Ég er svo ótrúlega imponeruð af fólki sem lætur drauma sína rætast.
Í Úganda hitti ég strák frá Texas - USA sem var að klára lögfræði. Til að halda upp á áfangann þá skelltu hann og vinir hans sér til Vegas þar sem hann datt í lukkupottinn.
Í stað þess að eyða peiningnum í skynsamlega hluti eins og íbúð og bíl þá laggði hann af stað í ferðalag.
Þegar við hittum hann var hann nýkominn frá Asíu og var sem sagt að byrja á Afríku. Hann er svo endalust sniðugur og skemmtilegur penni að ég hef því ákveðið að birta nokkra valda kafla úr
ferðasögum sem hann sendir mér reglulega.
Njótiði...
I crossed the border the same evening I arrived in Moyale, but the Ethiopian border post had already closed. This was bad, because it meant that I could not get my passport stamped, and therefore could not legally enter the country. The surly guard told me to be back at 8 am, the next morning, which meant that I would miss the early bus North, and be stuck in dirty, dusty, bordertown Moyale another full day. But the guard was nice enough to let me take a hotel on the Ethiopian side, provided I gave my word to come back to the post the next day. Thankfully, I'd made a couple of Ethiopian friends, and since they were in the same boat, or bus as the case may be, I had them to help me.
Bogale and Wakene were two Ethiopians who were coming up from Kenya on the same bus, and were both around my age. Kirimi, a middle aged Kenyan reverend, rounded out our motley gang, and the 4 of us went to the border post the next day as ordered. So what to do about transport North? We were able to find a bus leaving for Yabelo, and that at least could get us to within a day of the capital if we could only get there. Buses are forbidden to run at night in Ethiopia, and it's best to get within 12 hours of your intended destination if possible, because if not, the bus stops at sundown and you have to take a hotel wherever you are. Moyale is too far from Addis Ababa to go in one day, but Yabelo might be close enough.
The bus to Yabelo was crowded, and stiflingly hot. This is because Ethiopians do not open the windows of the bus, no matter what the temperature. They believe the wind can get them sick, and I am really not kidding when I say this is a country-wide cultural practice. The bus ride, thankfully, didn't last long. We broke down in the middle of nowhere. Great. So I got off the bus with my 3 friends and the rest of the passengers, one of whom included a rastafarian fueled up on qat who got in a yelling match with a fellow passenger that almost resulted in fisticuffs. Luckily, we were able to flag down an empty truck, and all of us got in the back and proceeded North.
Southern Ethiopia is dry country, and not surprisingly, looks a lot like northern Kenya. The Boranas and other tribes inhabit the area, and ther are also a lot of ethnic Somalis there. Like their kinsmen on the Kenyan side of the border, they herd camels, cattle, sheep, and goats, and often carry spears or rifles to guard their flocks from raiders (both the fanged quadripedal kind, and the dishonest bipedal kind.) The truck drove too fast for me to take many photos, which is too bad, because I saw a Borana herdsmen leading a caravan of packed camels along the highway, his face swaddled in a billowing white cover and a spear balanced across his colourfully-clad shoulder. It would have made a great photo with the sandy red earth and acacia dotted landscape in the backdrop all framed by rounded mountains in the distance. But alas, the only photo I will ever have of this timeless scene will be in my mind.
As you continue up from Yabelo, the land becomes more fertile, and the scrubby dry valleys give way to green rolling lands and conical huts with smoke wafting from the grassy rooves. The people make fires inside their windowless huts and let the smoke fumigate the grass rooves in order to keep out bugs. I suppose a lot of the reason for the greenery carpeting the region is because it's the beginning of the dry season, so the rains just ended. I wonder if the terrain looks this green toward the end of the dry season?
We made it as far as the town of Hagra Maryam (sp?) and then the four of us took rooms in a cheap hotel and settled into a spicy dinner of Ethiopian food (called "national food" here.) Basically, Ethiopian cuisine consists of a spongey bread called "injera" that covers the plate. Different soupy, chili-like foods are plopped on the injera platter, accompanied sometimes by a dried cottage cheese, or whipped bean spread of one type or another. The food is shared by all the diners, and eaten by scooping up the food in another piece of injera and eaten with the right hand (and only the right hand.) I washed down dinner with a Meta beer and a bottle of Ambo sparkling water (said to aid digestion) and settled into my room as Amharic music whined through the walls and the highland chill sent me diving under the blankets shivering after a cold bucket shower. It had been a long, windy, dusty, day in the back of a truck, and I'd logged a couple of hundred kilometers of varying Ethiopian landscape and passengers behind me. It was definitely time for some shut eye. The next day, my friends and I would be up well before dawn and heading towards the capital. You'll hear about that soon.
