Ethiopia

The effect was such that I determined always to carry a barrel loaded with shot as the best answer for all those who might object to "Feranji."
-Sir Richard Burton, "First Footsteps in East Africa"


My quest to Sudan was put on hold indefinitely after the USA vetoed the resolution in front of the UN condemning Israel's actions in Gaza. The Sudan Embassy in Cairo apparently decided to start their own little jihad and stop issuing visas to Americans . . . bummer. But it's cool, and instead I went directly to Ethiopia, a country which I fell head-over-heals in love with.

The mountain air or Addis Ababa was a refreshing break from the smog of Cairo and the Sahara dust of Egypt. But the temperature and climate, perfect really, is little compared to the food situation. I think most people who would actually read my blog realize this, but for anyone who might not know - my food intake in the USA is never limited by appetite but instead by cost. Here, everything is so ridiculously cheap that I hardly know what to do with myself. And after a steady diet of falafels and koshery, massive amounts of Ethiopian food is a gift from God.

Those who have ever hung out around Cedar/Riverside in Minneapolis know what I mean. Ethiopians know EXACTLY what they're doing with their cuisine, and while it's maybe ten dollars for a plate in Minnesota, it's a dollar and a half here. Not only that, but a 30 year occupation by the Italians a century ago means that they left behind pasta for Ethiopians to put on their menus, something that comes as a blessed relief to me after having pasta maybe four times in the first six weeks of my trip - basically a starvation diet. I was so enthused when I first saw spaghetti on the menu of a restaurant for one dollar that I ordered four plates, but after the look I got from the waitress quickly decided to order two plates and then just go to another restaurant.

Anyway, it's just a good place. Addis Ababa still has that same general group of people who give me dirty looks and shout "Ferangi!" ("Stranger/White person") at me and a smaller subset who try their various tactics to get money out of the stupid tourist, but they're far less annoying than up north. Those aside, most everyone else is at least moderately friendly.

Instead of traveling the popular northern circuit, I decided to head east towards the Somali border. There were a number of cities I had read about and wanted to visit. Chief amongst these was Harar, a city that has always been a spot of mystery to me.

Harar for years was an important city in the slave trade for caravans heading east. It was impossible for white people to enter it without getting their heads loped off, but in 1885 Sir Richard Francis Burton made his historic run from the Red Sea city of Zayla across the desert to Harar and entered under the guise of a Turk, thus becoming describing for the first time to outsiders this "impenetrable" city.

Okay, I have so stop here for something: I'm going to write a lot about Harar for a number of reasons, but one of them is because I LOVE Burton. One of few among the great European explorers, Burton had an endearing tendency to understate rather than exaggerate the perils he faced in his various travels. This is in stark contrast to, for instance, his famous contemporary Henry Morton Stanley, whose writings are excruciating because they read more like science fiction than reality. Stanley and too many others appear to view exploration as something to be undertaken with giant caravans of porters and servants and saw no problem with killing or kidnapping inhabitants of villages they came across in order to keep up their food supply. "Exploration" for him was done in the name of fame and was carried out in the name of destruction. (I'll leave it at that, though I'll most likely complain more about Stanley when I get to my Central Africa posts.)

Burton, on the other hand, had first made a name for himself by writing about his travels to Mecca. To do so, he spent seven year learning Arabic, studying Islam, and immersing himself in the Indian-Muslim culture. Only then did he go on his pilgrimage to Mecaa, one of the first infidels to do so and certainly the most famous. Later, after returning from Harar, he traveled with John Speke in search of the source of the Nile and discovered Lake Tangyanika. Burton was forced to stay here, ill, while Speke went on to discover Lake Victoria and the true source of the Nile, a feat which had previously eluded countless searches.

His writings display a large amount of wit, prescience, and subtlety that make them a real pleasure to read. Besides a fair amount of humorous fatalism that should be present for any travelers attempting travel in the Horn of Africa ("The next morning, all the villagers assembled . . . consoling us with the information that we were dead men."), he throws in the occasional philosophical comment ("What hath man but a single life? And he who throweth it away, what is he but a fool?"). He predicts well the consequences of what was to happen when the spear was to be replaced by the gun in Somalia and cautions others against rushing in a foolhardy manner towards his exploits. Altogether he is a calm, rational, and extremely entertaining writer. And he is what made me love Harar. Luckily, though Harar is a twelve hour bus ride from Addis Ababa, it's on the way to Somaliland, so it fit perfectly into my schedule.

In Paul Thoreau's cross-continent "Dark Star Sarfari", he described Hararis in rather negative terms, spitefully shouting "Ferangi!" at him from every doorway and hurling the occasional rock at the white intruder. In reality, however, I suspect that the locals simply had an inkling of who he was and wanted to give him his come-upings. I found Harar to be, hand's down, the friendliest city I have ever in my life been to. Nothing compares. Yes, it seemed that nearly everyone did yell "ferangi" after me, but it was always in playful, welcoming tone. Depending on the age and gender, it could even be a little shy.

Little kids, those who weren't scared of me at least, were constantly running up to me and shaking my hands and asking me questions. I couldn't sit down in public without being invited it to someone's home to relax, drink something, and, "if I was at all interested", chew some chat. I always accepted because Hararis appear to have perfected the art of relaxation with a room separate from the house about 10x8 feet, no lights, comfortable cushions, a hookah, stereo, and sometimes a tv. The men typically hang out here in the afternoon. Having done this one three different afternoons, I can tell you that it can't be beat.

Given its place in history and the wonderful ambiance surrounding it, I expected more tourists, but was pleased to have large swaths of the city to myself. And gosh, if there is a city to walk around in, it was that one. The women, as typical of Ethiopians, are beautiful. My first day a women, stunning even by local standards, walked up to me and said in halting English "I think you . . . are very handsome!" before turning and running away. Stunned, I manage to call after her "You're beautiful, too," which she acknowledged by turning her head and shyly grinning. This theme was to be repeated more times in the days I spent in Harar and made me wonder just what exactly was going on until I asked a local guy. He laughed and said "Ferangis have money. It doesn't matter if you're good-looking or not, they want to marry you. They do it all white people." That explained it well enough, but still, I was flattered.

A great travel experience in Harar is to visit the "Hyena Man", who sits outside the city walls each night at sunset and feeds a pack of wild hyenas who come to him. He calls them all by name and they come up to him individually and take food from his hand and from a stick he holds from his mouth. It was so entertaining watching him that I momentarily lost myself and asked him if I could do the same thing. He laughed and said "Sure!" So I was able to feed the hyenas both from my hands and from my mouth which, though perhaps less-than-sanitary, was a hell of an experience.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Harar and the cities around it, namely Jijiga and Dire Dawa, are regionally famous for growing chat. Chat is a mild narcotic consumed in the horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula that is wildly popular with the locals. It's waxy look implies a painful death along the lines of "Into the Wild" rather than any sort of high, but those who chew seem to survive and swear that it produces a mild euphoria, loss of appetite, hyperactivity, and the occasional white rabbit. Tourists almost universally disagree with this and say that it produces no effect, though given how popular chat is with people living on the Horn, I'd say that the tourists have to be doing something wrong.

Chat is illegal in the United States under our completely rational and wildly succesful national drug policy, but the large Somali/Ethiopian/Eritrean population in Minnesota has wisely decided to give the finger to the DEA and has devised an ingenious method of getting the freshly-picked chat from the Ethiopian fields, onto planes, across the Atlantic and into Minnesota in less than 24 hours before it loses its chemical properties. They then distribute it via reliable cab drivers to a grateful population.

I spent some more time in the surrounding towns, but nothing terribly notable happened, so I'll leave my post at that for now.

I'll be back in Ethiopia in a couple weeks to explore some of the south on my way to Kenya. For now I'm doing some trail-blazing here for a couple weeks, so wish me luck.