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.