MEDIEVAL MEANDERING

IN REHANA'S WORDS

23 September

It would be the grossest exaggeration to say that my recent illness was a life-changing experience. But it has inspired me – at least to no longer be a smoker (the doctor says I can’t smoke for six months and I don’t see the point of starting up again.)

During all the many hours I spent tossing and turning in my fever-soaked bed, I've thought a lot about Ethiopia and inspiration. Tuberculosis is such a fitting, old-fashioned illness to have in this country, where the vast majority of the 80-million population lives in what appears to be a biblical time warp, especially in the rural areas.
I keep expecting to see Jesus riding onto town on a donkey. Lots and lots of people ride into town on donkeys in Ethiopia.

With the kilograms dropping off my bones daily I’m fitting in even more with the beautiful Ethiopians whose bodies are twisted because their government couldn’t care to ensure that every baby gets two drops of polio vaccine on their tongues.
I fit in with the blind people who preside over scales on city pavements where the nation’s few fatties can weigh themselves with no fear of censure. I fit in with the “mentally disordered” who roam half naked through the towns and drape themselves on the tar on hairpin bends.
And yet I can’t stop smiling. Ethiopia inspires me.

Getting skinner by the day ... and looking more Ethiopian

And loving it!

Driving through mountainous rural Ethiopia to reach Lalibela completely justified our decision to do this journey overland. I am so glad we did not fly into Lalibela on one day and out the next day, like so many tourists do.

The gravel road to the town was much worse than we expected. The riverbeds were filled with loose grey gravel and when we drove across them our tyres struggled to gain purchase. Poor Jules, I couldn’t drive for weeks, it’s been all her, everything is nowadays.

We skipped from mountain ridge to mountain ridge, with valleys of green stretched out below. Several kinds of grain were being grown, many that we did not recognise, and their green varied from patch to patch – from a mixture with yellow to psychedelic shades of green. All of this was splashed with yellow and purple wildflowers and the road was edged with yellow and orange aloes.

Lalibela was circled with mountains and the town was surprisingly small for the big punch it packs in international tourism circles. Our aptly named Panoramaview Hotel was flanked by two rivals on a magnificent cliff top offering a view of verdant valleys rolling away to forever.

The view from our favourite restaurant in Lalibela

Many tourists in Lalibela visit the 11 rock-hewn churches – the town’s chief attraction – in one day. You can do justice to them in a day’s visit; they’re tiny. But we stretched it over three days. I couldn’t do it faster; my body was still too weak.

One man, King Lalibela, had a vision during a three-day coma in the 1200s and inspired (forced?) his countrymen (subjects? slaves?) to build a new Jerusalem at Lalibela, even contriving (coercing?) them to carve a new River Jordan out of the mountain rock.
I felt sorry for the carvers tasked with bashing out the spaces between cliff and church, how many of them did not live to witness the unveiling of an arched doorway or decorated pillar?

I felt for the guys who had to carve out the space between mountain and church

The churches are inspirational, if merely for their foolhardiness. I had some very fever-soaked dreams during my daytime naps and nighttime sleeps in Lalibela, during which it made sense that the churches were carved out of dark mountain rock rather than raised on Lalibela’s light-drenched mountain slopes. It made no sense in the daylight though.

But when you look closely at the exquisitely symmetrical little churches carved into hostile volcanic rock, you have to admire that insane, sweat-soaked vision of one man in a coma. It's easier to understand this madness when you watch the veneration that church buildings hold for Orthodox Christian Ethiopians. They kiss the gates, walls and doors of their churches and prostrate themselves on the stoeps and floors.

They see holiness in the structures themselves, which are all designed according to the same strict rules. Rule number one is that every church has a secret hiding place for the Ark of the Covenant and other treasures. It could be a replica of the ark, or the actual ark itself which is somewhere in Ethiopia and may be in a church near us. (Cue Indiana Jones theme music)

Only priests may enter these locked parts of the church. Some disused churches we visited have museums where they now display their treasures, and their art is sometimes amazing but mostly boring crap kitsch that looks mass produced in a Chinese factory. They also have ornate, moth-eaten ceremonial robes, umbrellas and several different crosses.

The churches of Lalibela are not the only fantastical buildings in the panoramic landscape that surrounds the town. On the edge of a cliff, surrounded on three sides by volcanic peaks, is the Ben Abeba restaurant, half owned by former teacher Susan, a Scot, who had come to Lalibela to teach English and never left; and her Ethiopian partner Habtamu. 

The building was designed by two young Ethiopians. While it may not be the most practical restaurant design (the staff have to go down a ramp to reach the level above the kitchen), not a single nook or cranny detracts from its magnificent view.
We ate there three nights in a row, Susan spoiling me with treats and dishes and resuscitating my appetite. She fed me mango-flavoured yogurt, lentil broth, the softest bestest Shepherd’s Pie and my favourite Ethiopian dish, spicy Doro Wot.

Great view, great food

The lovely Susan

And then Big Red Car skipped higher and higher on mountain ridges surrounding Lalibela and took us back to the tar. The mountains were terraced with ancient stone and the yellow and purple wildflowers grew lush in those ridges.

On the way to Gonder we stopped at Guzara Palace, a pretty shell of an ancient palace drenched in wildflowers. In the 15^th century an Ethiopian king built a splendid edifice with a pavilion on which he staged religious and other festivals. He chose the site because from the hill he could see all the way to Lake Tana, vital for the transport of agricultural goods that grew in his lush lands.
Today, there are only small plots below the palace, and small herds of cattle and goats being badly tended by boys who came rushing to beg when we pulled to a stop.

Guzara's remains sparkling in the spring sunshine

In Gonder, where we stayed for three nights, Julia briefly reuniting with Mike and Carol before they left again to camp at Lake Tana, we marveled at the royal enclosure, where six emperors built their palaces after the 17^th century. 

The ruins are the reason the town is known today as the Camelot of Africa. The palaces have been stripped bare, even those with sturdy roofs, so its hard to imagine the splendour with which these emperors lived, but it is much easier with Julia as a guide. She concocted a fairy tale which passed off as a rich and fabulous history.

Must have had some rockin' good parties here

On the outskirts of Gondar ... the route we planned but are giving a miss this time

Between Gonder and Bahir Dar we were given the finger of God

Next stop Bahir Dar, a big town on Lake Tana, with smooth tarred roads and expensive accommodation. We settled for a damp establishment on the lake, where I collapsed into a stupor after lunch every day. But I was no longer sleeping till dark, three or four hours was enough to revitalise me again.
There are many monasteries and churches on islands in the lake and on its shores, but we could only bring ourselves to visit three.
A nun at one monastery allowed Julia to take a photo of her tattooed face. Its not unusual for lay Orthodox Christians to also tattoo their foreheads, cheeks, necks and chests with the different versions of the cross in use in Ethiopia.

Hopelessly devoted

We also saw loads more weird religious art (this I don’t mind staring at for hours). At an old church on an island in the middle of the lake made of mud and straw, we found rifles painted into ancient biblical scenes.
And Mary leaving Bethlehem carrying the baby Jesus in her arms and behind her a servant bearing a woven injera basket pot on her head.

We took a boat ride to the source of the Nile in Lake Tana (boohoo, we meant to follow the river all the way to Alexandria).
On the day we left Bahir Dar we drove to the Blue Nile Falls outside of town. I managed the walk, up a hill, to the falls without collapsing. We chose a good time to visit – it was thundering thanks to the recent rains.

Ancient bridge over the Nile. Spot the men collecting rocks to crush into gravel and sell alongside the road

Blue Nile Falls

Thundering water heading north to wash away roads in Sudan

I walked to the falls and back

We’re back in Addis Ababa now, having completed a loop around the country over the past 40 days. I drove for the first time in more than a month, for about three hours on the highway to Addis, through a magnificent pass.
In a week’s time, we’ll be back in Kenya. Jules and I are feeling a bit sore about leaving Ethiopia as we’ve grown to love it.  Almost everything that could go wrong on our trip went wrong in Ethiopia and we were caught gently, helped generously and sent on our way.

The country is maddeningly stuck in the past. My heart hurts every time we drive up a hill and I see women bent over double under the weight of the produce, firewood and water that they carry. I celebrate when I see men driving donkeys burdened instead, or driving horse carts.

This country has a unique religion – more chapters in their Bible, more archangels and saints, more miracles, more feasts, more fasts – there has been no reform of their version of Christianity since it was introduced in the 4^th century.

Ethiopia adopted and developed devout forms of Christianity and Islam. People came from afar to marvel at their piety. The country developed strong kingdoms that traded with each other and nations to the north and east flocked to profit as well.
Until the Derge stepped in, in the mid-1970s, their society was feudal. They were ruled by a bastard Emperor and a flock of princes and decadent overlords who watched their people succumb to famine while they stockpiled food to push up prices and quaffed French champagne in their palaces.

Today, it’s hard to figure out who is ruling Ethiopia. The nation venerates their dead president Meles Zenawi. His face is on every billboard, draped on government buildings and on millions of T-shirts. I can’t name the current president despite being here for more than a month.

Ethiopians are not inspired by the Western world.  A German Lutheran missionary we met on the way to Gonder complained that they’re backward: they don’t listen. Ethiopians are inspired by themselves; and the height of their development was hundreds of years ago. Do they really need to follow our model of “development and progress”?

Industry was introduced by Selassie in the 1970s, but he, his family and cronies owned all the businesses and none were run for profit. In the 1980s the communists nationalised everything and almost everything of value is still state-owned today. 

Yet people are investing. Jules and I spent much time in Ethiopia’s small towns as we broke up our journey into manageable chunks for a recovering invalid. There’s a huge building boom of hotels, office blocks and state housing in every village and town.
Addis Ababa is a muddy mess of new road and skyscraper development. Julia says they should evacuate everyone and bring them back when the development is done – it takes a frustrating amount of time to get anywhere in the city.

The rural areas of Ethiopia creep all the way to the centre of the cities. There are few factories. We saw no squatter camps. Cows, donkeys and goats are herded through the CBD. 
Which of the two pictures below do you prefer? The young man on his way to yet another feast day or the development of an urban railway and highway network in the city?

SOLID AS A DEAD ROCK

IN REHANA'S WORDS

I am confident I will be forgiven for my delay: what follows are my thoughts about Harar, which we left two weeks ago. They are probably half-formed and slightly unfair because my fever delirium began there and my plans to tour it for a day or two were cut short when a doctor sent me to bed. But still, I have strong opinions and I mean to voice them.

Once again, I found myself in an African city unprepared for the depth of the peoples’ religious fervour. Until I arrived there I had no idea that Harar regarded itself as the fourth-holiest city in Islam. I knew about the importance of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem in the religion, but had never heard of Harar. And I think it should stay that way for most Muslims and the rest of the world.
Harar was established in the eight century by a Saudi, Sheikh Abadin. By the 15^th century it had grown into a significant trading centre linking the middle east with Africa, and Christian Kingdoms to the north were eying it with greed. The Arabs built a wall around the city to protect it in 1550, with six gates leading inside – a geography that still exists today.

One of the gates in Harar, a walled town.

I’m wracking my brain here to come up with a reason why they rank the city with Mecca and Jerusalem and they only thing I remember from Abdul, our Harari guide, was that the city has 99 mosques, the same number as the names of Allah in the Qur’an. Some of the mosques were built by families for their own use and so accommodate around six people, but still, this makes the city holy.

According to Abdul Harar was not only a trade centre hundreds of years ago but also a centre of Islamic study and research, with several colleges. He claims it still is today, but then couldn’t say what they’re studying or name a single college. He says Islamic scholars come from around the world to Harar, but couldn’t name an Imam they’re studying with.

In the privately-owned Harar Museum we met Ilyas the book restorer. With one exception, all the ancient texts he was restoring with the most clumsy methods (he banged one book on a table to show us how he does it) were Qur’ans.
The other book counted how many times Allah’s name appeared in the Qur’an, how many times Mohammed’s name appeared, how many times the letter ‘e’, ‘t’, ‘c’ appeared. Shades of Kaballah?

Ilyas the book restorer

The museum had one shelf of artefacts dedicated to showcasing Islamic scholarship – I mistook the shackles for those used on slaves (they were smaller, meant to punish Muslim children who struggled with their Arabic). The paddles used to beat the deen (religion) into the kids were quite clearly marked with Muslim texts. Not much has changed since then, madressahs still use them around the world.

As far’s I’m concerned what disqualifies Harar mostly from being a holy site of Islam is the drug culture, already alluded to by Julia. Trade in Harar today consists of several markets – the khat market seems the biggest; there’s loud and proud smugglers market where grey goods are brought in from Malaysia and other eastern countries (it's brought to Harar by trucks from Djibouti and Somalia); the second-hand market; and the Muslim and Christian markets. No one blinks an eye at the grey, tax-free goods on sale in the smugglers market and khat is completely legal.

The second-hand car parts market. Harar has more Peugots on the street than anywhere else in the world

The garage where we had our clutch cable fixed.

Abdul insisted that khat is a stimulant, but in all my time in Harar I did not see one person on their feet chewing it, they all lie down in the filth. They are clearly addicts, usually older men and women who mumble misty-eyed with branches stripped bare of leaves collecting under their chins.
Rawda, at whose guesthouse we stayed, had workmen replastering her walls. They arrived with their bunches of khat and rolled up mats, stretched out full-length in her courtyard and delicately nibbled the leaves off their branches for an hour or so before starting to work. Not for them a leaf or four followed by a huge spurt of energy.
Nowhere in Harar did I see anything but dull eyes among the khat chewing community. Move along, nothing holy to see there.

To Harar’s credit, we only heard one azhan from Rawda’s guesthouse, not 99 competing cacophonies. There were evenings when Rawda and her employee Khadija went to madressah and while they were away a hum rose up from the city, which is only one square kilometre.

If Harar wants to be recognised as a holy city it better start behaving like one. The place is filled with filthy beggars, many of them clearly seeking their next branch of khat. There is no attempt to feed or shelter the beggars, and I saw two naked ones within 10 minutes of entering the city.
Abdul kicked a young peanut-seller out of my way when he was leading me to the main road to catch a tuktuk to hospital. Not on.

One thing other “Muslim cities” can learn from Harar is their attitude to women’s dress. They are mostly modest, but proof that there’s no merit to wearing black. I meant to work on a photo essay before I took to my bed, because in Harar the womens’ hijabs range from pastel peaches and purples to bright reds and hot pinks – my favourite.

Here's an orange hijab  – now think pink

They're not all in hijabs.

A small aside: we struggled to find good food in Harar, which is quite unacceptable in Ethiopia, the land of good food. Rawda made us excellent breakfast pancakes with honey but the local restaurants had the boring standard fare, and then quite tasteless. 

I asked for local specialties and then was quite relieved they were only prepared on feast days – they were a broth of either intestines or tongue boiled up for a few days before serving.

Harar's beauty is hard to capture

IN JULIA'S WORDS

15 September

Amidst the rolling folds and multilayers of mountain ranges, patchworked in luminous, yellow-infused and other greens, we are now in that famed ancient town of Lalibela.

Most people fly to Lalibela, we drove. Van Gogh would have drooled.

Teff growing along the road

On the outskirts of the town

Once named Roha, and before that Lasta, it became Lalibela after the legendary king credited with carving the 11 impossible churches out of the solid rock (well, him and the angels).

Three things made what was always going to be an incredible experience that much more wondiferous. The first is that this is low tourist season. Lalibela's apparently teeming in December and January when religious festivities are amok – Christmas, for example, is celebrated by thousands here on January 7. Bar one or two other faranji strays, we had the churches to ourselves.

The second is our feeble Rehana. Unlike most other tourists, we couldn’t do the whirl-of-a-tour of all 11 churches in one day. Rehana’s at her most sprightly (which is not very sprightly at all) in the mornings; afternoons she sleeps, then we have an early dinner and then it’s back to bed for her. So we visited the churches over three days, snail-ly and incredulous-eyed, giving us that much more time to savour their amazingnessessess.

Taking a breather before climbing the next four steps

Our third and perhaps greatest good fortune was having Hailu as our guide. The churches are seriously his personal heritage, his intimate stomping-ground since his birth. He was baptised in the well at St George’s church; played soccer with his mates in a large underground room which has recently been claimed as the 12^th church (it will be opened next year). 
His mum died from malaria when he was young, and his dad was a member of the communist party, who was tried and found guilty of persecuting people when the Derge fell, and died in prison. So he was raised by his grandparents – his grandfather being the head priest of St George’s. 
All his life he has known the dark tunnels that join the churches, has had privileged access to monkish grottos and spaces reserved for the priesthood.

Hailu knows every nook and cranny of the church complex

He was baptised in St George's Church, in the green pond to the right

Hailu is thus steeped in the lore and legends of Christian Lalibela – but he is by no means the mouthpiece of the priesthood. He is thoroughly alive to the many tensions and controversies that continue to play out on this most marvellous of stages. 

This is a UN World Heritage Site, which - as the priests have become uncomfortably aware – comes not only with international prestige and World Bank financial assistance, but also with bevies of archaeologists, historians and other students of antiquities with their pesky insistence on verifying folklore and priestly claims with scientific methods. (The UN also comes with extraordinarily crude structures with which to cover and “conserve” these outstanding ancient phenomena. How unpleasantly ironic!)

The despised Italians apparently got the Unesco tender, and this is the shit they deliver!). How inconvenient for the holders of All Truth, the priesthood, to have interlopers, often from distant lands, doubting the received wisdom, prodding and probing artefacts and ancient chisel marks for proof of their age and likely originators!
The negotiations for access to undertake scientific analysis of many of these ancient sites are ongoing; not lightly will the priests permit those adherents of the religion of science to gather potentially contradictory information and therefore cut their authority from beneath their holy feet in their own backyard.

Damn Italians built a protective roof

While these disputes rage on around him, Hailu has personal and burning issues with the priesthood too. There’s his deep dissatisfaction with the current Very High Priest (or patriarch, or whatever the word is for the head honcho of all the Lalibela churches) – a man appointed a few years ago, apparently not for his holy religious ways, but because of his political connections. Worse, the man (I don’t remember his name but there is his photo in the museum here) is accused of atrocities as a member of the Derge during the communist era, for which he is apparently soon to go on trial.

Perhaps worst of all, though, Hailu sees the priestly villain’s leadership to have taken the Lalibela priesthood away from what their traditional and right role should be – like caring for the community – and towards cynical and materialistic concerns.
For example, under this man’s tenure, the entrance cost for faranji to visit the churches has rocketed in the last three months from Birr 350 (about R175) to US$50 – triple the price. The church keeps all the proceeds (although I think Unicef enjoys a 10% split) – the community gains nothing.

Hailu's grandfather's house. His grandmother was recently evicted

Hailu’s other deep-hearted issue as a believer which puts him at odds with the priesthood is something fantastically reminiscent of the medieval European battles over language – and therefore accessibility to the gospels – and the Catholic church.
In Europe the battle was between vernaculars like English and German versus the rarified dead language of Latin that the Catholic church uncompromisingly insisted on using. How better to entrench the power relations of priests as Those Who Knowest and the ignorant commoners, who must rely on those in frocks to mediate meaning between them and their religion/god?

In contemporary Lalibela (all Ethiopia? I’m not sure), the priesthood insist on delivering their sermons in the ancient and now “dead” language of Ge’ez, rather than the everyday language/s of the people (Amharic is the official language, but there are 80+ in the country). 
Hailu objects to what he sees as their insistence on making their teachings complex and inaccessible to the people; as a result, he prefers to do his own readings of his Amharic bible, avoiding the priests’ sermons altogether. He is as dangerous to the priests’ tenacious and jealous grip on Christian “truth” as Wycliffe or Luther ever were.

Hailu’s a graduate from Addis Ababa University (in Social Anthropology), and due to start his five-year law degree in a few weeks’ time. His ambition is to use his law degree to work for justice for the poor.

And so it was in the care of this delightfully knowledgeable, critical and socially conscious young man (he’s amazingly regal looking too. I could see features of his face reflected in the 800-year-old – verified by carbon dating – artworks in the churches) that Rehana and I were introduced to Lalibela’s marvels.

The sketch I gathered from Hailu about Lalibela’s story is this. Born in early 11^th century, his brother ruled the area, then called Roha. The king dreamt that Lalibela, not his son, would lay claim to the crown after his death. Lalibela was persecuted and fled (why does this sound so damn familiar?!?).
His exiled wanderings took him to Jerusalem, and it was there that he was poisoned (apparently by henchmen of his persistent brother). For three days Lalibela was in a coma, and it was then that he had his divine vision: he must build a replica of Jerusalem in his birthplace, Roha.

Somehow or other his brother’s worst fears were eventually realised and Lalibela did return to become king. And so his life became devoted to conjuring in the rock of his home town the vision he had while in a coma in Jerusalem – to recreate that Holy City here in the volcanic mountains of Ethiopia.

Some say it was by his hand and with the help of angels alone that all the buildings were created in 23 years. Others say it took more than 150 years, and the hands that chiselled great masses of rock away to create the buildings were very human (and perhaps included both Syrian and Indian master-builders – Arabic iconography and swastikas are very much in evidence).
Still others say that, some of the structures at least, are not attributable to Lalibela’s handiwork at all – that they are older, perhaps temples to pagan deities.

Tunnels link the churches hewn into the rock

And were all these stone-hewn buildings actually meant as churches at all? At least six of them are so carefully designed around Christian symbolism - the division of space inside into threes, cross-shaped windows (whether the crosses are Maltese, Axumite or in Lalibela’s own design), and a whole lot of other evidence I can’t quite recall. There’s no arguing that St George’s church, for example, was intended to be every bit a church.

But the four buildings cut from a great hunk of rock on the southern side of the cluster can be differently interpreted. Was the one with a seeming moat around it Lalibela’s palace? Was the dingy structure with its pokey dark windows – linked by a quite terrifyingly long and pitch-dark tunnel to the other buildings – a prison, rather than a metaphorical “passage to Hell”, as the priests would have it?
Was the building, now mostly collapsed, that would have been the biggest of them all, in fact a former court of law/justice? Those holes cut through the inside pillars – were they meant for threading through the chains joined to the prisoner’s shackles, or simply as holders for torches, as the priests say?
Perhaps they’ve been used for both over the many hundreds of years they’ve been around.

A lesson in ancient technology

Whether by the hand of a king and his helpful angels, or by the many hands of mere mortals, the engineering and architectural wizardry of all these places is gobsmacking.
Weak Rehana may have felt, but entirely inspired she was too. On the first two mornings we looked at the churches with Hailu from 10 until 12.30 – that was enough for Rehana. Day three turned out more than enough for her when we lingered an hour longer than we had on the two previous days.  She opened the door and vomited her guts out out onto the cobble-stone road just a minute after climbing inside the car.
The road was busy with many white-cloth draped people. Most ignored her gagging form – there was little but water and bile for her to spew. Only one boy was gawking and callous enough to nag the vomiting Rehana and me for money (he eventually moved off, probably having learnt a good handful of new swear words).
One white-clothed woman arrived with concern all over her age-creased face and a tin can full of water. She poured it over Rehana’s head where it stuck out from BRC’s open door. “Amasigenello, ma, thank you, ma”, Rehana repeatedly gasped as the kind woman rubbed and patted the cold water from the old can into her hair.

Water dripping down her face and soaking into the passenger seat, bile her taste and perfume, Rehana made it in a pale-yellow way back to Panorama View Hotel, and soon to sleep between the clean, white Ethiopian-cotton sheets.

We lingered for this church, it was worth the vomit

Tomorrow we move on. Lalibela has been more than kind to us – inspirational too. It’s vindicated the risks we took driving further north from Dessie, Rehana just out of her terrible sick bed, and us driving without Mike and Carol to back us up.
But we’ve had to revise our ambitions of going north to Axum – it’s too far and too hard, with too little time left for us in Ethiopia, for us to attempt. Next time, we’re telling ourselves. Instead we’ll go west to what’s described as “the Camelot of Africa” – Gonder.
We also won’t be trekking in the Simien mountains north from there, but it’s close enough for us to consider a day trip and a picnic.

Rehana is edging towards betterness, day by slow day. For sure travelling is physically and mentally demanding at the best of times, so we’re building all our plans around ensuring Rehana has the breaks for the rest she so badly needs. Also, as sole Nurse and Driver I need to realistically pace myself too – won’t do to have an exhausted and grumpy fuck after an epic toil, will it now? Tomorrow’s journey towards Gonder, for example, we’re breaking in two: about three hours to Debra Tabot, then we’ll stop and travel the remaining four hours to Gonder the next day. Somewhere in those parts soonish we should reunite with Mike and Carol, who’ve been up to Axum in the meantime.

Or so go our plans, anyway. Let’s hope reality pans out in tandem.