again. Finally, between the screeching, I could make out a thunderous, reverb-drenched voice ranting about Haile Selassie, Jesus Christ, and God. I rightly took it to be fire-and-brimstone preaching.

I comforted myself with the lack of cataclysmic car accidents in the papers. In Kenya, at least, you can't open up a newspaper without reading about a matatu plunging 1,000 feet off a sheer cliff and bellyflopping its payload of 40 passengers below. Then again, the press in Ethiopia doesn't exactly enjoy freedom, and the government is pretty touchy about anything that could damage its reputation abroad. The likelihood of an English-language report on one of the four buses we saw capsized between Debre Birhan and Dessie was decidedly low.

So far the only vehicular carnage I saw was one exceptional instance of minibus violence. Three days prior, Hassan and I were heading back to Hannah Maryam by bus. The metropolitan buses of Addis are ramshackle affairs with mouldering seats and aisles pregnant with blowing trash. They have a kind of ghost town quality to them, only they are full of bitter-looking people. We got off at the major intersection between Saris and Meskel Square called 'Baghdad' by the locals--a place where the settlements have been torn to the ground by the government for reasons as of yet unrevealed. We got on a minibus, and I took my seat on the wheel well. At the next stop, a crush of people slammed against the door and tried to gain entry. One person disembarked; twelve tried to get on. Their efforts seemed unusually desperate. Then I noticed a maniacal barefoot man around my age tormenting everybody.

He reached in and grabbed the minibus tout and started strangling him. It was an uneven match, as the boy was all of thirteen. The maniac pulled the boy out of the van and began barking at him, his hands tightening around his neck. I took it to be a dispute of some longevity between the two parties. After all, one doesn't gad about indiscriminately strangling minibus touts. But when I looked to the back of the bus, I realized there was more to the altercation: I could see Hassan's eyes aflame with rage.

Hassan got out of the minibus and began yelling at the maniac. Two men of the crowd inserted themselves and freed the tout. They pushed the maniac to the ground. I saw a man flash through the air as if he had leaped from the top rope of a wrestling ring and land a punch full on the face of the lunatic. His head landed heavily against the concrete and bounced up. The blow would have knocked a lesser madman unconscious; as it stood, it only knocked out his front teeth. He now used his bloody spit to keep the crowd at bay while he persisted in throttling the tout.

Hassan had finally had enough. He grabbed the tout, placed him in the minibus, and confronted the aggressor with his superior frame. Faced with so colossal a foe, he backed off. Everyone got back in the minibus and it seemed that the conflict had ended. The tout thanked Hassan and proceeded to close the door. Just before it clicked shut, the maniac jumped in, pulled out the tout, and started strangling him again. Hassan and I decided to get out. A couple of parries later, we decided to leave. The maniac was knocked to the ground once again; the minibus took off, but not before a well-aimed rock shattered the window. A shower of glass fell onto the street amid horrified screams.

I asked Hassan what the point of contestation had been between the tout and the angry young man. Apparently, the maniac was despicably drunk and in need of more drink. Having spent all his money, he held up our minibus and tried to extort it. He aimed his efforts at our hapless tout as he was the treasurer. Finding it all strange, I found it particularly so that the driver had completely absented himself from the tout's defense; he had just as much to lose. Hassan, for his part, was ashamed that a minibus full of his countrymen had responded so apathetically to the threat. And that's the grand tale of Minibus Violence.

Meanwhile, the sun rose on the Pilgrim Bus--and that's when I realized what it was. About forty people in spotless white raiment sat behind me, some in checkered head wraps, others holding walking sticks surmounted with silver crosses. I asked around; the bus was headed to Lalibela for Ghena, the Ethiopian Christmas. So too was I, a happy coincidence.

After the heights of Debre Sina (Mount Sinai), the thick mists lifted a bit. It would be difficult to overstate the natural beauty of the scene before me. In the foreground, elephantine grasses sprung out of the roadside between cactii that looked like crockeries of giant ping pong paddles. Behind lay fields of golden-hued teff and emerald green patches of sorghum riven by jagged riverbeds; these cut deep into surface like open wounds in the red earth. The enormity of space was interspersed with huts of mud and grass called tukuls, with woodsmoke curling out of their kitchens. A background of fleecy clouds nesting on peculiarly rounded mountains completed the picture.

The mountain ranges of Ethiopia are ancient, predating the formation of the Rift Valley. Millenia of erosion have stripped the peaks of their sharpness, but left their slopes nearly vertical. On the road to Lalibela, they appear to be the bellies of sleeping giants or shoals of humpbacked whales. Ambas, flat-topped mountains, abound--some peopled with minuscule settlements . Amid such drastic scenery, it is difficult to imagine the survival of any meagre notion; Ethiopia is truly a land of kings.

From Debre Sina, a good asphalt road makes a straight shot for Dessie. Enjoying the unfolding panorama, I had no recollection of packing my travel wallet. It wasn't in my carry-on bag; perhaps it was tucked somewhere in my backpack or sitting temptingly on my bed in the Akalu Hotel. I mentioned this casually to Hassan who immediately stopped the bus. A dozen people got out with me in a frenzy of concern. I removed my backpack from stowage, and twenty-six hands rifled through it. Sure enough, there it was at the very bottom. The discovery set off an explosion of joy among the lost-and-found posse, with everybody smiling and slapping each others' backs.

I was a bit sheepish about stopping the bus in the first place and climbed back in with a bit of trepidation. Instead of leering at me, the passengers clapped and seemed genuinely pleased I had found my lost article, no one more so than Hassan. He let out a sigh of relief.

"Now," he said, "we do not have to worry."
"I wasn't that worried," I countered. "I was reasonably sure it was in my backpack."
"But what if it wasn't?" he moaned. "What if you left it at the hotel? That would be shame for the country of Ethiopia!"
"Shame for Ethiopia that I'm an idiot?" I asked.
He shook his head as if I couldn't understand.

We decided to continue with the friendly bus all the way to Lalibela. After stopping in the drizzly town of Dessie for lunch, I brought out my camera and showed everyone in the back some of my photos. The bus tout was the most impressed.

"You make beautiful picture!" he said gleefully.
"Thank you."
"And you show to us!"
"Of course."
"Because you love the people! You are different faranj!"
It was one of the nicest compliment I'd ever received.

As our thirteen hour bus ride continued along occasions of road between potholes, I grew more and more impressed by the passengers around me. Most were older, many of them elderly ladies wrapped in shawls of white. I tried to picture a bus load of American soccer moms taking a twenty hour ride to Church on a road slamming their heads against the ceiling. Probability: zero. The hardship was taken with good cheer, joy even. I received oranges and Pepsi with a nod of the head from people far up front. I passed my iPod full of photos around. Many remarked on the beauty of my estranged girlfriend: "Enchi konjo no!"

Ten hours into the bus ride, one of the women brought out an Arabic calendar. It was a book full of hand-written hymns. The entire bus began clapping and singing; the tout stood up and shouted out the verses; both women and men ululated; and the bus filled with the strains of voices praising Maryam, Mother Mary. While the transformation of a dingy, rattling bus into a choir was moving, the most miraculous transformation took place in the person of a small boy sitting next to me. He'd had a haunted, harrowed aspect to him thus far. His brow furrowed with concern and his eyes lush with anguish, he'd spent most of the time anxiously looking around the bus, waiting for some great calamity to strike. But with the opening of the hymns, the angst melted from his face and he sang like an angel. He was possessed of the finest voice on the bus, that of a prepubescent boy absolute in his devotion, unencumbered by the doubts of adolescence.

But as the bus rode on, I realized that even the awkward looking youths with thin, fuzzy mustaches and pimply countenances were singing with equal conviction. A blind old lady in front stood swaying in the aisle raising her hands and giving thanks to God. The bus tout ran around leap-frogging over seats and clapping giddily. Everyone was in a state of spiritual ecstasy on the way to Ethiopia's Holy Land. Not one person wore a trace of sanctimoniousness. There was none of the competition for visibility I see so often in the dress of church-going Westerners: everyone wore the same humble cloth. My overall impression was that of a mild-mannered, solemn and deeply devout people on an ineffable journey to the heart of their faith. For the first time in many years, I felt a connection to Christianity and the power of God. Still, I couldn't locate it outside the people and doubt I ever will.

As the bus pressed into its thirteenth hour on the road, twilight fell on the landscape, now an amphitheater of mountains, each a huge hulk of wrinkled flesh. A blushing horizon heaved pink streaks into the purple clouds above as they scudded over the range. Row upon row of serrated mountaintops, like clusters of shark teeth, extended into mere suggestion. Suddenly, a maniac boarded the bus and began strangling the angelically singing boy.

Just kidding.

Debre Birhan

2007-01-13T11:25:00.000+03:00

En route to Lalibela from Addis Abeba, Hassan and I stopped in the languid mountain town of Debre Birhan. It was quite a relief from Addis, particularly in terms of hassle. The children failed to agglutinate into faranji-screaming swarms; beggars didn't cross the street to importune me; prices didn't skyrocket the moment I set foot in a cafe. But there's always something; in this case it was my stomach.

I'd spent the better part of the week contending with an alien life form gurgling away in my belly. It was in Debre Birhan--'Mountain of Light'--that it completed its infiltration of planet Earth. I woke up on the morning of the 3rd to an angry rumbling that I promptly ignored. Hassan and I went to the City Top Cafe where I ordered a macchiato. As they were steaming the milk, I couldn't tell whether the swooshing sound was coming from the kitchen or my gut. By my third sip, I knew it to be the latter. Coffee, milk, and sugar--was I trying to defy the gods?

Within seconds, I became aware of an angry mob crowding around the one physiological exit. It was perhaps one kilometer to the hotel. With veins sprouting from my forehead and a sheet of sweat oozing from my pores, I stood up and declared, "Gotta go." Hassan looked up from his Sudanese breakfast a bit baffled; before he could inquire, I was gone.

I proceeded to walk the longest kilometer of my life. It was a masterpiece of adaptation. Because I knew that any release of pressure meant failure and humiliation, I kept my buttocks firmly clenched. This, however, was not conducive to forward movement. The only real option was to pivot on one foot, swing to the other, and then repeat. In this way, I made my way to the hotel swinging like a revolving door.

I also adopted the adage of "When in Ethiopia, do as the Ethiopians do." Because the country and its people attribute everything, whether victory or failure, to the whims of God, I abandoned the fate of my mission to the monarch of the skies. Not, of course, without what must surely be one of the strangest prayers on record:

"Dear Mighty God, maker of Heaven and Earth, please grant this unworthy sinner the sphincter control required to reach the Akalu Hotel without releasing a riotous torrent of shit. Thou art great; please use thine omnipotence to stymie the flow of fetid sewage from the buttocks of your humble subject. And if thou Lord-all-powerful see fit for this miserable wretch to spill his bowels in public and thereby ensure his everlasting shame, please locate the site of ignominy somewhere inconspicuous, like an abandoned alleyway, or perhaps a deep ditch with limited visibility from the horizon."

As God would have it, I was destined to reach my hotel room door where I frantically stabbed the keyhole. I quaked on the commode for the better part of the day. Two factors conspired to enhance the humor: for one, the toilet seat was mysteriously unattached to the toilet bowl. Secondly, the toilet, as is the case in most hotel bathrooms in Ethiopia, was right next to a curtain-less shower. I had taken a shower earlier that morning; the effect was not unlike a really disgusting Chucky Cheese challenge, a kind of slip n' slide propelled by explosive diarrhea.

We didn't make it Debre Sina as intended. In fact, we were moored in Debre Birhan, or at least that's where I dropped anchor. The matronly owner of the Akalu Hotel boiled me some potatoes, Hassan dashed about cornering the town's supply of toilet paper, and I bounced through an eight hour series of contractions. After a dose of Cipro and Immodium, Hassan and I walked around the plains south of town. A full moon rose between mountain peaks while pink ribbons of light streamed out of the west. And thus a morning of fear and trembling gave way to a night of peace and sleep--well, peaceful but for the troop of fleas I picked up.

Mercato Madness!

2007-01-01T13:49:00.000+03:00

Flash Slideshow

Yes, my friends, your valiant photojournalist wannabe sallied forth into the Mercato armed only with a camera and came back with these illuminating photographs. Enjoy!

A Good Hut is Hard to Find

2006-12-27T15:32:00.000+03:00

Pound for pound, the women of Ethiopia's service industry must be one of the most attractive cross-sections of the world's population; my waitress at the confoundedly-named Extreme Hotel was no exception. She had served me a number of national dishes--from spicy Doro Wat to the ground beef staple Kitfo--with finesse and a ready smile. By the fifth night, I felt up to a little small talk and told her that my work as a waiter had financed my trip.

"What was your salary?" she asked.
"Pardon me?" The boundary between r's and l's in English is less-pronounced in Amharic. She repeated the question, and I pondered it.
"Well," I rambled, "on a good night, I probably make $150. On a bad night, I might break $100. So I probably make an average of $120 a night."
She laughed. "I make a 150 birr a month."
"A month?" I stared at her slack-jawed.
"Yes, one month, 150 birr." She smiled and left me to my food.

Back in my 172 birr a night hotel room, I began calculating. At 8.7 birr a dollar (roughly the current exchange rate), she made about $18 a month. Working five nights a week, she could hope to make $216 a year, some $36 dollars more than the newly announced per capita GDP. So, on a really good night--not altogether unusual at Restaurant Magnus--I made more than she did in an entire year. As if to heighten the absurd inequity, she wore a cleaner uniform and carried herself with more dignity than I ever did.

I began pacing and wound up in the bathroom. As the 150 birr a month figure mixed with the day's images of Addis Abeba's poor, I felt an unendurable wave of sorrow. What could I do? The rusty waterworks began churning. I sat down with a ponderous plop on the cover of the toilet and, as my backside burst through it and into the commode's reservoir, I realized that simply feeling sorry for Ethiopia was about as effective as plunging my butt into a bird bath. I also realized, incidentally, why Ethiopians keep their toilet seats up.

Luckily for me, I had met a man by the name of Hassan Nasser a couple of days before. A well-known trader, he inspired me over a round lattes with his rag-to-relative riches story of growing up as a shoeshine boy and using his wits to become an antiquities dealer. He was a scintillating conversationalist loaded with personal histories of Ethiopia, the sort of things I devour. Whenever he recounted miscarriages of justice or, come to think of it, any form of iniquity ever perpetuated by man in the history of the world, a dull blue flame of outrage flickered in his eyes--the mark of a righteous individual. We soon became inseparable and were referred to half-disparagingly as 'The Macchiato Brothers' by the sundry loiterers of Addis--a reference to the components of the de riguer coffee drink, one-half black espresso and one-half white milk.

After telling me how he lost his incisors fleeing forced conscription by the Marxist Derg regime, he mentioned his wife and family across town in Hannah Maryam. I inquired further, and he invited me to see for myself. A kindly man from Canada by the name of Shawn had helped him acquire a plot of land and build a home, some outbuildings, and a hut. He invited me to stay in the latter. It was just the sort of offer I had been waiting for: I could stay with an Ethiopian family outside the diesel-choked commotion of Addis and learn the rhythms of daily life. No more hysterical taxi horns at the gates of the Extreme Hotel inciting the stray dogs into nights of epochal warfare! Here was a way to use my money for the local good instead of putting it in the pocket of a morally decrepit miser of a man who paid his waitresses $18 a month.

We decided on Saturday the 23rd as the move-in day and Meki met me in the morning. We took a series of minibuses, first from the Piazza to Saris, then from Saris to the Ring Road and Hannah Maryam. Built by a joint Sino-Ethiopian workforce (or, if you listen to any Ethiopian, by the labor of their countrymen under cruel overlordship of Chinese taskmasters), the Ring Road isn't exactly a ring yet. The last I heard, it circumnavigated three-fourths of Addis Abeba with the final quarter in some state of abeyance. But that's neither here nor there. What I want to write about are the minibuses.

The minibuses of Addis Abeba form a far-reaching and cheap system of public transport. They are invariably of Toyota-make, the top half white, the bottom half blue. They can hold up to eighteen people, though the limits of comfort hover closer to twelve. These snub-nosed vehicles are perfect for the difficult maneuvers demanded of them: weaving from traffic lane to road's edge for pickup, darting around pedestrians curiously indifferent to their lives. Their dashboards are bedecked with votive images of Christianity, with Mary being the apparent patron of the minibus drivers. On the whole, these guys (always guys) seem less under the spell of a death wish than the taxi drivers who perform the most kamikaze feats of derring-do in the name of shaving 30 seconds of the transit time, only to return to sitting around aimlessly. A spoonful of adrenaline makes the medicine go down.

The best place to sit in a minibus is the front. The panoramic advantages of such seats are somewhat diminished by their certain-death-upon-impact and driver-fondling-your-leg thinking-its-the-gearshift qualities. The worst place to sit is probably on top of the wheel bed due to a hot torrent of dust. Two people operate a single minibus, the driver and the tout. The driver is usually the elder of the two, although it must be said that he might be twelve. The tout, for his part, has to be a born acrobat. At every opportunity he slides open the cargo door and hangs precariously out of the van shouting its destination: Saris! Saris! Piassa! Piassa! Mercato! Mercato! When he perceives an interested party, he slaps the side of the van signaling the driver to stop. Sometimes, inexplicably, the tout gets out and disappears for five or ten minutes until the driver begins leaving in storm of calumny; he then miraculously reappears bounding through the door. The minibus: an uneasy marriage of transportation and entertainment.

In this way, Meki and I arrived in Hannah Maryam's bucolic surrounds. I met his wife, Habiba, and his daughters, Hannan and Labiha; I also took a liking to the halcyon hut where I have been living for the last week and a half, hence my lack of posting.

Stay tuned...

Yod Abyssinia: Ethiopian Dancing

2006-12-27T14:09:00.000+03:00

Flash Slideshow

Photos from Stefan The Swiss' last night in town taken at Yod Abyssinia on Bole Road. Featuring the inimitable Gebre Meskele Gessesse!

Yod Abyssinia caters to a well-to-do Ethiopian crowd, though a considerable faranji contingent is present. The menu represents the entirety of Ethiopia's rich national cuisine; it was here I first tried the mouth-watering tere sega: raw beef spiced to perfection. I ended up at Yod Abyssinia randomly, having run into Stefan constantly over his last two days in Addis. His friend from Mekele (the capital of Tigre), Gebre Meskele Gessesse, kindly drove us.

Aside from my pleasant company and the haute cuisine, I was very impressed by the dancers. I watched four to five of them (depending on the song) sweat to a variety of styles and work it for a full four hours. With the recent passing of James Brown looming large on the airwaves, I can't help but think that these people are the hardest-working men and women in show business. All in all, an enjoyable and highly recommended experience.

Addis Ababa Photos

2006-12-22T18:44:00.000+03:00

Flash Slideshow

Photos from my first week of rambling around Addis Ababa.

The Madness of the Mercato

2006-12-21T19:52:00.000+03:00

After four days of outfoxing Addis Ababa's pickpockets, I deemed myself mentally prepared for the Mercato. Perhaps dumb luck accounted for the integrity of my belongings, or perhaps the alarmist tone of the guidebooks had no basis in fact. Regardless, my tally of stolen goods had accrued to one mechanical pencil probably misplaced during a bout of peer pressure between me and a bottle of Scotch.

Gazetted by the Italians in 1938 as a 'Grand mercato indigeno,' this ill-defined area northwest of the city's center has since functioned as its commercial hub. It is said to be the largest outdoor market in Africa, one that suffers a nasty reputation for wallet-snatching and bag-slashing. Its literary status seems to depend on where a given author stands in respect to the wind: some describe it as an intoxicating confluence of exotic aromas, while others call it a stinking cesspool. All seem to agree that the Mercato sells anything and everything, from camels to chat, from silk finery to AK-47's. The time had arrived for me to form my own invalid opinion.

Averse to sparing myself the city's less appetizing sights and eager to let the sun work my doughy flesh into the hardened bronze of disgraced country club ladies, I walked the 6km from Churchill Avenue to the Mercato via the Piazza. It was an unusually hot day for Addis; so hot, in fact, that I considered resorting to disgraceful measures previously unknown to me, namely the wearing of shorts. Fortunately for my dignity, I had read that Ethiopians are modest dressers, and shorts fell outside the purview of propriety. I thus took to the streets attired in a two-tone blue outfit of rolled-up long underwear and jeans. Almost everyone else was better dressed. In my zeal to avoid appearing the Great White Colonizer, I instead looked like a pauper, or more accurately, someone with no self-respect. Like most of my attempts at cunning, my wardrobe betrayed an embarrassing core of malfunctioning self-consciousness. Oh well; it was a worthy effort.

Along Churchill Avenue, Addis' main artery, I grew sympathetic to the accounts of former travelers. Uniformly churlish in tone, they give the impression of a chronically unfinished city. I can't say that this view is wholly inaccurate: the growth of Menelik's 'New Flower' appears more a process of metastasis than blossoming. The sanitation system, at least, hasn't caught up with the population density, if such an amenity can be said to exist at all. At every river's bridge, people hurl sodden buckets of rubbish onto the banks below. Whether purposely, accidentally or inevitably, these piles set ablaze and befoul the air.

But there are other amusements: where else can you witness outdated minibuses, cars and donkeys vying for suzerainty of diesel-choked streets? Where else can you see children head-butting crude tetherballs amidst a backdrop of Armenian architecture and Marxist obelisks? Where else can you hear the amplified crooning of Orthodox Churches competing with the Mosques' muezzins for the souls of a city? However much Addis may shock the senses, it still evokes sensibility.

Somewhat inured to shock, it was nevertheless with some surprise that I walked into the Mercato only to see a naked man spreadeagled on the pavement as if it were his private beach. A broad, beatific grin stretched across his face; his dress--ornamental at best--was more typical of a San "bushman" than an urban Ethiopian. I took everything about him to be exceptional, although I haven't any idea what rule such an exception might prove.

The Mercato opens into an endless warren of ramshackle stalls struck together out of dilapidated buildings and corrugated metal. The further you tread, the more you disappear into a dusty jungle of hawkers shrilling their wares. Nearly one third of the men sweat beneath some tremendous burden on their backs, usually a sack of grain. Gaggles of women sing and dance from the waist up; glassy-eyed men sit splayed in the shade ruminating on chat; shifty characters flit across the streets; lumbering trucks drive in virtual assurance of pedestrian fatalities--all to the national soundtrack of florid caterwauling that is Ethiopop.

Keeping in mind Ethiopian piety and modest dress, I was surprised to see that urinating in the middle of the street was not only permissible, but popular as well. I decided not to follow suit despite a distended bladder. I didn't feel that such relief would blend in, even as a man five feet from me loosed a yellow lasso. Just then a boy in brown rags backed into me. I turned around to see him holding a rock with palpable menace. I backed away. A better-dressed boy ran up and kicked him. The ragged one cocked the rock as if to throw. His opponent laughed and ducked under a blow to kick him again, exciting an outburst of laughter. Bystanders began to hoot and holler. The aggressor jogged over to make a final attempt. The poor boy's knuckles whitened around the rock as the well-dressed boy trotted up to him to land a kick. He pretended to throw the rock, caught the foot of the kicker, shoved him away and hurled the rock at him. It landed on the assailant's back with a dull thud. The ragged boy preened for the jubilant crowd while his opponent squirmed groaning on the ground. Justice was served.

Elsewhere, my presence as the lone faranji was taken with amusement, curiosity or hostility depending on the person. Rounding the corner on to the chat street, an adolescent boy ran up to me and wailed, "Why? Why are you here?" He said it with the abject passion one normally associates with Christ's last words on the cross: "Father, why have you forsaken me?" Not much later, a muttering madman caught sight of me and crossed the street to scream spit-flecked words into my face. He stood a shrunken five feet tall and had to tilt his head back to lob saliva at me. My limited understanding of Amharic notwithstanding, his speech didn't conform to any discernible pattern and seemed more a loose concussion of improvised sounds. Then he began beating me with a switch. Naturally, I found this a bit vexing and objected to my shabby treatment.

"Yikarta!" I said, Amharic for "Excuse me!"

He continued beating me undeterred. I didn't exactly have Barry Bonds on my hands; the beating was aggravating but not very painful.

"Yikarta!" I repeated.

I moved away to little effect. I looked around in exasperation only to see the younger boys pointing giddily in my direction. A bemused crowd began to form around us as my assailant continued his anemic flogging. Finally, a soldier broke through the ranks and began waving what looked to be an AK-47 in the air. He yelled at the man and kicked him in the backside. As the loony scurried away, the soldier pointed to his head and said, "Ballagé."

Crazy.

It was a fitting epitaph to the day.