Feast and famine in the Horn of Africa Ethiopia needs but also still merits tourist income, finds Jeremy Seal Times, 28/12/2002
Another famine threatens Ethiopia. 17 years after Live Aid, with the aid agencies working flat out to avoid catastrophe in the Horn of Africa, the harrowing media images may also mean calamity for the country’s fledgling tourist industry. Just as it was getting back on its feet after a second conflict with neighbouring Eritrea ended in 2000, tourism looks set to be floored once again, only deepening distress in this desperately poor country. With tourism projected to replace coffee over the next few years as Ethiopia’s prime earner of foreign currency, now is definitely not the time to cancel your visit to Ethiopia.
Nor is there any reason to do so since the drought is centred on the country’s southeastern Afar and Ogaden regions, far from the established tourism circuit in the highlands of the northwest. Here, where stability has returned, it soon becomes evident that this is without question sub-Saharan Africa’s number one cultural destination. At Axum, in the country’s far north, our guide Daniel led us into the grounds of St Mary of Zion’s church and planted an unlikely kiss against railings which enclosed a building resembling a pretentious municipal toilet on the slide. But bespoke loos are rare in Ethiopia, and Daniel had proper reasons for his reverence. ‘This is the place,’ he whispered; it was Ethiopian to a fault that this squat building, of scabby concrete with a patched-up dome for a roof, should supposedly house the actual and original Ark of the Covenant, brought here from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of King Solomon and Axum’s very own Queen of Sheba.
In this part of the world, where the safari tends to hold sway, the ‘northern circuit’ usually refers to Tanzania’s famed wildlife itinerary through the Serengeti, but its Ethiopian namesake is every inch its equal in terms of Orthodox tradition and lore. There’s a dizzying array of unique monuments and antiquities on show at the former capitals of Axum, Gonder and Lalibela, as well as the island monasteries of Lake Tana, and the Blue Nile’s Tis Abay Falls, after Victoria Falls the continent’s greatest freshwater spectacle.
The 1998-2000 war stopped tourism dead in Ethiopia. By January 2002, the time of my visit, visitors were back in evidence though even in Ethiopia’s high season tour buses were rarer than UN aid vehicles; poverty and disease – particularly polio, leprosy and blindness – remain on a sobering scale, and are attended by persistent begging. More practically, there’s the calendar to adapt to. You don’t so much adjust your watch in Ethiopia as reconstruct notions of time measurement from scratch. The Julian Calendar puts the country back seven years and eight months, making it 1995 at the time of writing, while the 24-hour clock runs from dawn instead of midnight. The practical advice is don’t rely on the locals for wake-up calls. We were in an organized group, with a guide on European time, though I wondered how independent travellers generally coped with this oddball destination. I spoke to a Belgian couple, Tim Dervin and Michaela Daelemans, who were finding the going ‘quite easy, though we would not recommend it as a first destination for a backpacker. Public transport is very uncomfortable and finding the right bus is hard. The biggest problem we found visiting churches and villages were the fleas.’
Then there was the altitude. An aid worker I talked to in Addis Ababa, at 8,500 feet the world’s third highest capital, told me that he hadn’t slept for two weeks after his arrival. We soon came to appreciate that initial broken nights and headaches were a small price to pay for the balmy climate, warm during the day, brisk at night, and a blissful lack of bugs, notably mosquitoes.
We flew north to Axum – the journey is a three-day endurance test by road – and were set down among landscapes so persuasively biblical that our bus and the receding airport seemed like strange intrusions from the future. The Axumite empire once ruled much of East Africa and even parts of Arabia; a thousand-odd years on and its capital had shrunk to a modest country town but hardly changed in the essentials, saving the common sight of outdoor ping-pong tables. The roads thronged not with vehicles but with beasts of burden, donkeys, camels and the shockingly common sight of women bent beneath back-breaking loads of firewood and animal pats. Men stood in yellow chaff clouds, winnowing the local grain called tef. Four figures appeared in the distance, shouldering an elderly invalid on a wooden bier, the ambulance service in these parts.
In the middle of town carved granite stones known as stelae soared skywards in honour of the kings that commissioned them some fifteen hundred years ago. Others lay shattered on the ground, the largest measuring 33 metres and weighing 500 tons – the world’s biggest manmade monolith. It lay broken-backed upon a hillside, challenging me to explain how these outsize memorials had ever been raised to the vertical. Daniel was poker-faced. ‘We believe that the power of the Ark was employed,’ he said.
A long dirt road led through the province of Tigray, where neat stone-built villages interrupted the chickpea fields and stands of eucalypts, junipers and giant figs. A flock of superb starlings, their plumage iridescent, flashed like leaping fish as they took flight from an umbrella thorn. An Abyssian ground hornbill lumbered past like an outsize turkey. Tanks and trucks rusted by the roadside; Daniel figured that their drivers had used them to get home when the long war with Eritrea ended in 1991 and simply abandoned them when the fuel ran out to continue on foot. The road climbed towards the jagged peaks of the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia’s trekking heartlands and home of strange endemic creatures including the Gelada baboon and the Simien wolf.
At Gonder, Ethiopia’s 17th-19th century capital, Portuguese-inspired castles and frescoed churches conspired with Italianate villas to create an impressively eclectic collage. With its coffee bars with faded leather banquettes and espresso machines dating from the time of Mussolini, it was a good place to lounge in. But the repetitious European fare on offer at the operator-preferred government hotels, most commonly in the form of something dubiously called veal cutlet (various spellings), was getting us down. We headed for a recommended private pension, the Misrak, to sample Ethiopia’s singular cuisine. We were shown into a round straw hut where a girl danced to a country lute while a meal appeared before us on low tables; little heaps of stews, lentil and chickpea purees, and curry puddles served on injera, a local pancake which happens to look like underlay and which doubles as tablecloth and cutlery (you eat off it and you also rip bits off it to scoop food with), washed down with taj, a rough honey mead. It was an evening of sensory firsts in which only the coffee, roasted from the green beans before our eyes, tasted familiar.
At Bahar Dar, we took a boat across Lake Tana. With monasteries and churches dotted on remote islands and peninsulars, Lake Tana is Ethiopia’s Mt Athos. But as we docked among coffee bushes there were papyrus tankwa boats, with their raised prows, which evoked pharaonic images, a reminder that that the Blue Nile rises here to begin its great journey to Egypt. A woodland walk brought us to the church of Ura Kidhane Mihret. It was strikingly round in the Ethiopian fashion and decorated internally with a dazzling array of frescoes. The priests were bedecked in richly gilt green, purple and yellow robes, woolen Rasta scarves and finished off with 1970s shades; a High Church meets Huggy Bear sort of look. The earthen floors were littered with ceremonial drums and with wooden crutches to keep communicants upright through the 6-hour services. There were holy books made from goatskin. Hundreds of years old and written in Ge’ez, the ancient language of the church, they lay about the church, functional as Anglican hymn books.
And so to Lalibela, a remote mountain town where a 12th century king’s religious vision spawned churches not so much constructed as carved - inside and out, complete with detailed pillars and pediments, windows and roofs - from the solid rock. Rock-cut ramps led from ground level to the deep pits where the churches stood. Tunnels gave on to hermits’ cells, monks’ graves and led to other churches. Lalibela was conceived of as a New Jerusalem, with replica tombs of biblical big-hitters including Abraham and Isaac, Adam, even Jesus himself, and a carved channel known as the River Jordan. In this ancient religious theme park, monks and priests had burned incense and worshipped for over 800 years. Ethiopia in miniature, it was balm for the travel-blase; as wondrous and unique a place as you could expect to find.
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Steppes Africa (01285 651010; www.steppesafrica.co.uk) who have a 12-day trip departing in September, from £1765 per person. They can also tailor-make packages, generally to coincide with the major Ethiopian festivals; New Year (September), Christmas and Timket (both January). Accommodation in government hotels is generally clean but dated, with the exception of the 5-star Sheraton, Addis Ababa.
Visiting season; September-March is dry, sunny and warm in Ethiopia’s Northern Highlands, but hotter in the lower-altitude south.
Innoculations: Your doctor will recommend typhoid, meningitis, polio, tetanus and probably hepatitis A and B. You should also be inoculated against yellow fever, and may need a certificate for yellow fever to enter the country. Travellers to the north tend to stay above 1,800 metres where malaria mosquitoes are not present. Drink bottled water.
Visa: visas cost £43. Application forms available from the Ethiopian Embassy (020 7589 7212) or www.ethioembassy.org.uk
Reading: Bradt Guide to Ethiopia by Philip Briggs (£13.95). A Far Country by Philip Marsden; out of print but worth hunting down.
Nor is there any reason to do so since the drought is centred on the country’s southeastern Afar and Ogaden regions, far from the established tourism circuit in the highlands of the northwest. Here, where stability has returned, it soon becomes evident that this is without question sub-Saharan Africa’s number one cultural destination. At Axum, in the country’s far north, our guide Daniel led us into the grounds of St Mary of Zion’s church and planted an unlikely kiss against railings which enclosed a building resembling a pretentious municipal toilet on the slide. But bespoke loos are rare in Ethiopia, and Daniel had proper reasons for his reverence. ‘This is the place,’ he whispered; it was Ethiopian to a fault that this squat building, of scabby concrete with a patched-up dome for a roof, should supposedly house the actual and original Ark of the Covenant, brought here from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of King Solomon and Axum’s very own Queen of Sheba.
In this part of the world, where the safari tends to hold sway, the ‘northern circuit’ usually refers to Tanzania’s famed wildlife itinerary through the Serengeti, but its Ethiopian namesake is every inch its equal in terms of Orthodox tradition and lore. There’s a dizzying array of unique monuments and antiquities on show at the former capitals of Axum, Gonder and Lalibela, as well as the island monasteries of Lake Tana, and the Blue Nile’s Tis Abay Falls, after Victoria Falls the continent’s greatest freshwater spectacle.
The 1998-2000 war stopped tourism dead in Ethiopia. By January 2002, the time of my visit, visitors were back in evidence though even in Ethiopia’s high season tour buses were rarer than UN aid vehicles; poverty and disease – particularly polio, leprosy and blindness – remain on a sobering scale, and are attended by persistent begging. More practically, there’s the calendar to adapt to. You don’t so much adjust your watch in Ethiopia as reconstruct notions of time measurement from scratch. The Julian Calendar puts the country back seven years and eight months, making it 1995 at the time of writing, while the 24-hour clock runs from dawn instead of midnight. The practical advice is don’t rely on the locals for wake-up calls. We were in an organized group, with a guide on European time, though I wondered how independent travellers generally coped with this oddball destination. I spoke to a Belgian couple, Tim Dervin and Michaela Daelemans, who were finding the going ‘quite easy, though we would not recommend it as a first destination for a backpacker. Public transport is very uncomfortable and finding the right bus is hard. The biggest problem we found visiting churches and villages were the fleas.’
Then there was the altitude. An aid worker I talked to in Addis Ababa, at 8,500 feet the world’s third highest capital, told me that he hadn’t slept for two weeks after his arrival. We soon came to appreciate that initial broken nights and headaches were a small price to pay for the balmy climate, warm during the day, brisk at night, and a blissful lack of bugs, notably mosquitoes.
We flew north to Axum – the journey is a three-day endurance test by road – and were set down among landscapes so persuasively biblical that our bus and the receding airport seemed like strange intrusions from the future. The Axumite empire once ruled much of East Africa and even parts of Arabia; a thousand-odd years on and its capital had shrunk to a modest country town but hardly changed in the essentials, saving the common sight of outdoor ping-pong tables. The roads thronged not with vehicles but with beasts of burden, donkeys, camels and the shockingly common sight of women bent beneath back-breaking loads of firewood and animal pats. Men stood in yellow chaff clouds, winnowing the local grain called tef. Four figures appeared in the distance, shouldering an elderly invalid on a wooden bier, the ambulance service in these parts.
In the middle of town carved granite stones known as stelae soared skywards in honour of the kings that commissioned them some fifteen hundred years ago. Others lay shattered on the ground, the largest measuring 33 metres and weighing 500 tons – the world’s biggest manmade monolith. It lay broken-backed upon a hillside, challenging me to explain how these outsize memorials had ever been raised to the vertical. Daniel was poker-faced. ‘We believe that the power of the Ark was employed,’ he said.
A long dirt road led through the province of Tigray, where neat stone-built villages interrupted the chickpea fields and stands of eucalypts, junipers and giant figs. A flock of superb starlings, their plumage iridescent, flashed like leaping fish as they took flight from an umbrella thorn. An Abyssian ground hornbill lumbered past like an outsize turkey. Tanks and trucks rusted by the roadside; Daniel figured that their drivers had used them to get home when the long war with Eritrea ended in 1991 and simply abandoned them when the fuel ran out to continue on foot. The road climbed towards the jagged peaks of the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia’s trekking heartlands and home of strange endemic creatures including the Gelada baboon and the Simien wolf.
At Gonder, Ethiopia’s 17th-19th century capital, Portuguese-inspired castles and frescoed churches conspired with Italianate villas to create an impressively eclectic collage. With its coffee bars with faded leather banquettes and espresso machines dating from the time of Mussolini, it was a good place to lounge in. But the repetitious European fare on offer at the operator-preferred government hotels, most commonly in the form of something dubiously called veal cutlet (various spellings), was getting us down. We headed for a recommended private pension, the Misrak, to sample Ethiopia’s singular cuisine. We were shown into a round straw hut where a girl danced to a country lute while a meal appeared before us on low tables; little heaps of stews, lentil and chickpea purees, and curry puddles served on injera, a local pancake which happens to look like underlay and which doubles as tablecloth and cutlery (you eat off it and you also rip bits off it to scoop food with), washed down with taj, a rough honey mead. It was an evening of sensory firsts in which only the coffee, roasted from the green beans before our eyes, tasted familiar.
At Bahar Dar, we took a boat across Lake Tana. With monasteries and churches dotted on remote islands and peninsulars, Lake Tana is Ethiopia’s Mt Athos. But as we docked among coffee bushes there were papyrus tankwa boats, with their raised prows, which evoked pharaonic images, a reminder that that the Blue Nile rises here to begin its great journey to Egypt. A woodland walk brought us to the church of Ura Kidhane Mihret. It was strikingly round in the Ethiopian fashion and decorated internally with a dazzling array of frescoes. The priests were bedecked in richly gilt green, purple and yellow robes, woolen Rasta scarves and finished off with 1970s shades; a High Church meets Huggy Bear sort of look. The earthen floors were littered with ceremonial drums and with wooden crutches to keep communicants upright through the 6-hour services. There were holy books made from goatskin. Hundreds of years old and written in Ge’ez, the ancient language of the church, they lay about the church, functional as Anglican hymn books.
And so to Lalibela, a remote mountain town where a 12th century king’s religious vision spawned churches not so much constructed as carved - inside and out, complete with detailed pillars and pediments, windows and roofs - from the solid rock. Rock-cut ramps led from ground level to the deep pits where the churches stood. Tunnels gave on to hermits’ cells, monks’ graves and led to other churches. Lalibela was conceived of as a New Jerusalem, with replica tombs of biblical big-hitters including Abraham and Isaac, Adam, even Jesus himself, and a carved channel known as the River Jordan. In this ancient religious theme park, monks and priests had burned incense and worshipped for over 800 years. Ethiopia in miniature, it was balm for the travel-blase; as wondrous and unique a place as you could expect to find.
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Steppes Africa (01285 651010; www.steppesafrica.co.uk) who have a 12-day trip departing in September, from £1765 per person. They can also tailor-make packages, generally to coincide with the major Ethiopian festivals; New Year (September), Christmas and Timket (both January). Accommodation in government hotels is generally clean but dated, with the exception of the 5-star Sheraton, Addis Ababa.
Visiting season; September-March is dry, sunny and warm in Ethiopia’s Northern Highlands, but hotter in the lower-altitude south.
Innoculations: Your doctor will recommend typhoid, meningitis, polio, tetanus and probably hepatitis A and B. You should also be inoculated against yellow fever, and may need a certificate for yellow fever to enter the country. Travellers to the north tend to stay above 1,800 metres where malaria mosquitoes are not present. Drink bottled water.
Visa: visas cost £43. Application forms available from the Ethiopian Embassy (020 7589 7212) or www.ethioembassy.org.uk
Reading: Bradt Guide to Ethiopia by Philip Briggs (£13.95). A Far Country by Philip Marsden; out of print but worth hunting down.