LIMPING INTO ETHIOPIA

IN JULIA'S WORDS

The astonishments of Loiyangalani bamboozled the overheated brain as we left, again in the dark, to rumble and shake our way towards our next spot: Koobi Fora, a place on Lake Turkana in the Sibiloi National Park, juuust on Kenya’s side of the border.

Bamboozled, astonished and overheated turned out to be merely the general mis-en-scene for our true challenges. Packing up at Palm Springs again, grumbling and snippy in the dark, dawn revealed to us the scrubby-gravel-sand vista, interrupted here and there by an inexplicable mountain of scree, or mega heaps of stone the shape of curvaceous teen breasts. 

The curves of Lake Turkana at dawn

On and on Lake Turkana stretched as we drove northwards following car tracks in the dustscrub. These tracks are not to be confused with a fixed road of any kind, and often times they divide up and veer in different directions, and not even our faithful Garmin has the foggiest where we are.

So having got ourselves lost, we found ourselves also in the midst of a stretch of serious sand. The kind of sand they dedicate chapters to in books on driving 4x4. You should let the air out of your tyres – go as low as 1.6 bar if you want – engage your diff lock and go into L4, keeping in second gear and revs around 200. Keep the speed low but keep it steady, and above all – don’t stop.

This I’ve read and even occasionally practised, but did I do any one of the above now? So before very long I had revved our car into a fairly deep and sandy ditch.

Hardly had we stopped than the local Turkana people came running (like the Maasai they’re dressed in little other than bright beads and slight cloth draped around, and herd cattle and goats in unbelievably harsh environments). A thin middle aged woman took control, yelling at me and Rehana and pointing vehemently in one direction, commanding the dusty children who gathered to do this and do that, and then fell on her knees to start sweeping sand out from under a tyre and shove stones under it.

Rehana and I did same with the other tyres, but a few attempts later we were no better off. Luckily, we had bought sandtracks with us. This is another one of those 4x4 mystery items (along with the winch, the compressor and the inverter) that we’ve had to become friends with. Sandtracks are very large very hard yellow ski-shaped items. There are two of them. 

First of all you unpack at least half of your car to reach them where they’ve been tidily tucked at the very bottom of the pile. You then wipe the sweat dripping off your nose before digging some of the sand out with your hands from beneath the front of the backwheels, and jamming one sandtrack under each wheel. Then you engage the diff and put the car into L4. Then you carefully, slowly, rev and inch until the wheels get a grip on the sandtracks and the car lurches out of the quicksand on to safer ground.

So that’s what happened. First time we’d used them, and sandtracks are forever our friends.

Our jubilant crowd, the woman pleased with the shillings we gave her for her troubles, howled and waved us goodbye. Mike and Carol had noticed we weren’t behind them and had come to find us, and together we retraced our tracks to where we met up again with the “main” route to destination Koobi Fora in Sibiloi National Park.

This meagre track led us across said sandyscape with its many dried-out river beds, some broad, some not. They make for demanding driving because the riverbed’s edges you have to negotiate can be steep, and avoiding thwacking the rear of the car as you descend is damn tricky. Plus, of course, the sand that fills the dry river bed is extra special thick.

In the in the middle of one of the broad dry river beds was where we were sanded for the second time in a day after still failing to observe sand driving rules. This time, as soon as the tell-tale whhhhirrrr was the only response to me revving the engines, Rehana and I looked at each other, sighed hotly, and went about the drill like pros getting out the friendly sandtracks (this time not packed at the bottom, hallelulia), jamming them under the wheels, engaging L4, etc. Perhaps a 5 minute delay? Quick learners we are.

A stretch of firm sand in the bleached landscape

So you can’t say we were daisy fresh when we finally arrived in the middle afternoon at the sweltering gates of Sibiloi National Park in a particularly bleached stretch of nothingness. Mike and Carol’s Big Silver stood ahead of us shimmering in the heat as we all traipsed gasping like fish out of water to the park’s office – where we handed over a phenomenal $700 between us for the privilege of driving through the park and camping for the night at Koobi Fora. All paid up, Big Silver roars herself along the sand track.

The sun smashing down on us, Rehana and I clambered bamboozled and overheated back into Big Red. Rehana twisted the key in the ignition as usual, and instead of the formidable roar we’ve been accustomed to, there was … a lame ticking sound from somewhere in the engine.

We exchanged glances. Rehana tried again. And again. And then once more. Just that same, fuckinghellnothing ticking sound.

Struck by heat we stood and stared at Big Red from several different angles, but mostly from the front at the hot red bonnet within which the inscrutable engine lay. Rehana pressed the hooter to try and alert Mike and Carol to our stuckness, but they had already driven out of sight into the park.

“Starter motor?” I stabbed into the dark of our ignorance.

“Nah,” said Rehana.

“Battery?”, I suggested.

“Nah,” said Rehana. “The hooter worked – it wouldn’t have if it was the battery.”

“Nnnng,” I replied, neither agreeing or disagreeing and feeling bamboozled, overheated and a bit panicky.

Because, as I stood there in the mis-en-scene of empty upon empty-of-a-mechanic land, I felt keenly as a panga upon a throat the full truth of my total ignorance of the car we depend on as you do your house; and how totally we depend on Big Red, to be our reliable car and our safehouse. 

That jolly-hockey-sticks-bah-humbug larf I said you, blog reader, as we set off ignorant as moths at the beginning of our trip? Now, not such a ho-di-ho larf at all.

The single, only, thing we know to do when an engine fails – besides calling a mechanic – is to jumpstart it. Seriously. That’s it. And although Rehana didn’t think it’s the battery, and I hadn’t a clue, because it is the sole, the single, the only thing we have any idea about at all when it comes to fixing engine failure, we dig out the jumper leads, attach the red positive of the main battery to the red positive of the auxillary battery, and … Voila. BRC burst back into roardom.

So it was, it would appear, a battery issue.

I must, at this point, be clear: BRC had for several weeks already been indicating that something was battery-wrong. Our dashboard had said so, in the lighting up of some inscrutable icons that lit up like alarms.

They were alarms, as we have now realised – and of course we’re both totally pissed with ourselves/ each other that we didn’t do something about it. We did have a service, after all, and already the dashboard warning lights intermittently would come on. But the truth is, I was so damned tired at the time in Nairobi, I couldn’t face another day (already two) sitting in a cold room, making minimum do, while we waited for the mechanic to finish the service.

Really, what a mistake. Because, since that first clear battery failure at the sweltering gates of Sibiloi National bluddy Park, our lives – including those of Mike and Carol – have been shaped by our failed power-generating system.
Because, you see, no matter how far Big Red drives, the batteries (and we have three, two new), DO NOT CHARGE!!!!!!!! Why is beyond me, but a superior form of life (a Toyota mechanic?) must surely know.

Pretty donkeys in the bleak incredible.

IN REHANA'S WORDS

The Kenya Wildlife Service staff in Loiyangalani and Samuel the Kenyan tour operator told us about a road flanking the lake to the Sibiloi National Park. They said it was in a good condition; it would be pretty; there would be less traffic and it would be shorter than the usual route.

Lake Turkana was to our left all the way – darkening from silver and turquoise at dawn to grapefruit red in the afternoon – making the road a pretty option. But it was riddled with dry riverbeds filled either with sharp grey gravel or soft white sand. We didn’t see another car all day.

After we mired in the sand for the second time, we decided to engage 4x4. This was no time to take into account our fear of running out of petrol before we reached the first garage in Ethiopia, at least two days' drive away.

Trees in the riverbeds were the only green in the landscape dominated by brown and grey scrub and dotted with gravel and black lava rock. Cicadas screamed in the trees. We have hardly encountered them on our travels to date; it hadn’t been hell hot in any of the other places we’ve been. Large herds of camels roamed across the road, perfect for the environment.

An environment fit for camels. Somalia is nearby.

After our false start at the gates of the Sibiloi National Park, we drove straight to the Koobi Fora campsite. We saw about six buck, a few birds and hundreds of goats as we made our way, flagellating ourselves for ignoring the warning light that had been glowing on our dashboard for days.

Koobi Fora campsite was close to the lake, which was shaded in grapefruit like Cape Town’s beaches when the red tide chokes the life out of the sea. From a distance, its stone buildings seemed inviting. We pulled up and climbed out, leaving the car idling.
Two men and four teenagers were lounging in plastic chairs on the shady stoep. All we got was blank faces when we asked if any of them worked for the Kenya Wildlife Service or the campsite.

One of the boys eventually admitted that he could speak English, and led me to the electricity switch where I plugged in the battery charger. He said we could camp anywhere, waving at the hot sand and thorny pale yellow grass. The rest of the group on the stoep stared robotically at us – mostly at Julia who eventually hissed them away, saying that she was not mzungu TV.

We plugged in the charger and hoped for the best. Hope yielded nothing. When we tried to start the car a few minutes later, there was nothing but dull clicks. We unpacked some of our goods (for the fourth time that sweltering day), rummaged and discovered that the charger’s connection to the battery had come loose. We probably hadn’t charged our batteries when we plugged in at Loiyangalani for our four-day stay.

The Koobi Fora campsite. The water in the lake was grapefruit red.

Jules and I decided that the challenge we faced was too big for our overheated brains. We changed into our cossies and headed for the lake. The six litres of water we had chugged on the eight-hour drive (during which we travelled just over 100km) hadn’t done much to cool us down in the 40-plus degrees heat.

We checked with the young English speaker and he said there were no crocodiles; it was safe to swim.  I had read that the northern shores of Lake Turkana were the most infested with crocs and I was nervous. But there were pelicans on the beach, and goats lying down contentedly. They would be our early warning system.

When we entered the lake my only worry was how we were going to find the strength to get out. The water was the perfect temperature, somewhere between 24 and 28 degrees, and we frolicked with huge grins.

Then I noticed that the goats and the pelicans had disappeared. We scrambled out. In the distance, we saw boys in the water. We decided to join them for another swim before heading back to the camp.

As we strolled towards them, me ankle deep in the water and Julia walking nervously on the sand, I saw a long shape moving fast into the lake just ahead of us. I glimpsed its tail before it disappeared. Unmistakably a crocodile.
To confirm my fears, ahead of us, just as I warned Julia, another croc slithered in. They weren’t the biggest crocodiles I had ever seen, but how big do they need to be to turn your blood to ice? Julia got goosebumps in the extreme heat. I was jealous.

We stepped up our pace to warn the boys in the water. A man was with them, one of the two we had seen earlier on the stoep. I joined my hands at my wrists and slapped my palms together to mimic a crocodile’s jaw; all I got was another blank stare.
The boy who spoke English joined us. He said there were many crocodiles in the water but they were scared of people and left them alone.

As we walked back to the camp Jules and I had a few minutes of glee – Ruhi Khan would probably enjoy hearing that his nana and Jules swam with crocodiles, everyone else would think we were insane.

Sunset at Koobi Fora. Goodbye Lake Turkana

Like all of the camps we visited that were “managed” by the Tanzanian Parks Board, the KWS gave us nothing at Koobi Fora. There was no tap, no fridge with cold drinks and no one to clean the ablutions despite the place being populated with men, women and children. 

Their washing hung on the lines; that was probably their slivers of soap on the dirty floors of the shower, their reek in the toilets I daren't check out. They removed the television from the main building while Jules and I were swimming with crocodiles.

We are beginning to suspect that these park facilities –where foreigners pay $30 a night for the privilege of being completely ignored – have been taken over by squatters in the absence of any management checks.

The wind howled and it rained in the night, fat drops that sent me into an exhausted sleep around 8pm.

IN JULIA'S WORDS

When, pre-dawn (I hate that), I steered Big Red onto the first of the sand tracks in the Sibiloi National Park towards Omorate and Ethiopia, it was the engine shutting down almost immediately that forced me to snap out of my half-sleep.
Not even a whisper of life, until we once again jumpstarted it. And then, a few hundred metres later among the pink whisps of sunrise and the pressing thorn trees, again the engine died. And only awoke when jump-started, and only then for a brief while.

But among our number (that would be four) is one most deft mechanic, Mike MacGyver Martin. So his bright idea was that we swopped one of our batteries for one of his. His battery would be charged coming from his working car, and our lame drained number would be reboosted as he drove with it in his Big Silver. 

And so we limped on through landscapes of scrub and dust and in-your-face curious, mostly naked, people, anxious all the time that we’d splutter to an unfixable halt, but managing to go on after swopping batteries every few hours or so. 

Through a swift river and fudge-mud we plunged, to the customs and immigration buildings in Omorate we reported, at Turmi under Mango Trees we spun out a night, until in Arba Minch (meaning “Forty Springs”), finally, we staggered to a halt. And now in the oooo-inspiring comfort of Swaynes Hotel, we urgently need to find ourselves a mechanic.

The view on the second day of our limp into Ethiopia

IN REHANA'S WORDS

As we set off from Koobi Fora the car’s digital clock faded to nothing, the rev counter and speedometer needles dropped to zero – our entire dashboard died. It began raining, fat drops that made circles of mud on our dusty windscreen. Julia switched on the wipers and we chugged to a standstill. Our Garmin warned us that it was losing battery power.

Our car seemed fine for a while after we swopped batteries with Mike, until it stared raining again. We used the wipers and the dashboard died. We could use no electronics, including the Garmin, but our car kept going.

As we neared Ileret – the last Kenyan town before the border with Ethiopia – I spotted a big silver river snaking towards it. Ileret's traditional stick and cow dung round huts were covered in silver iron sheets; it must be at least 60 degrees inside at noon. 

We had to report to the police station before jumping the border. A loquacious policeman laboriously wrote our names and passport numbers in a big ledger while we itched to be on our way. Our car’s problems had cost us time – there was a lot of nothing to traverse before we reached Omorate, the first town on the Ethiopian side.

Within a kilometre of leaving Ileret we met our next hurdle. The river behind the town was raging and about 50m wide. Mike rolled up his pants and waded across while we watched anxiously. Although the current was strong, the water did not go above his knees and the sand was firm under his feet. He crossed first and made it to the other side. We followed, anxious that our car would cut out in the middle of the torrent. We made it across but our car shuddered to a standstill a few minutes later.

We swopped batteries again.  A group of people gathered to stare. All the women were topless and wearing goatskin/camelskin(?) skirts. Every female over the age of 14 (or so it seemed, they may have been younger or older) had a baby on her hip. They were all beautiful; it was hard not to return their constant stares.

We set off again, Mike leading the way. A few minutes later we watched him skid across a brown muddy pool of rainwater. We followed and were quickly mired in the mud. Jules tried to reverse; we slipped sideways. She tried to go forward; again we slid to the side. Mike stood on the far side, waving his arms frantically.
Julia sought traction – the last thing either of us wanted was Mike's help again, we had caused enough grief. Eventually she managed to manouvre us through the muck and we set off again.

We drove into a settlement and found ourselves in a backyard. A crowd came out and waved at us to go back and around. Naked children screamed with excitement as we headed out, several holding onto the cars and running behind and next to us. They probably don’t see much traffic.

At the next settlement a piece of wire strung up across the faint track in the sand brought us to a halt. We drove around the building to which the wire had been attached, encountering people who angrily motioned at us to go back the way we came. We obliged and stopped at the wire, where a tall man was waiting.

He was wearing a blue shirt with “police” stitched onto his breast pocket, but he was definitely not a policeman. He demanded to see our passports and squinted illiterately at them. We told him we had reported to the police at Ileret, hinting that we would report abuse. He lowered the barrier and let us through.

There were no roads, no signs as we drove into Ethiopia. This was our guide

We wound our way through the scrub, the landscape sparse after we passed the northernmost shore of Lake Turkana. The costumes of the people on the side of the road and in the small settlements gradually changed. The men still had feathers in their hair and jewellery on their ears, necks and chests, but they also had white striped socks painted on their shins all the way up to their knees. Many carried ancient shotguns and rifles, draped across their shoulders.

The children were mostly naked. The women were all topless and their hair was cropped Cleopatra style, twisted and matted and drenched in red. Probably a mixture of goat fat and ochre, much like the Himba in Namibia.

I noticed the first Amharic signboards outside settlements, proof that we had crossed the border. Mike said afterwards that the border had been at the wire barrier in the unfriendly village.
Needy as Malawi was, we were now in the land of aid. Every settlement was bristling with boards advertising largesse. They were all there, the European Union, USAid, Farm Aid, Food Aid, Child Aid, Cow Aid, Christian Aid, Islamic Relief, Hope for Mercy (what a crap name!) and a school erected with the kind assistance of the government of Monaco. I hadn’t known until then that Monaco had a government.

A few kilometres later a rope barrier strung across the road brought us to a standstill again. While Mike spoke to the men who gathered round his car, we glared at the clamouring, begging children who left fingerprints and snot on our car windows. We locked our doors after a child opened Mike’s door and some of his possessions tumbled out of his car.

Eventually, a young, dreadlocked man came to Mike’s window, spoke to him and waved us through. Mike said later the men had said, “give us something”. When he declined they said, “give your T-shirt”. Mike told dreadlocks that we had been on the road for months and had already given away everything we could. What we had left was what we needed.

I only realised the next day that the men armed with rifles and machetes manning the barriers across the road were probably the bandits we had been warned about. Their methods were so clumsy that it hadn’t occurred to us to be scared.

At the very next dry riverbed an Ethiopian truck was stuck in the sand. They had piled rocks and branches under their tyres but with each rev the truck sank deeper. They produced a towrope and Mike pulled them out. It was turning out to be his Good Samaritan day.

South African civil servants should be sent to Omorate in Ethiopia for training. The immigration offices were empty and locked when we arrived at lunchtime on a Friday. A young man went to find help and within minutes an imp of a man arrived.
He looked just like my Uncle Hassim except that his forehead was taller and his reading glasses were bigger – Austin Powers owlglasses. I’m sorry that, because of my anxiety and exhaustion, his name escapes me because the man deserves a medal.

He quickly completed his formalities – apologising endlessly for his handwritten ledger entries as there was no electricity in the town. The immigration offices all had air conditioners, neon strip lighting and plug points on every wall. Maybe they once had electricity and it was taken away.

The heroic official phoned his colleague in customs and told him to cut his lunch hour short. Young Mr Customs (can’t for the life of me remember his name either) was efficient, but the most officious of his breed we had yet encountered.
He labouriously filled out his form using carbon paper to make triplicates and left his office to inspect the cars, checking all our electronic equipment and our chassis and engine numbers. Not one customs officer had done that before.

Everyone we encountered in Omorate was amazed that I wasn’t Ethiopian because I looked just like them. The staff at the Ethiopian consulate in Nairobi had warned me this would happen, but this hadn’t prepared me for the extent of the familiarity. My whole family – especially the Rossouws with healthy foreheads – were represented on Ethiopian faces.

We made our way to Mango Camp in Turmi, 70km away, without the car dying. The trees offered sumptuous shade and hundreds of small green mangoes perfect for pickles if we’d had the energy to pick them.

Jules and I served up a magnificent feast. We switched off our fridge to conserve our batteries and used as much of its contents as possible before putting the rest in Mike’s fridge. We had olives, asparagus, avocado, chopped tomato and onion, sardines and tsatziki with lashings of lemon. All that was missing was pita bread; we made do with toasted Kenyan government loaf.

We were so exhausted we were aphasic. Julia would start a sentence and sputter to a silence like our dead batteries, “where’s the … that thing, you know … that thing I’m looking for. That I put with the … You know, that thing …”. I could only stare in silence. I wasn’t going to start a sentence I couldn’t finish.

We were in bed at 9pm and didn’t set our alarm. We were leaving Turmi when we were ready to move. The campsite was above a deep and wide riverbank and the Spaniards sharing the space said the walk along the trickling river was beautiful.

The view from the Turmi campsite

Mike and Carol went for a morning walk the next day; Jules and I were too anxious about our dead batteries and too exhausted after breakfasting and packing up camp at Turmi.

Staring is going to be a big issue in Ethiopia. We knew this before we came and yet it still got under our skin. The big problem in southern Ethiopia, particularly, is that the local Hamer people live so far outside of time that people come from faraway continents to stare at them. There aren’t many places in the world where you find beautiful women, walking around topless, wearing skirts of skins and dripping in animal fat, living about 20km from a tarred road.

The faranjis’ (Amharic word, means mzungu) staring has changed the Hamer people; they demand that you take their photos. They charge for each click and, reportedly, if you take a photo of a mother and child you have to pay both.

The Hamer are stared at every day by tourists as excited to see them as they are a lion or elephant. How can you take offence then, when they stare at you? Maybe they think staring is what we do and they’re trying to be polite.

The Spaniards at Mango camp had gone to stare at the Hamer. One of the first questions they asked me was whether women in South Africa also walked around topless. I bristled and said we wore clothes and lived in brick houses, some with sophisticated alarm systems, dishwashers and swimming pools. Pretended I knew nothing about the Zulu king and his ways with virgins.

I’m still the bourgeois bitch travelling through Africa. I have to be; at many campsites I've been ignored by our fellow pale-skinned foreigners who probably think I’m a guide or a cook for the rest of our team.
Not one of the big Italian group at Palm Shades in Loiyagalani greeted me. I asked Jules to check, and her greetings were returned. So I took to shouting my greetings at them and eventually they acknowledged my existence. It’s going to be worse in Ethiopia because I look local.

A teenaged Hamer girl with matted red hair came traipsing to our camp. She languidly removed the cloth wrapped around her shoulders and coyly asked, “photo?” as her firm breasts came into view. I said no thank you, she stayed for half and hour and stared at me nonstop.

We finally left Turmi at 11.30am, after we once again swapped batteries with Mike. Batteries are heavy, may I remind you.
None of the blogs we had studied prepared us for the next leg of our journey. None of them oohed and aahed about the mountain pass that took us down to the lush Omo valley below. The mountains echoed the physiognomy of the people we passed – hewn dark rock covered in skinny trees with dusty grey and red caps of foliage.

Hamer people lined the gravel road as we slowly drove out of their world, most of them with hands outstretched and screaming at us for money.

Those are Hamer people walking up the pass. Couldn't get close up pics, sorry

As we drove into the valley we realised that the lush green we had seen from above were thousands of acres of cotton plants. There was a market at a junction where we turned towards Arba Minch with stalls displaying reams of Ethiopian cloth. I can’t wait to get my hands on some.

Just after we swapped batteries again on the side of an unexpectedly tarred road that shimmered in the heat, the road wound its way up and down high hills and short mountains all terraced and planted. 

We made such good time that we stopped at Konso for a late lunch.
Our first Ethiopian meal was a winner. The Strawberry Fields Eco Lodge and restaurant (a foreign funder must have named it) served up vegetarian food on a stainless steel platter.
The lentil and potato stew was hot and spicy, the spinach crispy, the carrots so bright they were almost red. The injera had just the right amount of sourness. The portions were large and the cost was small. I don’t think we’re going to be cooking much in Ethiopia.

Despite the tarred road, the drive to Arba Minch was hectic and laborious. The day was drawing to a close and people were taking their livestock home – herds of cattle and goats ambled slowly in large swathes across the road.

The Maasai should bring their five year olds to Ethiopia to train herders. Few of the locals had sticks to keep their beasts in single file, yet every male without exception carried a rifle, machete or spear. 

When we screamed at them in impatience – we didn’t have a hooter and were worried about time because our car had no lights – they lazily swatted the beasts with the butts of their rifles or the flat side of their machete blades. Fortunately Mike was right behind us and his hooter was working.

Jules filmed the livestock traffic jam and one day when we find high speed internet (probably won’t find any before we’re back home) we’ll share the footage that starts with a bull humping a cow in the middle of the highway while hooters blare at them.

Most of the young herders were too busy clamouring at our windows for money to care about the jam. Hundreds of children we passed on the road broke out into a dance that made them look like frogs on a hot tin roof. I think faranji are expected to stop and distribute loads of dosh in payment for the performance. Their unattended livestock forces us to stop – that's a good strategy.

If I ever meet the people who taught thousands of children across Africa to scream “give me money” at every foreigner they encounter I am going to strangle them very slowly while I bake them on a bed of hot coals.

It’s not that I mind beggars. My neighbourhood and the whole of South Africa is riddled with them. There’s a man with no legs planted in the middle of a busy intersection no more than 2km from my house in Johannesburg. There are beggars at every robot, in every parking lot and homeless people sleeping on the pavements and the riverbank flanking my house.

But I’ve never before had to deal with kids forcing me to a standstill, banging on the car windows, hanging onto the car as we pull away. We’ve been warned that kids throw stones at faranji who don’t give; it’s already happened to Mike and Carol and this is our second day in Ethiopia.

I’m not used to women beseeching me with both hands outstretched. I find it unnerving when they lift up their children with swollen bellies and plant them on the road as we drive past. Every time we stopped (its very hard to take a roadside pee in Ethiopia), we were mobbed by people.

As we drove towards Arba Minch we passed one village where everyone looked as though they were from Mitchells Plain and another where the people would slot right in if you dropped them in Elsies River.

We made it with minutes to spare before we needed to switch on our non-existent headlights. Arba Minch is perched on a mountain that looms over two lakes – one red and one silver blue connected by what the locals call “the bridge of God” – two hills joined by a spit of land.

A quick snap from a distance of the two lakes. We never got there. Click on the pic to enlarge.

I needed time to get my head around this incredible and arduous journey. It was a bit too much. In one day we travelled from a place where women wear skins to a university town where women wear skinny jeans. This trip can’t only be about getting there, I need to be somewhere for a while. 

Arba Minch offered us the fanciest accommodation we’ve had to date – large, clean ensuite rooms in a guesthouse at less than half the price of a night’s camp in a national park in Kenya or Tanzania.

We found the best mechanic in town, Mamush – who looks and moves just like Terror Lekota. He diagnosed the alternator, removed it from the car, opened it up and shook out charred remnants of wire and plastic.
Mamush sweated for two days to rebuild our alternator, cloning it with a used one that had been in a Toyota Venture, he installed a regulator and checked all of Big Red Car’s wiring. Inshallah, his dedication and commitment will ensure that we reach Addis Ababa and beyond without compromising Mike’s car by draining all the life out of his batteries. 

The spasms in Julia’s back have subdued, my hands have unclenched and all we’ve seen of Arba Minch was a distant view of its lakes and Mamush’s muddy workshop.

It is Tuesday, 20 August. I am back in the land of time.

What we saw of Arba Minch. 

IN JULIA'S WORDS

23 August

If it was your aim in life to win heartfelt, teary-eyed devotion by rescuing the lost, the desperate and the anxious – and you don’t like the sight of blood or want to be a pastor – then becoming a mechanic is a definite option.

Mamush, a big-shouldered well-dressed middle-aged man led a team of mechanical assistants and onlookers over a two-day marathon to save us from our battery hell. It was the alternator (here known as the “dynamo” or “generator”) that was the burnt-out problem. What a curious piece of machinery it is, with its shiny coils and onion-like structure. 

We had several false starts, with the reconditioned chunk being reinstalled in the car, the car starting, and then the bluddy thing overheating almost immediately. Each time Rehana and I thought he’d fixed us, we erupted with hearty relief and gratitude, throwing ourselves into the arms of our gallant rescuers, pumping their grease and mud hands and thanking them from the bottom of our deeply dependent hearts. And then returned glumly to sit back in the dead car when it turned out all was not well, after all. 

Hah! Not so easy being damsels in distress. Especially when we look beyond the mud and oil garage compound to where we can see mountains rift-style concertinaing, and know of the rose-tinted and its twin blue lake just down the forest drag.

The view at Mamush's garage from where we sat for two days.

Still, by the early afternoon of day two in Mamush’s care we were finally liberated from the mud-and-oil (and girl did we pump his grease-grim hand then). Our problems are not exactly behind us – the battery system that works the fridge and the extra LED lights on the car is still kaput – but at least we could drive on to where we now sit, in the cold rainy ramshackle tip also called Addis Ababa.

Without Mamush’s backstreet cure (you get backstreet mechanics and backstreet abortions and what other backstreet things?), we would never have made it.
Ethiopian roads are two-laned and ok when they’re paved, and rock-‘n-roll dust devils when they’re not. And they’re often not. Plus, the local drivers seem to have a most alarming driving philosophy of “he who dares, wins”. It’s like playing an arcade car game where mad drivers and unexpected obstacles – people, chickens, goats, dogs, cows, horses, donkeys – dash out at the last half-second in front of you amid the potholes.  Except that it’s not virtual. No, not at all.

So while trying not to have a stroke as we negotiated said mayhem, I had to avoid having a stroke woooowing at the mountains and the Irish-emerald cultivated fields that ushered us all the way to Ethiopia’s most recent capital, Addis Ababa.

Traffic in the Addis CBD

I had an idea that Addis was on the mangy side of city, but also an idea that “café society” might dwell among it. I had visions of wee boutiques betwixt fine coffee houses with rough and ready pavements, but pavements none the less. 

We chose a place that seemed to promise this – the oldest hotel in the city named after the dodgy empress Itegue Tiatu (you have to be dodgy if you were associated with the feudal bevoknitudes of Haile Selassie’s court) in an area known as the “Plaza/Piazza”.
Perhaps tomorrow will reveal a more sprightly side, but all we saw as we arrived today through beepingswervingmudsucking traffic labyrinths was one giant shanty town, punctuated now and then with more substantial buildings.

The mud suck Addis roads under construction.

A few minutes of sunshine makes a shabby hotel pretty

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Monday, 26 August

Archbishop Desmond Tutu must surely have been to Ethiopia. I can see him pleading passionately at the African Union about the plight of his people and many others on the continent who suffered worse than apartheid. So why does he persist in calling his country the rainbow nation? That description belongs to Ethiopia.

After leaving the dark-skinned, half-naked people in the Omo region, the Ethiopian people we encountered changed rapidly – their curls loosened, their foreheads grew and their features flattened into an unmistakeably Cape Flats visage. In Arba Minch there’s low-income blocks of flats, which makes its occupants look even more coloured. Only difference is they’re not on tik, they’re on khat – which is LEGAL in Ethiopia!

We headed towards Lake Lagano, on the highway to Addis.  Our car started first time when we left Arba Minch. But Mike’s car wouldn’t get going; one or more of his batteries was giving up the ghost. I felt large dollops of guilt as we jumpstarted his car.

An Ethiopian tour operator warned us that the livestock traffic jam on the road to Arba Minch would be replicated across the country. We were more patient on the next leg of our journey – our hooter was working again so we could herd the animals to the side of the road while the children into whose care they were entrusted begged from us.

The round Ethiopian Orthodox churches made way for mosques as we headed eastwards. The peoples’ faces changed yet again – their curls loosened, their noses sharpened and the men had beards. The women were either scarved or covered in burqas, the men wore Palestinian scarves on their heads like turbans.

People drove on the highway in horse-drawn carts brightly decorated with frills of gold. Ethiopian drivers are proving to be the worst we’ve encountered so far. They drive on both sides of the road and don’t give way to oncoming traffic.
Lake Langano was pretty and copper red. The Karako Beach Campsite was pretty basic, but we stayed two days because we were still exhausted.
The “beach” was a tiny strip of black sand and dreams of a long walk on the water’s edge were shattered because of the massive hotel and resort development underway. When the bourgeoisie matures in Addis, their playground will be waiting for them.

The copper waters of Lake Langano

Sunset at Lake Langano

I’ve never been to Calcutta but, at first glance, Addis resembled it. Where else do you find cows planted in the middle of a busy city road while trucks, taxis and cars sidle apologetically past them? There were also donkeys and goats on the streets – even in the heart of the CBD.

We chose a bad time to come, I would like to return to Addis in a decade. The city is one big building site. The Chinese are constructing an underground train before they repair the city’s roads and they’re excavating deep and leaving mounds of mud. It rained hard every day for the four days we were in Addis and mud got everywhere and into everything.

The Chinese are also improving the city's sewers that burble up and onto the muddy pavements. You have to watch every step when you walk.

The streets are littered with beggars, homeless adults and street children. There's lots of polio-stunted people of every age on crutches and in wheelchairs. Some of the street children ply a busy trade cleaning shoes (even takkies, they get so dirty) and cars. Jules and I watched them draw water from a sewer to wash a car and declined an offer to clean Big Red, paid them to go away with their buckets and cloths.

The food in Addis wasn’t better than what we had enjoyed in the rural areas, but there was more variety – and particularly good Italian food. Ethiopians have an eat-out culture and they love coffee. There are western-style coffee shops and vendors selling a brew on every pavement. They worship the bean they gave to the world with elaborate coffee ceremonies in almost every eating establishment. 
There’s a charcoal brazier going constantly; the beans are roasted in a pan before being ground in a pestle by hand; the coffee is brewed in a clay pot; chunks of burning frankincense and myrrh mix aromatically with the smell of coffee brewing. The brew is poured into tiny porcelain bowls and served with lots of sugar, no milk and popcorn on the side. It’s so strong you wonder why khat’s so popular.

We spent a rainy Sunday at the Ethonographic Museum, one of the best I've seen on the continent. There was an art gallery and it was simply brilliant to see Jesus, Mary and all the associated saints in coffee-coloured skins. Julia spotted the holy sperm on this painting:

Can you see it?

We struggled with accommodation in Addis, which is the main reason why we’re heading out of here. We stayed at the city’s oldest establishment on the first night, the Itigue Taitu hotel where the toilets were foul. But still, for a night, I felt like the empress who had it built in 1898 – the double-volume staircase and the floors were teak, our room was huge and had a wooden balcony.

Our room at the guesthouse we went to next was also huge, with a jacuzzi in the bathroom. One small problem, we had no hot water. At least we kept dry all night – Mike and Carol were faced with a leaky roof.

The third establishment we tried gave us the most grief. They took our money and then demanded we pay for another room because their rules forbid two women from sharing a bed. They couldn’t exactly voice what it was they suspected Julia and I would get up to, and we fought back because we couldn’t face moving for a fourth time in three days. Jules and I were eventually allowed to sleep together for one night but then we had to shell out for a cramped “suite” with two bedrooms.
We had a weird encounter this morning: we took Big Red Car to Tadese the mechanic to check the alternator and rewire the fridge and lights to the battery at the back, which Mamush in Arba Minch had disconnected.

As we entered his workshop two men who had been strolling down the pavement came in and the older, skinnier one flashed an official badge at Tadese. He was wearing bureaucrat beige, his face was pinched and he stalked like a marabou stork.

He had a heated exchange in Amharic with Tadese and Jules and I figured out this was some kind of official who was very interested in our car. Tadese said afterwards that he was a “secret” policeman.

Once again, a stranger whom we had just met protected us fiercely. Tadese put his body between Jules and me and wouldn’t let the cops near us. The older one seemed particularly interested in our rooftop tent; he wanted us to open it in a space where you could hardly swing a cat.

But Tadese saw them off. He told us afterwards that he told the men to get off his property. He said he warned them when they threatened to return to come with two warrants – one to enter his property and one to search our car. Looks like Ethiopians are finally standing up to their nasty officials.

The museum was in Hailie Selassie's Addis palace

Hailie Selassie king of kings, lord of lords, prince of cushions and platform heels, slept in this bed

More big news: there’s been awful floods in Sudan which is facing an outbreak of cholera, yellow fever and malaria. Many toilets and latrines have been flooded, the World Health Organisation is setting up mobile clinics and the UK government is urging that people only visit the country on essential business. 
So we will not be travelling further north than rainy Ethiopia which is sending torrents of water into Sudan. We're not getting to Egypt. We have to drive home. 
We were three-quarters of the way to our dream destination and it is time to implement the U-turn route that we planned before we left, nervous about the Arab Spring. We are adding at least six new countries as destinations, which makes for a hurried trip home with hardly space for lingering.

We’re heading to Harar tomorrow, an ancient walled city in the east where some of the Prophet Muhammed’s family and closest allies fled when they faced persecution in Saudi Arabia. Should be fascinating.
I am so glad we are slowing down. So many mornings on this trip it takes a good couple of minutes after I open my eyes to work out where I am.

PS: We've been in Ethiopia for almost two weeks and we haven't seen one Rasta!

At St Georges Cathedral the pious cling to the walls while they pray fervently

IN JULIA'S WORDS


27 August

I was nose to the steering wheel as we left a (surprise!) wet and muddy Addis packed with wet and muddy traffic on our way to Harar, that intriguing-sounding ancient town. Expected kilometres: 500, to be driven over two days with a stop in the middle.

We were but blocks from La Source Hotel, our most recent home, when our cheerfully roaring BRC transformed in a split instant to a dead silent and dead still hulk. In the midst of the mud and muddy traffic, first thing on a Monday morn.

Hearts falling into our muddy boots, Rehana and I breathed wetly and opened the bonnet. Yup, there was the engine. Yup, it had a set of (some now) recognisable parts, but nothing waving at us to let us know what to do next (like, “Hello, it’s me, the bright pink wire that’s become unattached, I’m the problem, just attach me again!”). Haul out the jumper cables, of course my single idea.

Now came again what we’ve sort of come to expect as ordinary miracles. A mechanic driving by stopped next to us in the busy trafficmud. He put his wonderful head down into the machine and immediately identified a connection that had come off the, um, distributor.

He deftly plugged it in again and off we roared. So now we know. Mind the distributor.

Mike and Carol were ahead of us and we’d let them know by sms that we were stuck. It wasn’t long, thanks to our saintly mechanic, before we’d waded through the trafficmud and caught up with them on the city limits.

Predictably, this was no drive in the park with stately giraffe, buffalos, elephant. It was a drive with The Big Truck. This was the main road from Addis to Djibouti and its harbour and trucks, trucks, trucks was the name of the game.

Wet and green around Addis surrendered to patchy and dusty and then to almost sheer dust by the time we got to our stop-over destination on our way to Harar, Awash, five-and-a-half hours later.

Meridian Hotel was a welcome multi-story white-washed picture on the road as we arrived in the town. Our room was awash with wonders – telly (with the Star TV package – mostly programmes from the Middle East), a fan, well-appointed comfortable beds, happy-making bathroom, even a wee balcony. So there were about a kazillion fat-ass flies everywhere in the restaurant downstairs – but what’s a few fat-ass flies?

Rehana was sinusy and pooped and, seduced by the white linen on the comfortable bed, she took an arvy nap. I went downstairs to BRC to make myself useful in the hot of the afternoon sun. Mike too was frootling under Big Silver’s bonnet next to the BRC.

I dug up plastic ties from our BRC spares storage box, with which I tried to fix the split rubber connector of the errant distributor plug more securely to the distributor. It proved tricky. Hope it holds.

Tomorrow we’re in for a whole lot more kilometres – 300 on trucked roads – til we reach Harar.

The view along the road to Harar