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.