25 July --Rafting the Nile headwaters (by Caroline)

Wicked Waters

The G-Spot is a sweet place to be unless you are caught in a giant Grade 5 rapid in the Nile River. Our 20 mile white-water rafting trip down the source of the Nile was quite a thrill. We began the day with some quick safety tips and an exercise in what to do when (not if) the raft overturned. Our Ugandan guide, Jeffrey, skillfully tipped our raft over. We found ourselves caught below the raft and had to maneuver to the opposite side. Where is Linda? She was still under but came up with a good taste of the Nile.

Off we went to our first rapid, a Grade 3. We sailed through. “What a breeze”, I thought. “This is going to be easy.” We raised our oars in unison and merrily yelled “Uganda is a nice place.” A Grade 4 came next. The photo shows our raft right before Linda and I suddenly sailed out. It shows Linda lost in the middle, me at the bottom (red helmet) and Roger and David at the top of the raft. When my head surfaced, I was immediately grabbed. This was Linda’s second near death experience. Okay, after this, the boat of six passengers (another American, Blair, and his Melbourne partner, Libby) needed some clarification. Did our guide yell “Get down!” or did he yell “Gay down!” and what were we supposed to do?

Gunga, our first of four Grade 5 rapids was next. We paddled hard toward the giant waves. “Get down and hold!” I grabbed my oar and the rope with heaven’s gate in front of me. We splashed through the water and then we hit the G-Spot. Not so sweet. The raft was lifted to a 45 degree angle and paused before flipping completely over. I could not hold onto the boat and was swept through the rapids, catching a breath every chance that I could. I panicked and felt somebody next to me and grabbed their life jacket. It turned out to be Linda and then she was swept away. I came up at the end and gave the signal that I was okay but my right contact was floating on to Egypt. Linda was rescued by one of the kayaks down the river. I was pulled onto another boat. Here came David. Now where was Roger? He had miraculously held onto the overturned boat through the crashing rapids. “For my dear life” he said.

As frightening as that was, I did not drink much water. Linda, David and Roger got a gallon or two and came up coughing. As David put it “ Oxygen is a good thing.” By this time, Linda had had her third experience seeing the Pearly Gates. She left the raft and boarded the Safe Boat with Tutu at the helm. Two more exhilarating and successful rides through a 4 and 5 and then lunch on an island.

The second half of the day included only four rapids but two monster Grade 5’s including the last one of the day called, Itanda (The Bad Place.) I was relieved to hear that we were going to walk around the first Grade 5 because the water was too low leading up to the rapids. Had we been able to go, the raft would have sailed past a Grade 6 and flown down a ten foot waterfall! This is a Grade 5?!?

The afternoon was easier through a 4 and another 3. We even got in some relaxing down time. We got in bird watching and swimming down the river in calm water. David and I took this opportunity to jump over board in our life jackets. Time to get out! The boat in front of us spotted a lethally poisonous, black Mamba snake in the water.

Now the end of the trip and Itanda loomed in front of us. Time to get out and walk around another Grade 6. We could not believe the sheer power of the water!! It was spectacular. I thought this would be a good time to pour some of Mark and Greg’s ashes into the Nile. What better place than a mighty rapid named “The Bad Place”. Thank goodness I did not lose their vials of ashes in the G-spot.

We took another team picture, our last photo ever, I thought. Mom would be relieved that I did not get eaten by a lion. There was no way a boat could go through that rapid without being flipped over. Now, I know that there are many people who would love the thrill of this kind of adventure, but Roger and I are not one of them. Remember, oxygen is a good thing. We and another passenger joined Linda in the Safe Boat and plunged into Itanda. Hold on! That was enough of a thrill ride for us.

Brave, brave David decided to take on The Bad Place. We saw the raft come down and in a split second it overturned. Where is David? Where is David? Come on, Come on! Our eyes searched the crashing water. I wish I could have taken his picture when his head finally popped up. Sheer horror. What a stud. He made it! Would he ever do it again? Nope.

The source of the Nile is one of the most spectacular white-water destinations in the world. It is fierce, exotic and historic. We are all glad that we experienced it. We are all tired and sore and still feel like we are bobbing in water. What an adventure!

24 July -- Entebbe, Uganda (by Roger)

July 24 – Entebbe

It was WONDERFUL for us all to finally be together and started on the trip. After closing the poolside restaurant last night, we went to bed, got up this morning, and headed to the airport. I’m amazed at how well everyone is doing, especially David. He just got in and should be suffering from jet lag, but he’s as good as new and ready to go.

When we got to the airport, we got the bad news that the flight had been oversold (and overconfirmed) and that we couldn’t get on our flight to Entebbe. We had some pretty amazing help from Kenya Airways, but you can’t create seats out of thin air or Delta would be doing better. We had to wait for another plane about 2 pm.

That was a long time at the airport, but we got to eat, correct some hotel reservations, and spend some time talking. I got out the laptop and made everyone look at my pics from Ethiopia, and then we looked at the ones from Linda and Caroline’s trip around Nairobi. We fooled around with PhotoShop, too, and Caroline showed me a few things to do with it.

When we finally got away, we only had an hour flight. Our driver, Josef, met us with an enormous landrover. I’d never seen a stretch Rover before; it looked kind of like a Ugandan Hummer.

We reformulated our travel plans and went right to the Botanical Gardens at Entebbe. I’d visited this place a couple of decades ago, and it was one of my best memories of that trip. I wasn’t disappointed this time around either. Josef knew a biology undergrad here, and we got that guy to take us around the gardens. We walked along a path a little up from Lake Victoria, and then we went right down by the Lake itself. Caroline attracted a small crowd of children by taking pictures of them, and we saw Linda’s soon-to-be favorite bird here in abundance – a little blue kingfisher (Woodland Kingfisher). Also saw mine – the Hammerkop, a kind of brownish egret that has a triangular crest that gives it a hammer-shaped head. These birds build simply gigantic nests -- way bigger than you’d think for a bird of its size – and other birds often try to take over the nest and even do an entire colony there.

There were kingfishers and water birds everywhere. As we started up around a little rainforest segment of the Garden, we spotted a small hornbill (Crowned Hornbill); these toucan-like birds have a really big beak that is shaped like ..well, like a horn. It had a large, red nutmeg, and it sat in the top of the tree playing with the fruit for some time. We enjoyed watching it flip the nutmeg around for awhile before it gave one last flip and caught the fruit in its mouth, swallowing it. We then saw a big, white vulture (Palm-nut Vulture) sitting in a tree, and we walked toward the entrance of the rainforest section. Sunday here, and the park had a lot of weekend picnic-ers. They were having a blast with Afropop playing on the car stereos while they ate, sang, danced around and played games. Vervet monkeys scouted the exterior of the picnic groups waiting for a chance to steal some food.

The tropical forest section of the garden was great, too. Walking down into it, we passed Golden Orb spiders on their webs and stepped carefully over a very active line of army ants. All the while, we kept hearing a sort of deep, booming bird call, and when we came out trees, we saw a huge hornbill. This was a Black-and-white-casqued Hornbill. We had been marveling at this huge bird for a while when an even bigger one of the same species flew up beside it with a nutmeg in its beak – this was the male. I could hardly believe it, but the beak on this bird was double, wide and about 1/3 the length of the bird. He sat by the other hornbill flipping the nutmeg around, then he flipped it over to the female who caught and swallowed it. The two then flew off over us, sounding like turkeys flying with the loud, slow swish of their wings. This was an absolute highlight, David’s and Caroline’s favorite bird.

We went back to our stretch landrover and drove on back to Kampala after that. We’re in a great hotel there, the Speake, named after the Brit who came this far looking for the source of the Nile. (He found it, too – Lake Victoria. At least the source of the White Nile.) Slept long and deep.

23 July -- Nairobi (by Linda)

Today was our first foray out of the hotel and into the city. The Israeli Embassy is directly across the street from our hotel and is well guarded. We went to three major sites that included the Karen Blixen Museum, Langatta Giraffe Center and the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.
The Karen Blixen museum is actually a farmhouse where Karen Blixen lived between 1914 and 1931. KB (aka Isak Dinesen) wrote “Out of Africa” in the early 1950’s after returning to Denmark, her homeland. The grounds around the house are simple but beautiful. The plants and trees look like giant versions of the ones that we know.
Our second stop was the Giraffe Center which currently maintains 10 Rothschild giraffes, an endangered giraffe species. We got to hand feed Daisy who tried to head butt Caroline several times when she ran out of food. Later, a very young male giraffe, Mark, also came for food. There were several warthogs running around rummaging for food. We had a great time with Daisy and the staff were so willing to teach us about giraffes – it was great!
Our last stop was at a Wildlife Trust where orphaned baby black rhinos and elephants are raised and reintroduced back into the wild. Five young elephants, no rhinos, between 10-23 months were hanging out with their keepers. To a baby elephant, it is the family that is all important. In fact, each keeper actually sleeps next to a young calf and tends solely to it’s needs. Elephants only thrive if they are happy. At 2 years old and in their own time, they return to the wild. We enjoyed learning a lot about elephants! All of us are leaving tomorrow for Uganda on a 1pm flight. Linda Lion posting here.

22July -- Addis

Uneventful day, but I’m really happy! David got my e-mail note and is leaving for Nairobi today. Caroline and Linda are already there. And for me, another perfect day of travel.

I was greeted at the airport by my travel agent’s accountant and a couple of other guys. I checked into a pretty nice hotel (if a little gaudy) and went out to do some fast shopping before I head back to Nairobi. I wonder if my traveling companions have seen the news – riots in Nairobi and bombs in London, Iraq and Egypt.

Saw the giant market here in Addis, and I have to say, it IS big. Went into several shops, high-end and otherwise, and found exactly the souvenir I wanted. Headed on back to the hotel and got into an Internet café that actually worked. Did the blog, paid some bills, and had dinner. I LOVE Ethiopian food, and I don’t understand why every tourist and book complains about it. I will admit I don’t eat all the animal parts they serve here, but the deep, spicy taste of absolutely everything is wonderful. I have to learn to cook greens this way.

Couldn’t wait to go to bed so I could wake up the next day. Will see David and Caroline + Linda in Nairobi tomorrow! YEA!!!

July 21 – Axum

Going back further still in Ethiopian history here.

Had a completely on-time, non-eventful trip here to Axum, and I was met at the airport perfectly by my guide and driver for the day. Funny little guide with his heavy army boots that are decorated with steel ornaments. I know that anything related to gay anything is heavily repressed here, but this little guy is as obvious as you can get without a slogan on a t-shirt – lots of style, lots of manner, lots of swish. And smart as a tack. He even speaks Ge’ez, the ancient language that is only used by the clergy here; he went to a monastery to learn it because he wanted to.

I got in the van, and we headed into town. Wonderful van, and the driver had clearly cleaned it up and burned some incense in it to give it nice smell. It was nice – nicest transportation I’d had in Ethiopia. We paused on the road into town to look at a church on a hilltop in the distance. This Disney-looking church belonged to a monastery founded in the 6th century. It was from a cartoon – tall, narrow peak with the church on top that was so big I don’t think there was enough room to walk around the perimeter. This spot dates back to the earliest days of Ethiopia’s Christian history.

Again, I didn’t waste time at the hotel because, while I’d been lucky with the rain so far, I didn’t want to press my luck. I FINALLY got to send an e-mail to David, and we headed to the famous stelae field that I’d mostly come here to see.

The origins of this city go way back into the BCs, but the known history of it starts about 100 AD. Axum was the center of a big empire based, predictably, on its important position for trade. The empire stretched east across the Red Sea and into what is now Saudi Arabia and Yemen, north into Sudan, and south through the Horn; the empire’s also prominent in Greek, Roman and Arabic literature. How did I miss this in my ancient history classes? Axum was the first empire to accept Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century, though Christianity arrived here much earlier via Egypt and trade along the Red Sea. It was also a uniquely African civilization, though its span brought in Semitic influences also.

I wanted to get to the famous stelae in Axum first, so that’s what we did. These monuments are great; the biggest one still standing is 72’ tall, taller than the obelisks of Egypt. The biggest one overall is 99’ tall, but it’s fallen and broken. They are tomb markers, but so little excavation work has been done that only a couple of the tombs have been opened. The stelae are made of granite similar to what we use as tombstones today, and these huge monuments were cut and transported several miles to this site. Hard to imagine – they weigh tons and tons. There were elephants in this part of the world at that time, so it’s speculated that they were used (Church legend has it that they were moved by angels, though.)

Well, they’re magnificent. There are about 120 in this field, some engraved and some just smooth. There’s still a lot of excavation work to do.

From there, we went to the Church of St. Mary of Zion. This is an important church in Ethiopia, though it “only” dates back to the 16th century, the Gondar period, because other structures at this site were razed during the various invasions that occurred after the Axumite decline in the 700s. It has the crenellated top I saw in Gondar. There were a couple of interesting things here. For one, this is where the Ark of the Covenant is. It has its own building, twelve security guards, and a hermit chosen by God as the only one who can go in the room with the tablets. The Ark got here by a rather circuitous route. The Queen of Sheba (Ethiopian, by the way) went to Jerusalem to consult Soloman, with whom she conceived a child which she delivered in Axum. This child, Menelik, went back later to meet his father, and Soloman gave him the Ark as a gift. That’s why it’s been here ever since and why Menelik is the founder of Ethiopia.

In any case, you can’t get in to see the Ark. If anyone other than God’s chosen hermit sees the Ark, he dies immediately, just like in Raiders.

The other interesting thing in the church is the all the iconographic painting. Just like in Medieval Europe, these paintings, even though 20th century, illustrate the lives and stories of the Bible, the Church and the saints. I saw one that explained the story of Soloman and Menelik.

There are ruins all over Axum, almost none of which have been excavated. I saw the reservoir of the old city, which still held water and had steps carved into the rock leading down into it. There was a 6th century palace complex a short way out of town, too, that had yet another stelae field with several hundred menhirs. There were fields of corn and millet that you had to walk through to get to the stones. There was also another palace up on a mountain with a couple of tombs. The workmanship in all the tombs I saw was wonderful – large stones perfectly cut laid seamlessly. Amazing.

It was getting dark at this point, and you could look out over the entire valley from this point. My guide pointed to the site of an archaeology dig he’d worked on and told me they’d found several chambers and lots of pottery and Axumite coins at that site. Nearby, the ruins of another palace had been identified, and there was yet another stelae field a bit further up the mountain with several hundred stones. He told me farmers were always finding old coins and pottery here and that they had for centuries. I always thought it was mysterious and cool that we’d find arrowheads and pottery on my grandparents’ farm in KY, but relics of a 6th century Ethiopian empire?

The rains came with sunset, so we headed back into town. On the way, we stopped to look at a fascinating monolith setting beside the road. It’s shape recalls the monolith in 2001, but this 4th century marker is a bit shorter and in three languages – Ge’ez, Sabatean (Arabian Peninsula language) and Greek (trade language of the day). It’s a sort of Ethiopian Rosetta Stone. It confirms the legendary 330 AD exploits of an early Axumite king in conquering the Arabian Peninsula. The inscription also says that anyone who moves the stone will die, and it’s been there for the last 1,700 years.

20 July – Lalibela

A journey further back in time today.

I was pretty lucky leaving Gondar. If I had known it was rainy season here, I wouldn’t have scheduled everything so closely; air travel to small towns is really unpredictable in the rainy season. However, I didn’t know about the season, and the trip sure looked good on paper. Anyway, got up this morning to driving rain and fog, and I thought it was real likely that I’d be another day in Gondar. However, things cleared here and in Addis, and the flight got away from the capital with just a couple of hours delay. I then got out of Gondar fine and, even better, the weather was clear enough to land in Lalibela.

This is beautiful country, too. Like around Gondar, there are plateaus and wide valleys of grassland and crops, tilled by oxen and plow. The airport of Lalibela is almost an hour away and down in a valley, I guess because it’s often foggy further up the mountains. The ride to town up the side of a mountain was great, and we passed several old churches on the way.

Lalibela is famous as the nexus for the second major flowering of culture in Ethiopia, a bit before the third, Gondar. Apparently, the use of cut rock technology had arisen a long time ago in this area, “long time” meaning eons, but it hit an apogee here that it didn’t attain again. Lalibela is the site of many 12th and 13th century churches that are cut from solid rock. I’ve seen this technique in Petra (Jordan) and in India in several places, but I can never quite grasp how the artisans did it. First, these guys have to find a massive area of rock, and then they carve down into it, freeing the form of the building from the rock. It’s inverse architecture – normally, you construct a building upwards and add what you need; in this technique, you carve the building out downwards and subtract what you don’t need. These churches are in massive, carved-out pits, and the buildings themselves – walls, ceilings, columns and decorations – are just part of the original rock that you leave as you carve. The sheer conception of a project like this boggles the mind…not to mention its execution.

Although it had stopped raining, the whole day felt like it was about 30 seconds from a downpour, so as soon as I got the hotel, I found a guide and hoofed it off to the churches while there was still light and it wasn’t raining. We went through the north group of churches this morning, and as always, I was in awe of the stone work. The churches have columns, barrel-vaulted ceilings, arches, capitals, and decorative windows, but the thing that I like is that none of the things like arches and columns is necessary. The rock is solid and stands on its own. In a regular building, arches hold up the walls, but in this kind of construction, the walls stand on their own. The arches are just decorative and, if anything, just add weight. One of the things that struck me here at Lalibela is that many churches even have ceilings that were left from the original carving of the rock.

Going in and out of these churches, I also learned a bit more about the churches in Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Churches have three areas for worship – women on the right (if you’re facing the altar), men on the left, and the center for music. There is also a raised area in the front where the priests stand. Behind this raised area is a curtained area that only the priest can go into. This area has a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, called a Tabot, and is very holy. This seems much closer to a synagogue than a church to my Protestant eyes.

Because the churches closed in early afternoon, my guide and I broke for lunch and walked down the mountain to the hotel, me feeling lucky that the rain had held off. We walked along a deep, wide ravine with graves on the sides, and my guide explained to me how Lalibela was the major pilgrimage point for Ethiopians. It’s also the place that every Christian wants to die at or be buried at as its Ethiopia’s Jerusalem. I was thinking Varanesi.

When we got to the hotel, the skies opened. “Fell” might be a better word. Rain came down solid and showed no sign of letting up, but we had to take a break of a couple of hours because of the church schedule anyway, so I didn’t fret too much. I went to my room after lunch and sat on the balcony overlooking the expansive valley and the rain below.

The rain ended just before the churches opened (I swear to you that’s the truth!), and we were able to see the second group of churches. More of the same. There was one long tunnel (50 meters, 150’?) that was absolutely, totally dark, and I nearly freaked out walking through that, totally blind and all bent over with my hand on the right wall so I had some sense of which way to go. My guide said that the tunnel was hell leading to the salvation of the church, and while I think these guys sometimes just make that kind of stuff up, the truth is that these churches are now and were originally connected by tunnels and massive, rock-hewn cuts. I just can’t imagine all the work that went into this place.

The one church worth mentioning by name is Bet Giyorgis. It looks to be about three stories tall (or deep, since it’s carved into rock) and rather than being in a rectangular shape, it’s shaped like a Greek cross. This is the only one of the rock-hewn churches that UNESCO hasn’t covered with ugly scaffolding, and that’s because the architects made the walls here thicker at the bottom than at the top to minimize earthquake damage (an innovation the Inca, too, figured out). This church has held up much better than the others. It has wonderful details on its exterior; one strange aspect of that is how the decorative lines on the exterior are carved to follow the natural line of the surface of the rock rather than being at right angles to the edges of the building. The building juts up out of the natural rock on a plinth, but the lines on this rational building follow the flow of the original rock. So people can walk down into the church, a large, curving entry entry way has been carved into the rock, like a tunnel with no roof; I think the turns and indirectness of the entry imply it had some ceremonial function.

I thought Bet Giyorgis was the most impressive thing at Lalibela, but I was more impressed by what I saw as we left the church. I asked the guide why Ethiopians considered this place like Jerusalem, and he told me that the founder, King Lalibela, had tried to reconstruct the city of Jerusalem here. The gorge I had seen earlier is called the River Jordan, and he pointed out to me that the gorge wasn’t natural – it had been hand carved! King Lalibela had carved a small canyon! There were also two small mountains, the Mount of Olives and Golgotha, that loom above the Jordan. There was a rock-hewn cross in the bottom of the River Jordan to mark where John the Baptist had been baptized, so if you were an Ethiopian Christian, if you’re buried here, you’re buried on the side of the Jordan. To me, this whole conception was even more marvelous than the rock-hewn churches. The entire village of Lalibela is one very big piece of 12th century landscape art.

Heading back to the hotel, I finally saw an Internet café, this one with a kid out in front trying to bring in customers. This kid told me that he and his friends had gotten a laptop from a Dutch woman who’d sent it to them, and since Lalibela had had Internet service for six months now (!), they were starting an Internet café. I asked him what a couple of 13-year-olds were going to do with all their money, and he told me they would pay their tuition and help their friends’ families when they got sick and had to go to the hospital. Sweet kids.

Figuring I could contribute to this good cause, I took my USB drive with several days of e-mail I’d written and went in. They had themselves a little room in a shack, and they’d papered the walls with nice little sheets of red paper. This was their first day of operation, and they were just getting set up. One of them had pulled out the power socket and was screwing something into it. I couldn’t watch; it’s 220 volts here, and I didn’t want to think about it. They talked to me as they got their old IBM Thinkpad plugged into the Internet which, to my surprise, worked! Unfortunately, my USB drive wouldn’t work on the computer, much to all our disappointment. They knew what a jump drive was, though, and asked me lots of questions about it. One of them also asked me, incredibly kindly, if I could send him one if it wasn’t too much trouble. They don’t have those things in Ethiopia, he told me. I’m such a sucker…I’m going to try to send a couple from the States when I get back. Any spares?

We went to one kid’s house for some tea, and another of the kids said he was going to be an engineer when he grew up; he’s starting a science high school this year. What does he want to build? Roads. He said that Ethiopia needs better roads because it’s so hard for his parents to get to their fields. He also asked if I had a dictionary because his high school classes are all in English and they can’t check words if they don’t have a dictionary. This, of course, tweeked my teacher gene. We went back to their Internet café, and the boys let me show them some online tools free — I didn’t have to pay for the time. I went to Google first to show them how to search. Using our right-click, we found an English/Amharic dictionary, which absolutely thrilled them! I also showed them the dictionary I use, the one that has a pronunciation feature. That was exciting, too. The future engineer likes physics and math, so I told him he could review things he hadn’t understood in class. We looked up a couple of lessons on Newton’s laws of gravitation, and I could see him soaking it up. Neither boy had known all those resources were on the net. More to the point, they now think of the Internet as an educational resource. And you can be sure they’ll tell their friends.

All this left me thinking about Georgia Tech, our surplus equipment, and what we could do in terms of not only boosting infrastructure at their little technical school but also aiding teacher training. What a worthwhile project that would be in a little village in the northern Ethiopian mountains that has only had the Internet for six months.

I got one more taste of the incredible need in this country before I went to bed. I met an American woman at dinner who’d just finished a Master’s in something like public health policy; she was going to live in Lalibela for the next two years doing epidemiology work. She told me about an orphanage in Addis that is run by Mother Theresa’s order for HIV-positive kids. There is a huge need for that service here as the government prohibits the adoption of HIV-positive kids and the kids’ families, of course, don’t want them either. She told me that, in the two days she was visiting there, two babies were left at the door. This order doesn’t solicit donations but, as you might guess, it has a tremendous need. I was so touched by this project that, though I’m absolutely the last person in the world you’d expect to donate money to a Catholic organization, I’m going to try to visit the orphanage when I’m in Addis.

19 July (Pt. 1) -- Blue Nile Falls

A great day today!

I started very early -- 6 am -- with a car and guide arriving to pick me up for a trip to the Blue Nile Falls. I gave my travel people a hard time yesterday about all the waiting I had to do, so they came up with a program that would let me get everything done that I wanted in one day instead of two. Six in the morning was part of that.

We’re so close to the equator here that the days and nights are pretty much equal in length, so it was already getting light by 6:30. Since it was a 45-minute drive out to the path to the falls, the car dropped us off on a hillside in daylight, and we started hiking. It was muddy as it had rained all night, but I slopped through it with my tennis shoes, gasping for oxygen all along the way (highlands here – 6500-7000 feet). At one point we crossed a high stone bridge built by the Portuguese in the 17th century. We were 100-150 feet above the Blue Nile at this point, so when the guide told me that the big square holes in the side of the bridge were to make it more resistant to flooding, I could hardly believe that, but since the whole river was squeezed into one narrow gorge, I guess that was possible. At this point, the Blue Nile river separates two kingdoms, and the Portuguese had built this bridge to facilitate trade and communication.

A digression about what the Portuguese were doing in Ethiopia in the 1600s: In the mid/late 1500s, Christian Ethiopia was under very severe pressure from first Arab then African attack. To deal with this, Ethiopia asked for help from that Christian superpower of the north, Europe – help that came in the form of Jesuits and their muscle, the Portuguese military. The Arabs and Africans were repelled, and the Jesuits/Portuguese settled in in the early 1600s. I think the Counter-Reformation was in full swing, and they’d certainly have wanted to straighten out Ethiopian Orthodoxy, so the Jesuits started doing things like building bridges between the two kingdoms to facilitate conversion communication. (The end of that story was that a couple of Ethiopian emperors converted to Roman Catholicism, there was a civil war against the Catholics, Ethiopian Orthodoxy returned, and the Jesuits and Portuguese were given the boot.)

Well, that’s why the bridge was there, and we walked across it with other local foot traffic. After the bridge, we walked up a hill, through a village and up another hill until the falls came into sight. Well, I thought it was the falls; that was only a small piece of it. I climbed a little more and saw the whole falls shortly. It was impressive. The Blue Nile Falls is colossally-wide, and the whole river plunges straight into a deep crevice and shoots up a gigantic plume of spray – exactly like at Victoria Falls. Unlike at Victoria (or Niagara) Falls, though, there was no one else to see it. Just the guide and me.

That was enough wonder for one day, so I caught my breath, took some pictures, and headed back through the village and up the path to the car. I was about the best thing of the day for the kids, who followed along behind me asking for pens. I also stopped to take a picture of an elderly lady who my guide said was a “nun.” She wasn’t, at least in the terms we understand it. She was a widow, and her kids had all married, so she just devoted her time to the church now. I saw the same thing in India, when an older or retired person, free of family duties, would devote themselves to religion. I saw it in Thailand, too. For that matter, I’ve seen it in Shelbyville.

19 July (Pt.2) -- Lake Tana

At the car, we drove back into Bahar Dar and went into a hotel on the shore of Lake Tana to get some coffee and a couple of sandwiches for the next leg of the trip. I needed the coffee since I still hadn’t eaten. We’d arranged for a boat to take us from the hotel out to an island in Lake Tana to visit a monastery there. Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile. (If you need some geography, the Blue Nile arises here, and the White Nile starts in Uganda. The two meet in Khartoum, where the Nile Nile starts.) Lake Tana is a crater lake, and it’s dotted with islands, many of which have monasteries on them that date from the 16th century and earlier.

Enjoyed my sandwich on the way out to Kebran Gabriel, a monastery only open to men. It’s on a small island, and when we landed I was thrilled to see my first priest! … or monk. He had on a bright, tan-ish robe with kind of a pillbox hat, and his beard was braided. I wanted to do a photo, but the guide said he’d be there when we got back, so I relented, and we headed off.

As we were going up the hill to the monastery on the top, I got a lesson in Ethiopian Orthodox monasticism. There are different types of monasteries, depending on whether they are all-male, all-female, or co-ed. And they have different functions, whether for meditation or for community service. Kebran Gabriel is a male, communal, spiritual monastery. Think Thomas Merton at Gestheme.

We passed the lodgings and gardens and went toward the church. Just below the church, we stopped at a small building which was the library for the monastery. This really was something out of Indiana Jones. There was a little old monk with glasses in the library, and there were shelves filled with ancient, leather-bound books. He took one out and opened it to show me. I forget the date, but it was hand-lettered and –illustrated, and the pages were goatskin. He told me I could look through it, but I was hesitant to touch the pages. Then he showed me a collection of antique crowns from the series of Gondor (Ethiopian) Emperors who had sponsored the monastery in some way. These were lying on the shelves, too, along with the books and old ecclesiastical regalia like processional crosses, incense burners, and chalices. The priest knew which emperor had donated what, where each book came from, and what each book said. It was amazing to see this stuff, 400 years old or more, just sitting around on shelves.

I wanted to talk with the priest longer, but my guide said we should hurry, so went up to the church. Again, an ancient church with a thatched roof and mud and brick walls. There was quite a bit of old paint work on the walls here, all done in big, brown-eyed, Ethiopian style. While the guide wanted to tell me all about St. George and the Dragon, I was real interested in the Second Coming panel with its Bosch-like creatures in Hell waiting for the leftovers.

When we got back to the boat, my priest wasn’t there waiting for me to take his photo, so we got in the boat and headed back to Bahar Dar. I asked if the monasteries had been founded on islands for security purposes. Partly, my guide told me, but mostly to get away from the distractions of towns and villages. Also, monks and nuns end up in these monasteries based on a calling from God as well as confirmation by the Church. The monastic vocation at a certain monastery isn’t necessarily a lifetime calling, though. If God moves you, you may just move to another monastery.

On the way back to the hotel dock, we made a detour to see the very spot where Lake Tana becomes the Nile. At that spot, there were kids fishing in thatched boats, the design of which is apparently very ancient since it’s depicted in some of the earliest art work. One kid, wearing a Florida sweatshirt, had two catfish, which he held up to show me.

19 July (Pt. 3) -- Gondar

A fast Coke at the hotel, and we were on the way up the road to Gondar. I was very surprised at what an excellent road it was. The World Bank had apparently granted a loan to Ethiopia, which had hired Chinese engineers to build it. I guess American labor is just too expensive; the big road up the Rift Valley from Nairobi, which I distinctly remember having been built by American engineers 20 years ago, has recently been rebuilt by Chinese, too.

Nice road, but terrible conditions in the small towns along the way. In the rainy season, water just stands around in places like these, and people have to get their drinking, cooking, and cleaning water all from the same place, often just big pools of standing water that you also have to wade through to get around. I recall from Mali that rainy season is the unhealthiest time of year because of water problems, and I found myself daydreaming of what it would take to develop a sewage and water system for just one of these towns.

Outside the towns, though, the mountains are beautiful. Everything is green pasture thanks to the rain, and the mountains themselves are unusual. There are often tall fingers, more like fists, that jut up from the usual lines of the landscape; I’d guess they are lava extrusions that the softer mountainsides have eroded to expose. Whatever their origin, they give an almost alien appearance to the area. There are also plateaus that echo the Four Corners areas, and there are the rolling green hills that feel like Kentucky. There are few trees, so you can see for miles and miles. This is a dynamic, varied interesting landscape…punctuated by the occasional poor, small, wet town.

After a few hours, we arrived at Gondar, center of power for the last big Ethiopian empire. These were the people who invited the Portuguese and enriched the monasteries on Tana. They had a fantastically rich and influential empire located at the center of world trade at their time – the convergence of all the important trade routes from the Muslim lands of the Arabian Peninsula, inland Africa, and India through the Red Sea to Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

I wanted to be sure to see the famed Royal Enclosure, so I cut lunch as short as I could without killing my guides and pushed us on. The Enclosure was all I’d imagined and more. The most impressive building was the Royal Palace, which, as you might expect, had influences from everywhere. With it’s round towers and crenellated work, it looked like the castle at Disney World – or something that was contemporary in Europe. However, the massive entry stair and gate recalled numerous forts I’d seen in India, and there were pointy windows like you’d see in Venice or parts of the North Africa and the Middle East. Arches throughout the palace were Moorish. All this was mixed with Christian and Jewish iconography (there was a Star of David with a couple of overlapping crosses in the middle, a reference to the Godorian legend that the dynasty originated in the love child of Solomon and the Queen of Sheeba).

The rains finally caught up with me here, so we finished visiting the several palaces and went to a truly beautiful Bath – an enormous tank with a small pavilion constructed out into the water. The Indian influence was clear in that conception, though the pavilion wasn’t exactly what you’d call graceful as it would have been in India. Surrounded by trees and figs, this place felt old and calm.

My last stop was at one of the most famous churches in Ethiopia – Debre Berhan Selassie. It dates from the Gondar period, too. The interesting thing here is the ceiling painted with lines of angels; for Ethiopians, angels are our guardians, and in this sanctuary, they watch you everywhere. There was an enormous amount of devotion being expressed while we were there.

The rain had gotten a lot worse by this time, so I finally called it a day. I think I’m pretty much over jet lag by this point because I slept like a log. I did wonder, though, if JRR Tolkien had had any acquaintance with Amhara or Ge’ez (the “Latin” of the Church); don’t names like “Gondar” and “Raz Sehul” sound faintly familiar?

18 July -- Transportation

Whew…today was really African.

Started when I was two hours late for my flight to Gonder. My guide had misread my itinerary, and he showed up at the hotel an hour after take-off so I could get to the plane two hours early. No problem though, because the flight hadn’t left yet.

He got me to the airport, and I joined the sleepy throngs who’d arrived at 5 am for a 7 am flight. I got there at 9 am and was feeling pretty good about the extra sleep and the Ethiopian breakfast I’d had. I felt pretty good til about 1 pm, when I started to winge and try to talk my way onto any other flight going more or less the same direction. The delay was classic – one of the engines had gone out as the flight was leaving this morning, and by the time they’d unloaded everybody and fixed the engine, the continuing rain in Addis had spread north, and fog was preventing landing up there. Anyway, the fog cleared in Bahir Dar, just south of Gonder, so I talked my way onto a plane headed there, bringing along a young, lost-looking, German logistics volunteer for medicines sans frontier.

It was a kinda bumpy ride, and the new-flyer, young Ethiopian woman in a robin’s egg blue scarf beside me kept things snappy with gasps, screams and sudden arm clutching. It was kind of like going to a scary movie with David. I won’t mention what the woman sitting beside the volunteer did, but she wasn’t an experienced flyer either. When we landed at Bahir Dar, Ethiopian Airways announced that we could go no further, so I wasn’t going to see Gonder today.

I wasn’t stranded, though, because someone from the travel agency had found out I was on that plane and called someone to meet me. We were going to try for a dash to the Blue Nile falls, so I got in his VW van along with a half-dozen airport workers, and we went through the back parts of town, dropping his buds off. (Don’t ask me where the German ended up…no idea. They might have taken the plane back to Addis.) Anyway, Bahir Dar was an Africa I hadn’t seen in 25 years – men sitting around listening to music and talking, women standing around talking, young girls pounding grain in those gigantic mortar and pestles. I should add, too, that it was continuing to rain on and off.

I was eventually transferred to a bigger bus and headed out of town to the falls with a group of five Ethiopian tourists who’d had the same idea I had in Addis and who, like me, had been stranded. This place was green like you couldn’t imagine – wet, fertile, rich. Guys plowing fields with oxen and wood plows reminded me of Mali 30 years ago. I saw some big, brilliant blue birds (rollers?) and a fish eagle in a tree. Then I saw dark clouds, and soon I saw a deluge. Since you have to walk about a mile to the falls, we decided to give up the Blue Nile for the day and head back to a hotel.

That’s Africa. Rain where you expect desert, delays, waiting and beauty.

17 July--Addis Ababa

Up early and on the way to the airport by 6:30. This is the drive I remember – acacia trees in the distance; flat, African plain; broken clouds and cool weather. Nairobi Game Park is right beside the hiway, so it’s almost like being far from town.

Got to Addis Ababa with no more delay than you’d expect and was met by my guide at the airport. Glad of that…I can already see that Ethiopians are somewhat aggressive, and it was nice not to have to deal with all the taxi stuff. The travel business here is nothing like in Kenya. My car is a beat-up Corolla that smells of a thousand people’s sweat, and the poor guide looks like he’s been around the block a time or two. But he’s a nice guy and I guess we’ll manage with the broken English.

Went right to the hotel and camped for an hour and a half. Like the Corolla, this hotel has seen better days. It’s supposed to be nice, but it just looks dingy and used to death. I noticed that there were no other tourists on the flight (unlike the flight from Amsterdam, which was all tourists who were already wearing their safari gear), and I could see when I got in the car that there wasn’t much tourist infrastructure here. After a needed rest, I headed out to do some sightseeing when my car and driver came back.

Addis Ababa is nothing like I expected. I thought it was going to be like Khartoum or something similar, but it’s more like Bogota than anyplace else I’ve seen. It’s high here (8,200 ft), and the vegetation is the alpine evergreens and lush broadleafs so common at that altitude. It’s humid, overcast and grey most of the time, and it’s very cool. And I have almost no energy and get winded when I walk up stairs. Addis feels more like Bogota than Bogota.

The first thing we did was head up a mountain for a scenic overlook of the city. From there, you really could see that Addis is the third biggest city in Africa, though it didn’t seem crowded as we were driving through it. It was nice up on the overlook with all the eucalyptus trees and the rich grass. I also noticed a big cluster of French tarragon blooming along the fence of a house there as well as several clusters of mountain daisies of some kind. Some shepard kids trotted a few goats and sheep though, snapping their little whips at their animals. The guide told me that this was where some princess stood when she asked for and got a grant to build a home that King Menelik II eventually turned into Addis in the valley below.

There was a very colorful church just below, St. Mary’s, where Menelik was crowned. I did a little tour of the outside of it and got a taste for how seriously Ethiopians take their Christianity. It’s octagonal with separate entrances for men and women, and there are big banner-icons at several places. People were praying and crying and kissing door frames and making offerings in several places. My guide explained that one building was where bread was prepared when people fasted during the three fasting holidays: Christmas, Easter, and one I didn’t know. It was pretty active, but I had to careful with the camera—they don’t like having their pictures taken, and they REALLY don’t like at religious centers.

It’s interesting that Ethiopia is so Christian. In fact, Christianity came here right after it started; Christianity was basically an offshoot of Judaism, and there was a big Jewish population here. There was already an established Church in Ethiopia by 100 AD, and the Ethiopian Empire of Axum officially became Christian in 300 AD, only the second country to do so, I think I read. Anyway, the Orthodox church is still extremely important in daily life, and about half of the population is Christian. At sunset in Addis, the mosques do their call, and the churches follow with their own. That’s something I haven’t seen elsewhere. Geographically, you could almost throw a stone to the Arabia Peninsula from here, so I guess Christianity has helped Ethiopian define themselves under the pressure from Islam in the northeast.

I was feeling pretty tired by this point, so we made one more tourist stop, the National Museum. How cool! The feature is Lucy, the three-million-year-old hominid discovered in ‘74 that showed walking upright preceded an increase in brain size in hominid evolution. There were realistic repros of her actual bones and a reconstruction of the skeleton. Lucy looked to be about the size of a baboon or smaller. Cute! And while Lucy was cool, she was almost overshadowed by all the other prehistoric bones. There were prehistoric giraffe bones and some aquatic dinosaur with a long snout that had lines of needly teeth running up it. It was an impressive display.

At this point, I was about to drop due to altitude and jet lag, so I headed back to the hotel for dinner and some sleep.

16 July--Nairobi

YAWN….. So what else to expect after a 19-hour trip? Got to Nairobi just fine. First leg of the trip on KLM was kind of mediocre, plane and food. However, I did get to see Robots, which I missed at the theater. Solid C. A melatonin tablet got me through Hitch, which I’d already seen.

My transfer gate in Amsterdam was right beside my arrival gate, so that couldn’t have been easier. I got out and explored the airport some so I could walk, and I got a bottle of gin at the duty-free. Tonic water and limes are available in Kenya, so we have the gin-and-tonics taken care of. (That info is so my fellow travelers can get something else there!) Changed some money so I’d have some for tips in Nairobi.

Amsterday-Nairobi was a great flight. Each chair had it’s own video, and there about 50 movies to choose from. I saw a very good Dutch film, Simon, about the friendship between a straight guy and a gay guy. I think it was Holland’s candidate for the foreign film Oscar. Very Dutch, but good – an A. Could’ve watched the Maltese Falcon or Million Dollar Baby, too, but I couldn’t stay awake. Give me KLM (Europe) any day!

It was dark when I got here to Nairobi, but I was at my hotel within an hour of landing. Things couldn’t have been easier. My driver tonight (and tomorrow) is a 67-year-old grandfather named Joseph. He took me right to the hotel through Nairobi’s dark night. The city is recovering from a really bad reputation for crime, and Joseph went to special lengths to tell me how the new government is beefing up police patrols. When we turned off lit streets and into a real dark one, two guys in combat fatigues with machine guns loomed into sight, but Joseph told me they were police going to question four guys I’d noticed as we turned. However, by the time he got that out, I was already feeling lucky that I had some money in my pack so that, when they stole it, they wouldn’t find my real stash in my money belt. Ha! However, as dark as the city is, I think it was a pretty normal fear.



Nice little hotel here in Nairobi—five acres of gardens, several outdoor restaurants, nice service. Hope the sun’s up at 6:30 am tomorrow so I can see it.

We're ready for Africa!