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?