Aske

Hey to you all.

So many things have happened down here, so we have not had the time to update the blog for the last couple of weeks. So let us update you chronologically.

Two weeks ago we invited four of the Danes over to our rooms for tomato soup and pancakes. We had spent a long time on cooking and preparing, and it was certainly a great challenge to fit six people in our “kitchen”, but we managed. It was great talking to them about the quotidian life here and we agreed with two of them, Mette and Louise, to meet again the following day (Sunday) to go on an exploring trip some miles out of town.

Sunday we woke up (very early) to go to church before we had breakfast at a café nearby. We found Mette and Louise later on (or they found us) and they immediately ordered the taxi that should bring us to one of the surrounding villages. The taxi driver asked for 500 birr ( = 50$ or the monthly wage of a teacher with a university degree) to take us there, but as we were all desperate to see the surroundings we accepted. We went to Seka, a village some 30 km from here as our Lonely Planet had recommended us to see the local waterfall. It was great to see what Ethiopia really looks like. 85% of the 80 million people in this country live on the countryside, so what we see here in the town in not the average Ethiopian. The landscape was astonishing and really African. We live 1800 m above sea level, but still there are mountains surrounding the city on all sides. There are mountains, plateaus and fertile, red soil everywhere.

When we came to the village, people immediately formed a crowd around us. We had to walk for 20 minutes to reach the waterfalls and had great company by many boys who wanted to be taken photos of for 1 or 2 birr. When we reached the valley of the waterfall it felt highly surreal, like the revelation of a landscape in a Disney movie. Well, look at the picture and judge it yourself. By the waterfall there was a constant breeze from the big masses of water moving the air and it just seemed like such a perfect sanctuary, all it needed was a bamboo-café selling warm macchiatos and cold colas.

We spent an hour or so there, following the local kids all around the waterfall. Local boys were swimming naked, men were chatting in the shade of a big tree, and some women were drying their clothes on bushes in the sun after having washed it in the brown water of the river. The waterfall was nothing big or famous in Ethiopia and I am sure not many foreigners go there, however it just felt so relieving and refreshing to see it, to feel the wind from the water and to get out to where electricity is still just a new invention.

On our way back we saw a bus being stopped for a police inspection. A German we talked to the day after had experienced six check-points on the 30 km bus ride between the village and Jimma. As we might have mentioned, chat (a lightly intoxicating drug taken by chewing the leaves of a certain plant, not the media of communication) is extremely popular around Jimma and apparently one cannot carry big amounts without having to pay some chat-taxes. What the chat-growers do is to distribute a pile of chat to all the passengers in the buses and collect them again when the bus reaches its destination.

Maria has written about our trip to Addis Ababa, but she did not mention how we got there. When we came to Jimma a long time ago, we took the daily domestic airplane (40 min.) as we could not imagine what a bus ride in a strange country and with 60 kg of luggage would be like. This time we wanted to do it the local way (and to save a considerable amount of money) by taking the bus (the buses operate at a fare price of about 1½ $ per 100 km). We found out that to take the bus in Ethiopia is a big mess, especially for people who tend to get carsick (Maria) or for people who like to wake up late (me). To take the bus from Jimma to Addis one has to be at the bus station at 5:15 in the morning, 1½ hours before it gets light. What meets you there is hundreds of people waiting outside the bus station for the gates to open at around 5:30. When the gates have opened (it really felt like being at Roskilde Festival again) people rush to find their bus. Every bus has a discretely placed sticker with a number on the side, which has to match with the number on your ticket. Luckily the taxi driver (one of the four in Jimma) who took us to the bus station also ran with our luggage to find our bus. He was fast, so he managed to get the best seats for us; the ones right behind the door, ergo a lot of space for the legs.

When you have taken your seats you sit, and wait. No one knows exactly what you wait for, but waiting is a compulsory part of the bus ride. People, beggars, boys selling chewing gums and other strange characters go in and out of the bus while you wait for it to leave after about 1½ hours. It is bitterly cold around dawn and when you have only slept for four hours the same night the enjoyment of yourself in the bus is at that point of time at a very low level. It helps when the sun starts to rise and the bus driver turns on the engine and sets of for Addis Ababa. The odd thing is that nobody knows how long it is going to take. There are 354 km and it takes anything ranging from 7 hours to 1½ days to put them behind you. We were lucky and arrived in Addis at around 14 o’clock, thanks to a fast driver.

The way to Addis was just marvelously beautiful. There are two valleys or gorges the road has to cross, so there are quite some serpentine turns that an experienced 4x4 driver would enjoy. However we were in a fully booked, Ethiopian-made bus that had been on the roads for at least a couple of decades, so Maria did not enjoy it as much and spent most of the seven hours gazing out of the window. I should maybe have done that too as it gave a good impression of the society and nature. We will post a picture or two of the landscape, but the majesty of the highlands cannot really be captured on a photo. I spent the bus ride finishing my Mandela autobiography that I had read ever since we arrived in Ethiopia. Finally on our way through the suburbs of Addis I got to page 527 (the last one) and read some very wise words by Mandela which I immediately forgot as I was exhausted and tired from waking up early.

After four hours drive the bus stopped for twenty minutes so the passengers could get some (Ethiopian) food. We just wanted to find a bathroom and were met by a big man who apparently was the manager of the “rasteplatz”. We chatted a bit with him and it turned out (according to his own claims at least) that he had been one of the royal, personal body guards of the Emperor Haile Selasse of Ethiopia and had travelled with him to destinations like Germany, France and England just to mention a few. What gave him credibility was that he immediately recognised the name Denmark. He guided us to two of his “hotel” rooms that were just about to get cleaned and said “you can take room number 5 and you take room number 6”. Great, two private “toilets” for 10 minutes. There was a hole in the ground, no tap, no water, no toilet paper, but the gesture in itself was highly admirable. So we also bought some coffee there on our way back from Addis.

In Addis we bought many different things (as you can read from Maria’s entry), and also two international newspapers. We really wanted to find some, but were unable to do so in the bookshops. We were told that we could probably find some at the Hilton and Sheraton hotels (the two most expensive hotels in Eastern Africa), but as I had forgot my dress and Maria her robe we didn’t quite dare (or bother) to go there. Luckily we were stopped by a street seller outside one of the most exclusive supermarkets, he turned out to have both Le Monde and The Guardian. Oh heaven! Now that I have no more Mandela to read, I am trying to get through every article, before I will start on a new book.

I guess that is all so far.

More news and pictures will come some time in a week or two.

Aske (with Maria by his side)