ETHIOPIA 2016- SPRING TRIP MARCH 27, 2016 TO MAY 9, 2016

ETHIOPIA

ኢትዮጵያ

Lalibela

Somaliland

 

MARCH 27, 2016 to MAY 9, 2016

MARCH 27, 2016: ETHIOPIA-ADDIS ABABA

 ‘’African tribal life at its most raw and wild’ is how the guidebook describes the less visited western region of this amazing country, near the borders with Kenya and South Sudan. Of course, I have to go. Dennis is sure about Ethiopia, but so sure about THAT part of it. ‘But we’ll be with Menge and Birhanu’ That seals the deal.

Mengistu Aby and Birhanu Mesele inhabit our lives now, companions, friends, travel buddies, family. Birhanu answered my Trip Advisor post in 2014 looking for advice on travel in Ethiopia, offering’ the best trip at the best price’. He delivered on both promises and joined us for 17 days of our 40-day trip. Menge is the driver who drove us almost 7000 miles of bumpy ‘African massage’ in those 40 days.

Both are men of sweet, good nature, kindness, easy laughter, and generosity. Menge’s wife, his beloved ‘Mama’, has cooked for us. His daughters have charmed us. We've followed Birhanu ’s immersion into new fatherhood and increasingly successful ventures into the tourism business. We are lucky to know them. They are the major reasons we have returned to Ethiopia.

Our flight from Kenya is short in time but long in anticipation.

Birhanu’s smile is immense, requiring sunglasses at any distance closer than 50 paces. The hugs are real, from both sides. He and his friend, Goitam, drive us to the digs he has arranged and paid for on our behalf, then has to scoot off. We decide to meet tomorrow morning and plan our days together.

Mr. Martin’s Cozy Hostel is indeed that, cozy, and spotless, airy, comfortable, the shared bath impeccable. Ababa, the beautiful clerk, is worthy of her name. Ababa means flower. (Addis Ababa is ‘New Flower’, a major stretch of imagination.) Better take a shower soon, she says, there will be an electrics problem later, and we won't have any water. So, we do. We know we're in Africa.

‘Spighitty’with vegetables, fresh and heaped, is our first meal in Addis at a traditional restaurant recommended by Ababa and right up the alley, then across the street. We survive the traffic crossing.

Italy’s shameful, inglorious, misguided, and genocidal experiment in colonial land grabbing has left souvenirs in Ethiopian culture and language. Goodbye is ‘ciao, ciao’. Foods and drinks are spighitty, cappuccino, pasta, ravioli, all of which have lost or gained a bit in the translation. Our spighitty with vegetables has benefitted from the translation. It’s delicious, and includes chunks of sweet carrots and richly flavored white potatoes, usually shrinking violet step-children in the taste department.

The sweet waiter smiles when I retrieve the word ‘kazkasse’, ‘cold’ from my brain’s language bin. It's one of the few words in Amharic I learned or remember from the last trip. It works. The delicious Harar beer is cold. The beers are $1.25 cents, the heaping plates of pasta, $2 each.

Both help us sleep after a day of great emotions.

MARCH 28, 2016: ETHIOPIA, PART 1 OF 2- ADDIS ABABA

 ‘Cappuccino’, laughs Menge, and he throws his arms into the air in the Italianate gesture of exuberant approval and excitement. We hand him two boxes of cappuccino mix, raw material for his favorite drink. Now, he and ‘Mama’ can make it at home. His other favorite munchy is hamburger. We desisted on that one.

We’re sitting in our cozy corner of Mr. Martin’s Cozy Hostel with Menge and Birhanu unpacking the bags of goodies we’ve transported across an ocean and 2 continents for them. Birhanu laughs over the baby clothes for his son (thank you, Joyce and Deborah). Both guys ooh and ahh over the 8x10 enlargements of favorite photos (thank you, HP), and over the photo books we made for them from selected photos of the 11,000 (!) we took on our trip together last year (thank you, MyPublisher). My old laptop, refurbished remotely by Dennis’ brother, Bobby, (thank you, Bobby) and my retired Samsung smart phone (no thanks to Verizon) bring tears to Menge. I know he has had a hard time since he lost his job. ‘You can sell it, you know’, and I hope he does.

Birhanu, always filled with surprises, has our morning all figured out. First? Visa for Somaliland. We squeeze into one of the crowded motor coaches that carry passengers on routes throughout the city, stopping when hailed for pickup and wherever â passenger needs to go down. The visa is a snap. Picture, application, passport, copy of passport page….and $70 from us. An official stamp and two hours from them.

With 2 hours to spend, off we go to a coffee shop. Birhanu is now a partner in AddisEats, an organization that leads people on eating tours of the city, so he knows THE local places. This one is a gem, presided over by a woman as charming as she is beautiful. We all do bunna, Ethiopian coffee.

Birhanu has a vegetarian meal, a luxurious composition of brilliantly colored vegetables displayed on an edible platter, Ethiopia’s staple, injera. It's Lent, and a ‘fasting’ day, a day without meat. We're still full from a cozy breakfast at Mr. Martin's, but a taste is inevitable and it is delicious. Right then we commit to joining one of his AddisEats tours.

MARCH 28, 2016, Part 2 of 2: ETHIOPIA-Addis Ababa

The music sails out, wailing over drummed rhythms. The musicians are at the far end of the dimly lit restaurant, in shadow. Their music comes out of the dark, disembodied. The tall, attenuated musician bows a stringed instrument, sound that carries hints of the longing that breath produces in bagpipes. The drum rhythms suggest India. One of the musicians adds hand claps, sharp. The singing is throaty and rich. The words of the song are alien, the emotion is not.

Then, two dancers turn the music into movement. The young man is handsome, as are so many men of Ethiopia, with headlight eyes blazing over sublime cheekbones, a face made for photography, deeply dark, rising out of swaths of soft, white.

He grabs a drum, beats his own rhythm and briefly drops to the floor, head thrown back, then rises. His partner, equal in beauty, shakes her head and shoulders in the vibration so common in Ethiopian dancing and frees a cascade of ringlets, joining him in movements at once staccato and fluid. Ears and eyes, then my pulse, give in to the seduction. This is what music does.

I leave a small tip in the basket by the microphone. The musicians smile, nod and say ‘thank you’.

We never do get to eat. We can't figure out the menu. Nothing on it matches our Lonely Planet food guide. (Gotta work on that with AddisEats tomorrow) No problem. The cold beer and music nourish us.

On the way back to Mr. Martin’s, we pass one of the many coffee shops where Ethiopians hang out. Cappuccino and pound cake seem like reasonable night caps. Even though in Italy cappuccino is an anathema after 11am, here, at 8 pm, it’s on offer and goes down very easily.

MARCH 29, 2016 PART 1 OF 2- CHORUS AND CABERNET

I awake at 03:42 today in the year 2016, by my watch---or 21:42, still yesterday, in the year 2009, by Ethiopia’s traditional system of counting the hours, starting the day at ‘sunrise’ (always 6 am by our clocks), not midnight, and counting the years by the ancient Julian calendar, which has 12 pages, each with 30. days, and a thirteenth page with the remaining 5 days that make up a solar year. The numbers are irrelevant. It's still the middle of the night.

That’s of no concern to the Canine Chorus filling the night with arpeggios of doggy doggerel. Like street and village dogs all over the world who scramble the canine DNA that the style and trend purveyors of dog breeds try to keep unscrambled, the street mutts of Addis verge in appearance. Middling in size, shades of light brown, smooth coated, perky eared, they are the basic dog lurking beneath the surface of tea cup Muffy Sue and horsey Marmaduke.

The Canine Chorus performance reveals that those uniform looks can deceive, and deeply rooted doggy DNA will be heard. I hear the basso booming of mastiffs, the baritone of retrievers, the tenor of poodles, and the high coloratura baying of huskies and beagles.

These are city noises from city dogs. I miss the hyena calls of Masai Mara. Mr. Martin’s Cozy Hostel is indeed cozy, as is my bed, and no place to leave at whatever time of dark it is, Canine Chorus be damned.

By sunrise, the Chorus has retired and morning arrives in silence. Well breakfasted on cereal, hard-boiled eggs, bread, peanut butter, jams, and honey, but not the chocolate and hazel nut Nutella slathered on bread slab all around us, we loll, and nurse dark, strong coffee. It’s not quite bunna, but tasty, and tempered with hot milk.

Ababa’s pig-tailed nieces fly through the yard under the clothesline, hiding and seeking through the sheets. Our laundry flaps above them. For 6Birr (about 30 cents) an item, it is purged of the dust of Addis, sun dried, and folded, and gives the laundry lady an income.

Birhanu arrives and plans for the next few weeks in western Ethiopia are launched. Some sink, or self-destruct on the rocks of reality. Others merely wobble. Car rental is a tricky business here. Negotiations are heating up the cell phone. Resourceful as always, Birhanu flashes his smile electric and heads off to make things work. Stay tuned.

At about 3, Birhanu and two other AddisEats folks pull up in a cab in front of ‘Oh, Canada’, restaurant (CANADIAN food??) and local meeting spot. Birhanu has kindly invited us for an AddisEats Wine Tasting. We survive the street crossing and slip into the small but elegant La Domaine for our wine.

Elaine and Jim are an interesting, traveled, funny couple our age from the Boston area. No wine is needed to move us from strangers to dinner companions. Birhanu introduces us to the story of the brave people who decided to bring wine culture to an area of Ethiopia 5,000 feet above the Rift Valley. It was a good move. The vines thrive, the wine is delicious, and is now marketed worldwide. (Good luck finding it in the local supermarkets in Florida.)

We move from chardonnay to cabernet sauvignon/merlot and then to a third I can’t remember. The wine is obviously working.

MARCH 29, 2016, Part 2 of 2 - AddisEats and Streets

A short stumble away from the Cabernet is our first food stop with AddisEats: traditional vegetarian fasting food, mandatory 2 days every week for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and every day during Orthodox Lent…now.

Five or six portions of vibrantly colored yellow to orange or red mixtures, based on beans and lentils, room with deep green collard greens on a two-foot circle of injera, Ethiopia’s bread and edible plate. Small piles of complex spice mixtures sit ready to add a choice of heat, from slightly tingling to tongue destructive incandescence, to the mix. It’s delicious food. My tongue survives.

Next stop is deep fried wild tilapia drizzled with fresh squeezed lime juice. This is REAL tilapia, with flavor and texture under the crisp limey crust, not the tasteless mush of the flaccid, farmed, frozen, and finned slugs we get in the USA.

Next? Fresh fruit smoothies, pure and sugar-free luxurious mixtures of avocado, mango, pineapple, papaya, rich green in color, tongue coatingly silken.

Stop Four is a return to yesterday’s coffee shop and its gracious owner. She pours her bunna, fresh roasted, ground, and steeped, gracefully into tiny cups. We swirl in a stem of rue, briefly, as is the custom, to enrich the flavor. No further sensory stimulation is needed…and then our bunna lady tosses frankincense chunks onto coals and sweetens the air. Fresh popcorn, unbuttered, but sugared, is the usual partner to the coffee. It works.

Ethiopians treat coffee preparation so seriously that they call it the Coffee Ceremony. It’s a 2 to 3-hour process from dusty raw green beans to coffee lover’s heaven. At the end you drink three cups of the brew, each named, the third as ‘blessing’ because the drinkers bless the people they’re sharing the brew with. This is so very NOT fast food, so very not Starbucks, rooted in tradition, not in corporate marketing strategies.

We’ve come in at the end of the process and, like most people who drop in for a cup with their favorite bunna lady, we’re happy with enjoying the 15 to 25 cent end product. I stop at 2 cups. If I have 3 of this potent brew I will be wired and wide-eyed for a week. As it is, after 2 tiny cups, I will probably still be awake when the Canine Chorus begins to warm up.

Finally, we walk the streets to Stop Five and crispy, delicious, tiny chunks of stir-fried beef. The last of the wine is re-opened. Mine winds up on my lap. It’s clearly time for Mr. Martin’s before the coffee kicks in and I climb up the walls instead of into bed.

Birhanu waves down a shared motor coach, we squeeze in among the other passengers, Birhanu pays the 7 cent fare, and tells the young ‘stop announcer’ (I don’t know what else to call him) where to drop us. A few minutes later we unsqueeze, drop down and out, get our bearings and head home. A promising looking shortcut takes us down a darkened streets lined with ladies of the evening in appropriate business suits. We keep going.

If the Canine Chorus performed later I didn’t hear it.

MARCH 30, 2016 ETHIOPIA - I'M GOING TO BE A FATHER

‘I’m going to be a father’.

It’s December 12, 2014. We’re many days into our first trip to Ethiopia with Menge and Birhanu, four guys on a buddy trip, hundreds of miles south of Addis, in Ethiopia's tribal region. It's Birhanu’s birthday (Number 30), a surprise to us. His wife, Herane, calls with the usual wishes and has just told him he will be a father in July, a BIG surprise to him. I know she saw the light from his smile in Addis.

Fast forward to July, 2015. The email comes, and with it a picture of their son, Asbe (‘Gift of God’), newborn, but smooth, wide-eyed, and not looking at all like the wrinkled Winston Churchill caricatures I’m semi-familiar with. This is a beautiful baby.

Fast forward to late February, 2016. We’re picking out baby clothes for almost 9 months old Asbe to grow into. Right. ME, who after spending my early teen years burping and changing many babies in my Mother’s Day care, announced at 16 that I was DONE with babies, UPPERCASE, BOLD, ITALICIZED, UNDERLINED.

The ‘we’ is, first, Joyce Mattson, then Deborah Lansing, grandmothers both. I have to admit the tiny socks, shoes, hoody, cargo pants, tee shirts, shorts, bathing suit, and above all, blue Hawaiian shirt with palm trees are cute, size 18 to 24 months, (room for growth). They fill my backpack, then a package I hand over to Birhanu in Addis a month later.

Fast forward to March 30, 2016, said clothes have been delivered, a few days ago. We’re off to meet nine-month old Asbe, finally.

Of course, he’s wearing the blue Hawaiian shirt. Of course, he smiles and laughs when he meets us. Of course, he’s totally unafraid of the funny looking ferngi. Of course, he’s adorable. And, of course, I am totally besotted.

Clearly, this is the cutest, the best, the most adorable of all babies.

I take a few pictures, perhaps a bit more than that, but who’s counting? Of course, I send EVERYONE I know pictures. That’s what Facebook is for, right? Check out the pictures. I CAN unfriend you, you know.

Oh, yes, Herane is lovely, charming, sweet, and makes us a wonderful, delicious, vegetarian, fasting meal. Meeting her, finally, is a great joy. This is a beautiful family. We are so happy for our friend, Birhanu.

Here are pictures. The two big people are Asbe ’s parents.

MARCH 31, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HEADING WEST

It’s a sad beginning to our journey to Ethiopia’s ‘wild west’. Menge, our beloved driver from our earlier trip, can’t drive for us. He lost his job 6 months ago and needs to keep looking. We work out a way to help him with Birhanu, but we have to say goodbye until we get back about April 17. The hugs are sad when we drop him off near his house.

Tall, lanky, smiling Alex is our new driver. We like him immediately, especially his laugh that rumbles.

Within an hour we are out of the unbreathable brownness of Addis air. The Ethiopia we remember emerges. Road life takes over. Fields stretch outward, horizon bound, from both sides of the road, separating small towns that sprawl inward onto the road, common shared space for living. Donkeys, goats, nonchalant cattle, and befuddled sheep, bump against horses, alone, or pulling three wheeled carts erupting with people-cargo. They claim the road. Everywhere there are walkers, often bent under great loads, hoisting the burdens of life on two feet, not four

Slowly the color of Ethiopia emerges: wrappings for the head and body, skirts, blouses, and shawls solid, patterned, tie dyed in colors and audacious combinations outrageous to western eyes but so exciting to those same eyes and unselfconsciously perfect here. Occasionally Moslem women billow by, dark faces nested in flowing yards of cloth in solid colors wrested from flowers, fruit, spices.

We pass a flotilla of teenage boys and girls, their school uniforms head to toe a dusty rose, a color death to most western complexions, but not to Ethiopian skin. The darkest Ethiopian skin steals the light into a blackness so profound surely it is irrevocably lost. But then that light shines out, an obsidian glow reformed as cheekbones and planes, angled in softness, flawless. Even dusty rose surrenders.

The road signs move from bilingual, Amharic script and English letters, adding the rampantly vowel rich words of the southern Omo language. Many are borrowed from English. I can get money at a baankii, clothes, a mobaaliyii, or a kaameeraa in a butikii, buy food at a girroossaarrrii, order fresh fruit juusii in a reestorrantiyii, study at an akkaadaammii, sleep in a pensiyoonnii, and, if there’s a problem, the pooliissii or sokorruuttii can help. Maybe.

We drive on, still almost 8000 feet above sea level on this lifted edge of Africa.

We snake around a curve and the world drops away thousands of feet and we stare across the immense valley of the Gibe River, a snake thread eon below. We will descend, cross this valley, then climb the other side before breaking for the day. The immensity defeats our cameras, but we stop anyway and click. A donkey rolls on the road.

We descend quickly down to the river and into the increasing heat. 34 degrees (93 or so), 35 (95) 36. …. Flame trees line the road. We are not surprised.

Twenty-five Birr ($1.20) buy us a dozen just picked mangoes, refreshments for later, but we’re too tired to eat them.

Easy sleep follows rice dusted with egg, beer, and good talk in the darkened hotel garden.

APRIL 1, 2016: ETHIOPIA-TO MEZAN TEFARI

Some of you have asked for road names and/or numbers that might be Google-able. Road names? Road numbers? There's this one that goes over there, and that one that goes somewhere else that will take a day to walk. Actually the roads do have numbers, but I don't have them available.

This might help:

We left Addis Ababa March 31, driving southwest, passed through MEKEMTE and overnighted March 31 in JIMMA. Today, April 1, we passed through BONGA, and spend tonight here in MIZAN TEFARI. These are all big towns and should be easy to find.

So far we have had hotels, restaurants and hot water. The next few days will be minus all 3…and perhaps place names that Google recognizes. (Ethiopians know where they are, and get there without Google. We’ll be with them. Google will have to cope.)

This is new territory for us, geographically and topographically. On our first trip, north and east of here, the landscape was the time-challenging rocky rawness and nakedness of montane and desert geology. This area is botanical Ethiopia, voluptuous flora covering the harsh backbones. It is Vermont-like territory, green and mountainous, and Hawaii-like, tropical and lush, a new kind of Ethiopia for us.

The region is called Kaffa. It is the birthplace of Ethiopia's most famous product, hand-picked from wild trees. The name of the region is the only other hint you'll get as to what that product is.

Kaffa is stunningly beautiful.

The newly asphalted road (thank you, South Korea), comfy path for cows, sheep, goats, people, flows and coils, a grey Slinky, up, down, along, and over slopes, ridges, peaks, through forests, open fields and passing homesteads of round straw-hatted tukuls.

We stop. No one is about. Instantly, the kids surround us, popped through the landscape by that unerring kid instinct for fun. Our cameras provide it.

In Jimma, the big town where we spent last night, foreigners are no big thing. It’s a main center for NGO groups hoping to provide assistance. Resident foreigners mean inflated prices. Birhanu bargains for two wooden stools, a hand-crafted local specialty, pays more than he expected, but way less than the going price in Addis. Dennis and I stay out of sight in the car while he looks for cheap sandals. We’re more successful finding toothpaste.

Relatively wealthy, this Moslem area had its own king, even under Emperor Haile Selassie. This morning, still in Jimma, we bounce up a muddy road to visit his neglected empty wooden palace and the small museum storing its contents. From high above the town the view is spectacular.

The last king was over 6’8”, even taller than our lanky driver, Alex, but at, almost 400 pounds, way over twice his weight. Descendants of his 5 wives and their 14 children are part of the Ethiopian diaspora. Some of his grandchildren probably live in Washington, DC.

Haile Selassie visited him once. Local Moslems took up a collection and built a throne for their Orthodox Emperor and decorated it with common Ethiopian Orthodox Christians elements, angels and the Star of David. He stayed for 20 minutes. The throne remains, dusty, but still a reminder of the good relations that exist in Ethiopia between its Orthodox and Moslem citizens.

At night, I sample another local product, delicious, sweetened tea from the town of Wush. Three of us move on to some of Ethiopia’s excellent beers. We laugh through our last restaurant meal and cold drinks for several days. Laughter and talk come easily to us. Our travel stories all seem to reach the same conclusion: travel brings light into our lives.

Birhanu and Alex certainly do.

We sleep on that.

APRIL 2, 3, 4, 2016: MEZAN TEFARI-TUM-KIBISH-MEZAN TEFARI, PART ONE

My scrambled eggs lose the taste contest to the delicious chechibsa the guys order. Think thick chips of French toast, sweet, with a hint of spice. Yummy. Ditto the tea, then the bunna chaser.

Fog drips from the mountains around us, greying the green, robbing brilliance but granting mystery. Mizan Tefari doesn’t deserve this setting. Few places would. Mizan has the look and feel of a place people pass through, and have few memories of.

But, this is Ethiopia, so there is always something for us. Across the street, two workers, already 2 stories up, construct a eucalyptus branch scaffolding headed for the top edge of the 4 story building. They're spider-like in agility, negotiating their wooden web in wide-stepped leaps, hawk- like in their fearlessness of heights. If they fall there is no net, physical, social, or otherwise, to rescue them from disaster.

The spider men keep climbing.

For the next 2 days, maybe 3, we’ll camp among the Surmi people. We’ll need a local guide and cook. He lopes up, hand extended in greeting, joins us for coffee. Tizzupt then takes our passports and heads off to handle the formalities that will give us permission to travel in this remote part off the country, and the local police notice that we’re there. (In the next 3 days we see only 3 other vehicles, and one other foreigner.)

The fog has dropped onto Mizan, an almost rain. The street life is irresistible. There’s a tree to protect me from the occasional drip.  A young boy in the omnipresent soccer shirt outfit gifts me with a biiiggg smile. He’s balancing a three-foot-wide flat basket--- filled with more baskets---on his head, hands-free. He swivels under it to wave at a friend driving by on a two wheeled cart, horse-drawn and tap tapping by on the cobblestones street. A three wheeled Bajaj belches black smoke, adding its tiny engine tuk-tuk sounds, the wheezing sounds that give these universal conveyances their name, ‘tuk-tuk’, in most of the world.

I join the road throng. People, especially kids, stop and stare. Foreigners are rare here. Friendliness is not. Five guys wave me over for some morning bunna, slip sideways and make room for me on a rickety chair. The bunna lady gives a look anyone could understand: who the hell is THIS! The coffee is strong, the guys exuberant, photos inevitable.

The second the camera comes out an elegant gentleman walks over, takes a seat, smiles, and requests a picture with an eloquent hand gesture. ‘Ah, Hajii’, I say, acknowledging the skull cap he wears that tells the world he has made his pilgrimage to Mecca, surely a big thing for someone in this part of the country, remote and mostly Orthodox or Protestant. He nods graciously, composed and ready for his close-up. I click. The 2 by 3 prints for him and the ‘bunna guys’, ready on the spot, are a sensation.

Coffee (you did figure out that Kaffa’s famous product is coffee, right?) is not cheap here, says Birhanu. No, it’s very, very cheap, 36 Birr ($1.80) for 2 kilos (4.4 pounds) of green beans. Buy 20 kilos says Birhanu’s wife. That's the plan on our way back through here in a few days.

The road south winds along high ridges, eagles’ aeries above a landscape stupendously beautiful. Scrubbed of dust by the fog-rain, still water-kissed, every leaf in the fields and untouched forests reflects the morning light. The world glows.

Towns and vehicles dribble away. At our lunch stop in quiet, remote Bachoma, a teenager lounges on the porch, turns to greet us. ‘Ohio State’ blares his sweatshirt, sagging on his lanky frame. I can’t pass up a photo for our friend, Greg, faithful alum, a gift from Bachoma, Western highlands, Ethiopia, Africa. The kid, shy at first, grins when we click away, doubles it when we tell him why.

Villages, clusters of straw-topped round tukuls and the cleared fields that support them, thin, then disappear. This is wilderness, and wildness.

We haven’t seen another vehicle for hours when we pull into Tum.

It’s market day. The color and mood are electric. The Deeze people (famous for their face painting and body decoration-more of that later) have left their farms, the Surma pastoralist (famous for large plates inserted into their lips and ears-also, more later), their herds of cattle. Nether have left their accessory of choice, loaded AK-47s.

We’re the only white faces, but people are too busy to stare. I shop. A pair of ‘Screaming Yellow Zonker’ plastic sandals, size 41, and 40Birr. ($2) changes hands.

We’re thirsty but skip the powerful home-made local brew, volcanically eruptive on the taste buds, a nuclear explosion in the head. It’s the choice of the day for marketgoers, it seems. But not for us.

Bunna calls. We cross the mud to a shop built in classic, ‘S and T’ style, Ethiopia’s cheap, practical, movable and colorful confection of sticks and tarps, common throughout the country. Ours is mostly blue and pink, a little scruffy from the outside, but tissue thin and beautifully translucent to the sunlight inside. Our hostess and the other guests welcome us. Photos ensue. The thin walls flap.

Then….gunfire.

PART 2

The shots come fast. 1, 2,.by 3 everyone rushes outside. We just duck at 4. After 5 and a loonnngggg silence, I look out. Everyone is staring back beyond our Bunna Bivouac, across a flat field to a wall of sticks. Between us and it are some guys in military uniforms, rifles aimed skyward. No one seems too concerned.

We get the story.

The wall of sticks is the local prison. It would seem to me that a 6-foot wall of sticks wouldn’t bode well for long term incarceration in a nation famous for its hurdlers, jumpers, and runners. But, that’s just my two cents. As it turns out, prisoners have figured that out, too. Saturday is market day, also on the schedule is the weekly ‘H and H Event’: Hop the Wall and Hope to Blend with the people at the market. It’s a sort of Jump and Join thing. It rarely works, we’re told. All 5 of today’s contestants are firmly back inside the walls.

Soon we’re back inside our pink and blue nest with our bunna, watching this world unfold before us.

The Surma people dress simply. They knot a blanket or piece of woven cloth on the right shoulder, swag it under the left arm, leaving arms and the entire right side free. The men wear nothing else. Nothing. And they move sublimely. This ripple of elegant human form and grace, under the caress of softly yielding cloth seems like another of those inevitabilities we humans offer one another. ‘Here look at this. Deny it, if you can.’

Twenty or so men stride by our cafe, barefoot, ramrod straight as the wooden staffs they carry, cloaks sliding over arms, shoulders, calves, thighs, buttocks, lithe perfection in profile.

A few minutes later, 2 runners pass, barefoot on rough stone, loping with the effortless, gravity-free grace that has carried Ethiopian runners to distance, speed, endurance championships all over the planet. At each leap they seem to spend more time airborne than gravity should allow. Gazelles would gape.

Camp at Tum is simple: tents, a table, some chairs, a key to the traditional toilet outhouse, good food, sleep.

PART 3

Sum Sum’s delicious breakfast is hard to swallow as Birhanu and Alex keep us laughing with their story of their brave experience with strange noises in the night. They are easy laughers and the best of travel companions.

We head west and south to Kibish, and what is probably the most remote part of Ethiopia. Tourists rarely get here. Photographers sometimes do.

Tizzugt (Sum to his friends) leads us through the grass to visit a Surma village. Surma use their bodies as art. Their body sculpting and face painting are stunning, justly famous. Whatever cash these people earn comes from people who want their pictures. We see only one other foreigner in three days, so pickings are slim. Sum arranges a package deal for $15. It's worth it.

Women and boys peer into tiny mirrors as they finger paint swaths of stark white onto the smooth canvas of their own deeply black faces. One kid goes for deep yellow as well. Twigs replace fingers and onto this second canvas they stripe and dot in other colors. Some paint their arms, legs, and torsos.

Men and women extend their earlobes with plugs, then keep the plugs in or decorate the hollow hanging lobes with earrings. I wonder if they know that teenagers in the US, Europe, and Central America do the same. Lip plates have not yet crossed the ocean and entered teen fad-dom. Many young Surma women now also give the custom a pass.

A beautiful young woman sits painting her face. Her blanket cups under her left breast. Above her breast is a design of small puffs in her dark skin. The Surma decorate their bodies by puncturing or slightly slicing into their skin, causing an upwelling into welts The result is three-dimensional sculpture, geometric, black on black. It is described as scarification, implying mutilation, yet for equally mutilating body alterations in our culture we use more positive terms, such as tattoos and cosmetic surgery.

Surma body sculptings are significant in the culture and of lifelong relevance, independent of current fancy. Our beauty will never need to smudge over a ‘Sum Sum Forever’ tattoo when she can no longer resist Alex’s glances.

Unlike ‘caught-in-a-strong-wind’ cosmetic surgery and its unfortunate step-offspring, ‘can’t-smile Botox’, ‘don't-touch-my-face acid peel’, and ‘I-create-gale-force-winds-from-ten-paces with my puffed up hippo lips’, her body sculpting doesn't deny the body beneath it, and stays with it, black on black designs that don't fade as her skin ages. She won’t spend her old age advertising droopy US flags, limp dragons, and sinking mermaids with sagging Dolly Parton parts.

We camp again, in a grassy glade, near a village and along a shallow river. The water is fast-flowing, clear, a perfect temperature. We strip, though not so completely as local folk, bathe and wash the dust out of our clothes. Kids ask for, and receive our tiny bars of soap. They wash their rubber shoes. Printing on the shoes tells that they have been donated. Most people we see are barefoot.

One kid, wildly painted, flattens into the current, briefly coloring it white as art that was leaves the black canvas of his skin.

I sack out on a foam mattress under the trees. Goats wander by. So do people. I doze, hear shuffling in the grass, look up. A perfect physical specimen of a young man walks by, stops at a tree, picks up a few ants, snacks, then walks on. He ignores me. In the distance we hear a loud voice, see an arm swing, then a child cry.

We fall asleep to the sound of crickets, and of the occasional mournful complaint of a village cow. People from the village, known to Sum Sum, build a fire nearby, and stand guard over our camp. I don’t ask why we need guards.

PART 4

Note: you probably received April 5 notes before this. Oh well...

Our plan for another day here, an early morning village visit to catch the Surma blood letting their cattle and drinking the fresh blood, a long hike, and more close ups with the Surma, are washed away by fog turned to rain, torrential audition for the rainy season to come.

The rains swarm in overnight, driving the crickets underground. The drum beat of heavy raindrops on our tent swallows their chirping.

 Unless we leave soon we could be stuck here for a week or more. Birhanu is not too disappointed. Camping is not his thing.

Breakfast is quick, good, and damp.

The dirt road back north is now tire-sucking mud. The shallow streamlets we bounced through a day ago are torrents, gushing into adulthood, swallowing our tires. Skillful Alex makes it through.

The road is due north. This is gold mine territory, the land up for grabs. And everyone is grabbing. Think California Gold Rush in 1849. Miners can sell their gold, but only in the region, and to one association, for $32 a gram, or about $900 an ounce. Is there any wonder there is a rush?

We haul into Dema, central town for the Rush, and it looks it, temporary, muddy, ramshackle. There are people from every part of Ethiopia, but no people in tribal dress. There is a bank, the first we’ve seen in days, and bus service, ditto. Five young women walk by, off to the business their hard, appraising, too-long stares, and clinging clothes suggest is waiting for them. It’s a depressing place. Maybe this is what fetal San Francisco looked like.

Later, we eat bananas injected by sun-massaged ripeness with hints of coconut and orange. Is this what bananas really taste like if harvested at peak ripeness rather than green, and transported in the sun and air by hand and shoulder from plant to car window in a few hours rather than locked in the dark for weeks in a metal container?

Our plan for another day here, an early morning village visit to catch the Surma blood letting their cattle and drinking the fresh blood, a long hike, and more close ups with the Surma, are washed away by fog turned to rain, torrential audition for the rainy season to come. The rains swarm in overnight, driving the crickets underground. The drum beat of heavy raindrops on our tent swallows their chirping.

 Unless we leave soon we could be stuck here for a week or more. Birhanu is not too disappointed. Camping is not his thing. Breakfast is quick, good, and damp.

The dirt road back north is now tire-sucking mud. The shallow streamlets we bounced through a day ago are torrents, gushing into adulthood, swallowing our tires. Skillful Alex makes it through.

The road is due north. This is gold mine territory, the land up for grabs. And everyone is grabbing. Think California Gold Rush in 1849. Miners can sell their gold, but only in the region, and to one association, for $32 a gram, or about $900 an ounce. Is there any wonder there is a rush?

We haul into Dema, central town for the Rush, and it looks it, temporary, muddy, ramshackle. There are people from every part of Ethiopia, but no people in tribal dress. There is a bank, the first we’ve seen in days, and bus service, ditto. Five young women walk by, off to the business their hard, appraising, too-long stares, and clinging clothes suggest is waiting for them. It’s a depressing place. Maybe this is what fetal San Francisco looked like.

Later, we eat bananas injected by sun-massaged ripeness with hints of coconut and orange. Is this what bananas really taste like if harvested at peak ripeness rather than green, and transported in the sun and air by hand and shoulder from plant to car window in a few hours rather than locked in the dark for weeks in a metal container?

The kids’ chorus of ‘you, you, you’, or ‘money, money, money’ takes a turn, and tells us something about today’s Ethiopia. ‘China, China, China’ they yell. The Chinese have arrived.

Looking back south we see deep rain clouds sitting over the area we have driven through. Our early departure was a good decision.

Ahead of us is Mizan Tefari, again. It’s still light when we thread through the tuk-tuk/bajaj and horse cart traffic to our hotel. Across the street, the bunna lady has closed shop. The spider men’s wooden web has reached the roof.

We had to accommodate the rains and cut the trip short, but we have had 2 days in the wilderness and wildness of Ethiopia, and with the Surma, Sum Sum, and two delightful, travel companions. We sleep easily on that.

The kids’ chorus of ‘you, you, you’, or ‘money, money, money’ takes a turn, and tells us something about today’s Ethiopia. ‘China, China, China’ they yell. The Chinese have arrived.

Looking back south we see deep rain clouds sitting over the area we have driven through. Our early departure was a good decision.

Ahead of us is Mizan Tefari, again. It’s still light when we thread through the tuk-tuk/bajaj and horse cart traffic to our hotel. Across the street, the bunna lady has closed shop. The spider men’s wooden web has reached the roof.

We had to accommodate the rains and cut the trip short, but we have had 2 days in the wilderness and wildness of Ethiopia, and with the Surma, Sum Sum, and two delightful, travel companions. We sleep easily on that.

*** DUPLICATE??

Note: the previous April 2,3,4 email somehow duplicated text. Scrap that one. This one, too, if you have better things to do.

Our plan for another day here, an early morning village visit to catch the Surma blood letting their cattle and drinking the fresh blood, a long hike, and more close ups with the Surma, are washed away by fog turned to rain, torrential audition for the rainy season to come.

The rains swarm in overnight, driving the crickets underground. The drum beat of heavy raindrops on our tent swallows their chirping.

Unless we leave soon we could be stuck here for a week or more. Birhanu is not too disappointed. Camping is not his thing.

Breakfast is quick, good, and damp.

The dirt road back north is now tire-sucking mud. The shallow streamlets we bounced through a day ago are torrents, gushing into adulthood, swallowing our tires. Skillful Alex makes it through.

The road is due north. This is gold mine territory, the land up for grabs. And everyone is grabbing. Think California Gold Rush in 1849. Miners can sell their gold, but only in the region, and to one association, for $32 a gram, or about $900 an ounce. Is there any wonder there is a rush?

We haul into Dema, central town for the Rush, and it looks it, temporary, muddy, ramshackle. There are people from every part of Ethiopia, but no people in tribal dress. There is a bank, the first we’ve seen in days, and bus service, ditto. Five young women walk by, off to the business their hard, appraising, too-long stares, and clinging clothes suggest is waiting for them. It’s a depressing place. Maybe this is what fetal San Francisco looked like.

Later, we eat bananas injected by sun-massaged ripeness with hints of coconut and orange. Is this what bananas really taste like if harvested at peak ripeness rather than green, and transported in the sun and air by hand and shoulder from plant to car window in a few hours rather than locked in the dark for weeks in a metal container?

The kids’ chorus of ‘you, you, you’, or ‘money, money, money’ takes a turn, and tells us something about today’s Ethiopia. ‘China, China, China’ they yell. The Chinese have arrived.

Looking back south we see deep rain clouds sitting over the area we have driven through. Our early departure was a good decision.

Ahead of us is Mizan Tefari, again. It’s still light when we thread through the tuk-tuk/bajaj and horse cart traffic to our hotel. Across the street, the bunna lady has closed shop. The spider men’s wooden web has reached the roof.

We had to accommodate the rains and cut the trip short, but we have had 2 days in the wilderness and wildness of Ethiopia, and with the Surma, Sum Sum, and two delightful, travel companions. We sleep easily on that.

APRIL 5, 2016: DOWN TO HADES

It’s a long 300-kilometer trip from Mizan, northward and westward---and downward—to Gambello, in Ethiopia’s sweltering lowlands, its Far West, near the border with South Sudan. We’re going there to visit the Nuer and Anuak peoples, among others.

The beginning of the trip from Mezan is still in the eruptively green highlands. The road is ridge-tied, undulating atop the landscape. We look across staggering vistas, the deep green forests patched with the colors of cultivation.

This reminds me a bit of Bali 50 years ago, but that was the flat lushness of rice fields. Here, back lit by the early sun and stirring in the breeze, the banana and corn leaves are vertical beauties in their own right, chlorophyll chorines slow dancing to the music of sunlight.

In Gorche, school has just gotten out for lunch and the road is lined as far as we can see with school kids in colored uniforms. A sea of dusty rose laps the edge of an ocean of lilac. One peacock is ecumenical in dusty rose pants, lilac jacket, and lime green shirt. I’ll bet he has a pair of sandals somewhere, like mine, in Screaming Yellow, and pink sunglasses. My imagination does not extend to his headwear.

A rear tire grows, well, tired. It has been through a lot and been semi-drowned several times, and needs changing. Our garage is a wide spot on the dusty road, green forest on one side, straw-hatted round tukul on the other. Birhanu and Alex do the deed. A young mother, two kids, (and another on the way), join the tire party. Prints of their photos bridge a gap already knitted narrower by smiles.

Down the road is a honey stand, selling fresh wild honey, a local specialty we’ve been waiting to taste. We do. Thick, gooey, it grabs onto my tongue and sits there, telling stories of wild roses. 4.5 pounds cost $3.50.

Our delicious take away bag lunch is good veggie salad spiced with tuna, on puffy rolls. The setting? Under an immense tree, and surrounded by infinite acres of a tea plantation. Bunna follows in the town of Goré, five cents a cup. A goat joins us.

225 kilometers into our 300 kilometers drive we round a bend and the world changes Mountains still ripple to the horizon, but their slopes are dryer. The road plunges down, down, down, losing altitude, gaining heat in a nose dive out of the cool air.

The landscape loses lushness to the dryness and heat. On the ridges, way above us now, light shines thru the trees. The ridges become great combs raking the sky, then bald.

Gambello defeats us all with its heat, hovering slightly on the downside of 100 degrees, and its humidity, ditto on the percent scale.

Our hotel, brand new, stylish by design, but with only a very slender grip on quality, is an adventure in misadventures.

Room 212 has no door on the bathroom, bare wires where an outlet should be, and an air conditioner with one setting: Summer in the Sahara. The sheets and towels are superb, though. At the rate Birhanu paid for our tents, it would be a bargain, but he’s paying for doors and AC.

Brave Birhanu passes on a dozen other rooms (no bathroom doors, can’t open, AC not working, etcetera and so forth) before striking gold. Room 105 has it all: doors where we like them, electricity that works, a shower head, hot water, and plenty of it, even Internet and wifi, and the aforementioned spiffy towels and bedding. Best of all it has an air conditioner with some familiarity with the temperate zone. Yes, we all agree, this is it: home for the next 3 nights.

We shower, recline. The AC dies. The affable desk guy shows us the circuit breaker, tripped by the hotel’s sketchy electric system, resets it. The AC wheezes off again. We reset the circuit breaker, again, and climb into our beds to a reassuring hum.

Then, the air conditioner explodes.

APRIL 6, 2016: ETHIOPIA-GAMBELLO-LIFE AFTER ARMAGEDDON

Air conditioners do not self-destruct gently or quietly.

This one goes out with a wall-shattering bang, louder (and a lot closer) than the gunshots in Tum a few days ago. This gets our attention. The flames and Fourth of July fireworks display hold it. Smoke and scorch and stink follow. Then, silence. We blink.

The sounds of Armageddon in Room 105 attract no attention. What other adventures would await if we change rooms? They’re all cursed. It is 10pm. We roll over and go to sleep.

No other devices commit suicide in the night.

By morning our room is a steam bath. Apparently, the rapid decomposition of dead air conditioners produces heat. We drip our way out into the cool 90-degree air and to the breakfast buffet, wary of anything with a plug. The breakfast is a decent effort, better than what you’d expect in a place with exploding appliances.

Birhanu and Alex think the story is as funny as we do….and have news: a room is available in the Baro Hotel. We move. The AC works. Inside, anyway.

Outside, it’s hot, no, HOT. Thermometers here don’t have numbers but go straight for the truth: ‘Parboiled’, ‘Soft-boiled’, ‘Hardboiled’, ‘Dead’. It’s 7am, so we’re towards the bottom, at the 3-minute-egg stage, shaky, but still recognizable.

There’s no tourist industry here. The associations of excellent local guides that makes visiting other places in Ethiopia a snap don’t exist. The government handles permits, and guides. They keep track of all visitors. Remember: appliances explode here.

Birhanu reports to a few offices to register our presence in the area, get approval for a schedule of places we’d like to visit, and arrange for a guide. We’re celebrities, the first visitors to Gambello National Park in 6 months. We push the annual total to 27 for the whole area, many of them Protestant missionaries tending to their flocks.

We may have blown our luck with appliances, but it comes back with our guide. Yessef is an anthropologist.

The area, so close to the ethnic violence in South Sudan, has thousands of refugees, mostly Nuer people. Pastoral and nomadic cattle herders they don’t mix well with the resident Anuak people, sedentary fisher folk. Six weeks ago shooting broke out a few hours away. It’s calmer now, but iffy. We compromise and opt for staying local.

On the edge of Gambello are two ‘sample’ villages, one for each tribe, occupied and lived in by real people (not performers) going about their real lives in real time. Yes, this is just a skimming along the surface, but it’s all that available now, and that may be enough. What can we expect in a few hours?

The Nuer are memorable for their houses.

Cascading blankets of straw thatched into multilayered roofs sit atop mud walls, painted or not, with care or not, talent or not depending on the time, effort, interest of the resident woman. Men tend to the cattle. Women do everything else, including creating and decorating the houses.

Surely, Nuer houses are among the most beautiful traditional structures in Africa. The roofs are organic, suggesting clamshells, armadillos, turtles. But, fundamentally they have a soft outline, a feminine, almost uterine look. The walls are solid, thick, mud. The paintings are bold, bright, geometric, angular, rather masculine. Top to bottom, these are welcoming, human structures, complete.

Anuak houses are similar, but not so stunning. We spend about an hour chatting with a charismatic man, refugee from the Nuer-Anuak confrontations a few hours away. He tells us the Anuak come from Minnesota. Later we check on this. He’s not stretching the truth…not too much anyway.

He has certainly left an impression on us. I hope we have left some impression other large white blobs, snapping pictures, turning pink, and melting.

By late afternoon, we don’t need the thermometer to tell were inching slowly just beyond ‘Hardboiled’.

The AC in Room 108 is humming happily, nice and comfy in the temperate zone. There are no signs of impending suicide as we drift into naps.

Later, in the dark of the gardens, we celebrate a memorable day with the guys. The day began with a bang. We end it with the pop of beer bottle caps.

APRIL 7, 2016: ETHIOPIA-GAMBELLO: MIGRATIONS

40 degrees is brisk/cool only in the US and Myanmar (formerly Burma). In the rest of the world, you know, the part that has joined the 21st century, no, the 19th Century, and uses Celsius rather than Farmers’ Height, it’s VERY HOT. For those of you in the US or Myanmar, it’s 104 degrees. At 4pm. It has been a long, dusty, and very hot day….

A 6am departure begins hours of ‘African Massage’ crossing southwestern Ethiopia on our way to Gambello National Park. The Park abuts South Sudan and there are security issues so we must register with the park authorities and pick up a park guide, Ali.

We’re the first tourists in 6 months, unexpected, you might say, so it takes a while for our AK-47 and its handler, Nyon, to get into uniform and join us. We make an impressive team: four Ethiopians, two of whom have unflattering opinions about the heat, two melting foreigners, and a dusty AK-47.

Dennis and I eat a take-away breakfast from the hotel, two flying saucer sized omelet sandwiches, still warm and delicious. The guys pass on the UFOmelets, still fasting during the 55 days of Lent leading up to Orthodox Easter, and so, forbidden meat, eggs, and milk. Breakfast for them, injera and garbanzo stew, comes a few hours down the road in Nyin Nyang, a dusty Nuer town. Ali is not fasting, can eat meat, and does, though not pork. Nuer, neither Orthodox or Moslem, are not affected by fasting or purity rules. Neither are the hopeful cats under the table.

Ethiopia does not have the great resident game herds of eastern and southern Africa. Gambello National Park has maybe a dozen lions and giraffes. It does have a massive migration of a million White Eared Kob antelopes, second in size only to the far more famous Wildebeest migration of Kenya and Tanzania.

We have come for this.

We have driven 4 hours through grey dust, then red dust that recolors our beards, and now walk over black granules that throw back the intense heat of noon. Water we drink oozes out immediately as sweat.

And, there they are.

The migration is not a great swath of animals moving end masse. It’s a string, occasionally clumped and knotted, of the graceful Kob, looped across the savannah, tying the horizons. Few people have seen this.

We watch them near a spot where they must cross a river. The river is much lower now, before the rains come. Desiccated Kob and catfish skeletons, revealed by the receding water, lie in the mud, dismembered. There are still azu, crocodiles, in the river.

Two men stand thigh deep, stripped, and washing themselves and their clothes. A third swims in the river checking his fish nets. We hope the azu have ‘Kob’bled together a hefty meal already from the antelopes and are not interested in two-footed desserts.

The 4 hour drive each way has its rewards.

Ethiopia is a birder’s paradise. An immense flock of Black Crowned Cranes dances the crane leap-bow mating ballet. Their name needs a comma between Black and Crowned. They are Black, Crowned Cranes. The birds are black but their crowns are resplendently golden, feathery headpieces that shake messages of availability to susceptible flock mates. African Fish Eagles, elegant white and dark against the blue sky and reddish dust, are sentries in scrub trees along the road. Herons and Ibis peck in the mud flats and fields.

Kob are not the only migrants through this heat.

We wait as a long caravan of Falatti people appear and pass in wellings of dust, their great horned cattle loaded with possessions and babies They are migrating westward into South Sudan, and beyond. The Fulatti people dress and look like the handsome Bororo people we visited way across Africa, in Cameroon. These walkers may not get that far, or be those very people, but their relatives do, and are. These are all Fulani people, at some many millions, the largest group of nomadic migrants on Earth. Everywhere, from Ethiopia across Africa to the Atlantic, there are Fulani. We’re lucky to see them here as they pass through the dust bound for South Sudan, a few days walk to the west.

We continue through the dust back to Gambello town, a few hours ride to the north and east.

Much later, outsides washed of our many-colored layers of dust, we reward our parched insides with gulps of kaskazza (cold) Ethiopian beer, and plan tomorrow’s adventures. Where will we migrants go next? We laugh a lot.

APRIL 8, 2016: ETHIOPIA-GAMBELLO-OUR LAST DAY IN HADES, PART 1 OF 3

We drive up to a group of men sitting in the shade of an immense mango tree. Yesterday was a funeral. The mood is somber, but the Komo people welcome us to their village.

It’s a real village, not a ‘sample village’. Every year, on Nationalities Day, the government invites representatives of Ethiopia’s many peoples to gather in one of the regions to experience something of the local cultures. The ‘sample villages’ provide that here in Gambello Region. We have visited two so far, representing the Nuer and Anuak peoples. They are good experiences, but this is a real village.

The Komo houses here are not in orderly rows, but spread under the trees in some order we don’t understand, or maybe in no order other than the whim or choice of the builders. Here, men and women share most tasks, including house building.

The village is, and looks, thoroughly lived in. Clothes dry flat on the thatch roofs, plastic bags blow around in the dust, pots and pans sit near now-cold cooking fires. Life is lived here, not just on display.

We sit in one house with its owner, young mother of 8 children, the youngest, a set of fraternal, mixed sex twins, cuddle against her. Her husband works in Gambello. When she returned to the village everyone, men and women, helped build her round house of poles. It’s not quite finished. Now, sunlight and the rare breeze filter through the open-spaced pole walls and roof. A layer of straw on the roof, and the plaster of mud that will make the walls solid, will come later. The end result will be cheap, use local materials, and dark inside.

We walk around in the heat. Most people are reclining in the shade of large trees. One man is making up small packages of tobacco. A child plays at grinding maize on a stone.

We can tell tourists have been rare. The kids smile shyly. Some run away. None do the ‘You, you, you’ or ‘Money, money, money’ chants. All are staggered by their photos, laughing, hooting, yelling as their two dimensional selves journey across the screen. And so are their parents. They pass our tiny 2 by 3 prints round and round, pointing at one another and laughing, heads thrown back in delight.

Lunch is back in town, deep fried fresh, fresh, fresh tilapia from the Baro River, just a short walk away. These are big fish, with at least an inch of firm, sweet, slightly grass-flavored heaven between the bones and that crispy skin. To Hell with the calories and cholesterol.

Afterwards, we walk with Yessef in the deep shade of big trees along the banks of the Baro River, past bunna shops and piles of mangoes, through the sounds and chatter of a busy market. Above the hum of the many voices is a new sound, the click clack sound of billiard balls. There are many pool tables in the shade, players lined up, queues straight up as they watch, or aimed at the white ball as they play.

Below us all is the drying Baro River. People wash motorcycles or cars in shallow spots, or swim in deeper pools. High up on the banks, Yessef shows us the wreck of a small boat. I think he says it was the first British boat on the river. It looks like the tiny African Queen from that movie.

Deeper in town, surrounded by dwellings and shops, is the abandoned foreigners’ cemetery. Long taken over by the living, it is overgrown, and littered. The tombstone dates are from a century past, names and inscriptions in English, Arabic, Italian, French, Greek, remnants of Gambello’s once cosmopolitan population and glory days. One stone covers a man of 31, and erected by men who remember him as a ‘great friend’.

We wonder if any of those buried here have distant descendants or relatives who know of these graves in distant Ethiopia. Maybe Great-great-great-great Uncle Henry just disappeared. Yessef senses a tourist potential, small, but possible.

We take a break from the noon day heat, and plan to meet at 4. We’ll go to a ‘sample village’ of the Mezenger people, but it will give us a very real memory….

APRIL 8, 2016: ETHIOPIA-GAMBELLO: OUR LAST DAY IN HADES, PART 2 OF 3

I ask the young woman of the Mezenger people. ‘What would you tell people in America about Mezenger? Beliba thinks a while, then answers. Birhanu translates. ‘If we know you will be visitors we will prepare food, vegetables, mangoes. We will welcome you.’

As they have welcomed us late on this hot afternoon.

We are in a ‘sample’ village of the Mezenger people. This is our third, after the Nuer and Anuak villages.

Our guides are a man, Arel, and the young woman, Beliba. We are sitting on benches made of branches in an open-walled stick-pole shelter asking questions, listening to answers.

Beliba and Alex play the stone game, moving pebbles among scooped out ‘homes’ in a thick board until no more moves are possible. The person with the greatest number of pebbles on his…in this case, her…side of the board wins. Alex is a quick learner, but even with lots of laughter and prompting, he concedes the Pebble Olympics to Beliba.

A young man joins us in the shade. He has the most extraordinary face. Terms like handsome, or beautiful, don’t apply, though surely to many eyes he is one or the other, or both. No, his face is simply extraordinary, unlike any I can remember. Then, I think, a face like this could have been the inspiration for the blue people of Avatar, all soaring cheekbones and huge eyes. The Mezenger have a legend that they came from Kenya. I wonder where they picked up the genes for this face.

Arel begins his story. ‘They stole my son…’

APRIL 8, 2016: ETHIOPIA-GAMBELLO: OUR LAST DAY IN HADES, PART 3 OF 3

They stole my son…’, he begins.

‘I was away, in jail.  My wife and children were on their own. My youngest son was about 6 years old. One day a woman came from one of the child welfare agencies to talk to my wife. She said there were people who could give our youngest child a better life. The boy would come back to visit in a year or two and his mother would see how good his life is. My wife agreed and let the woman take our son.

We never saw the boy again.

He was sold to foreigners to be their son and taken away.’

‘The ‘agency’ and its records disappeared, too, so no one knows where our son is.’

Arel stops.

There is nothing we can say.

Note:

Birhanu helped one adoptee find her older sister here in Ethiopia, but there were records.

Recently, the Ethiopian government has banned all foreign adoptions.

APRIL 9, 2016: ETHIOPIA: GAMBELLO BACK TO JIMMA

I awake about 4am. Distant chanting softens the night. Orthodox ritual music is ancient, the texts dating from songs written in the 6th century. They are in Geez, like Latin in the pre-Vatican Catholic Church, a language that can be sounded out but is not understood by most of the faithful. Nor I, of course.

But the music reaches more deeply than language and text can reach. There is a yearning that rides in the music. We are here, our God, see us.

The guys arrive. We’re heading north, east, and up, out of the heat. ‘Our faces are full of smiling’ laughs Alex, and that is better than I can say it.

We ascend the Baro River gorge, the shallow sliver river thirsty in the sun, waiting for the rains. With every slope-hugging, steep snake turn we gain altitude and green, and leave the flat heat of Gambello to the haze, behind and way below us.

One more turn, and the world falls away. We ride our ridge into the lush, luscious---and cool---highlands. Escape from Hades has taken an hour.

Baboons welcome us.

The thermometer regains its numbers: 25 degrees Celsius…a cool, dry 77 in ‘Farmers Height’, Springtime.

The animals know it’s Spring. Their babies are everywhere. Herdlets of soft skinned calves wander the roadsides. A fuzzy toy of a donkey baby curls up on the road, black tarmac warm in the sun, resting on his birthday. It is an especially good year for baby goats, bouncing and nodding in pairs, stiff-legged, and wildly finger-painted by goat DNA in exuberant mixes of black, brown, white, rust, grey, and shades in between.

Green, almost eye-searing, the tea plantations are spongy cushions strewn on the mountainsides.

At Metu we are back again in Oromiya, land of conjoined twin vowels. We settle for the paired twin consonants in ‘bunna’.

The dusty road crosses over a river way below us. It’s laundry day. Clothes, blankets, and shawls lie in the sun, flat drying, brilliant colors checker boarded on green grass and bushes.

Bedele is a must stop, not because of any inherent charm, but because this is where Bedele beer is brewed. That gets the town several stars in our book. The beer is kaskazza and delicious. Add a star Even more delicious is my rice with vegetables, crisp, fresh, bright colored cabbage, carrots, spinach, and tiny chilies, deep green but fiery. Add a star. We pass up the yummy looking pastries and cappuccino. Any more stars and Bedele would look like the Milky Way.

Ten hours after leaving Hades we pull into Jimma and the HoneyLand Hotel again. Too tired to eat, the guys pick at French fries and we slurp soup. We tell them that when the French did not join in the attack on Iraq, the Congressional cafeteria changed the name from French Fries to Freedom Fries. This makes their day, as it made ours back then.

APRIL 10, 2016-ETHIOPIA: JIMMA TO WELLISO.

There’s great Ethiopian road trip music playing, the beat driving us forward. But, this glorious landscape stops us. Dead. We stare at the Springtime of the world. New green is everywhere in every shade and shape. Deep black soil makes the green even more green, the sharp peaked roof of round tukuls make it even softer. As far as we can see, across valleys and up slopes, Mother Earth struts her stuff in triumph.

In north Ethiopia, she is humbled, bowing in drought under the onslaught of El Nino.

I hear Birhanu’s baritone laugh and Alex’s tenor on top of it. Up by the car Alex is shimmying through an Ethiopian shoulder dance to our road music. Did I mention these guys are GREAT travel buddies?

We continue through a landscape that anywhere else would be a national park. The roadside is a ribbon-thin farmer’s market display of the region’s fertility and abundance: papayas, avocados, pineapple, bananas, chickens, eggs, coffee beans, injera baskets, wooden stools, hanging, spread, stacked, in piles, laid out flat. The apples are small, dimpled, tart and sweet both, and delicious. I eat 2.

Boiled corn on the cob is 25 cents.

Suddenly we are staring down and across the depth-defying abyss of the Gibe River gorge, plunging to scrape the center of the earth. It’s yet another unheralded wonder of this unheralded country.

We stare, but not so a woman walking along the road with a little boy. She’s having a conversation with a voice that winds through a fence of trees on the other side of the road. No one is visible behind the trees, but the two friends chat as our lady walks down the road. I doubt they’re discussing the view.

We covered part of this road on the outward leg of the trip, and stop again at last week’s lunch place to claim ‘our’ table under the trees. The guys go for their favorite, a spicy fish goulash, chunky, red and tasty. The piles of veggie goodies on our fasting injera keep us happy, especially the lentils, and caramelized strips of beets.

It’s late afternoon now and we’ve driven through markets and small town up towards the clouds. Having used up our daily allotment of oohs and ahhs on the mountains and gorges, we’re reduced to staring dumb-struck down at Wenchi Crater Lake.

One of several lakes that fill a string of volcanic craters on the edge of the Rift Valley, this one holds small tree covered islands, giant stepping stones across its green waters. The water is pure, crystal clear, like the air up here at close to 10,000 feet. The rim of the crater is even higher, a dark line slicing across the clouds above us.

It’s a two hour walk down to the water and a boat ride to the church on one of the islands. We pass. Others do not. Way below us on the road are tiny white dots, Ethiopians in the white shawls proper for rituals.

We add another adventure to our growing list for the next trip to Ethiopia, camping on the shores of Wenchi Crater Lake. Yes! says, Birhanu.

We drop off the slopes, and thread through the road walkers and markets to our lodgings at the edge of town. Our twin beds are in a white-plastered adaptation of a traditional mud and straw round tukul, up a rocky path and deep in the gardens of Nagash Lodge. These are luxurious digs in total quiet. Birhanu has outdone himself. This is paradise.

Paradise doesn’t come cheaply. Dinner is not among the quiet Chosen, residents of Paradise, but downtown, among the partying, earthbound, beer-drinking, exuberant street crowd. My spaghetti with veggies is good. The beer is kazkazzas. The company is great.

APRIL 11, 2016-ETHIOPIA: WOLKITE TO AWASSA (HAWASSA)

This is Day 12 of our trip with the guys, our last full day together. We’ll drive several hours to the southeast into Ethiopia’s Rift Valley and return to lovely, lakeside, Awassa (Hawassa on some maps), a favorite place from our trip in 2014. A hippo played hide and seek with our boat.

This is a flat landscape for a while, fortunate in fertility and climate. We trade the rock and roll Olympic Level African Massage of the rough tracks ‘out West’ for smooth rides on paved roads. Still, the road is a universal pathway for all, legs, double or quadruple, out numbering wheels of any configuration. This year’s crop of big bovine babies, yet to learn the ways of the road, need nudging, a slap, a push, to get to the side. The tiny baby goats, whiz kids of the four-footed set, have it all figured out, and scoot, stiff-legged and bobbing, out of the way.

The towns look prosperous. A huge construction project on the right is part of Ethiopia’s rapidly expanding university system. There are already 32 universities in the big cities and towns. 70% of the students graduate in engineering fields and get jobs in the world’s fastest growing economy. They have discontinued the minor in Exploding Appliances.

The tin roofs of tiny mosques and their metal minarets, shiny fingers pointing Heavenward, crackle in the sunlight.

We drive on into the even richer Gurage region. The Gurage people are famously hard workers, and it shows. Their farmsteads are idyllically beautiful. Waving banners of the sun struck false banana plants surround neatly trimmed tall tukuls sitting in green open spaces, manicured into lawn-like neatness by caretaker cows and goats.

It’s market day. Not many people are around, but Birhanu is persistent and we’re invited into a family’s tukul. The inside, it is as neat, organized, and lovely as the outside. Round houses always feel welcoming to me, the curved walls a kind of embrace. The family’s animals share the large space under the tall conical roof, theirs a darker patch through a partition, the tukul holding all, regardless of number of feet...or number of countries crossed to get here.

The Gurage region captures us. Plans form. Next time how about camping at Wenchi Crater Lake, then a homestay and walking through the fields of Gurage? Birhanu and Alex laugh. They know there will be a next time.

You’d think we’d be used to it by now, ‘it’ being Ethiopia’s perch on the roof of Africa. We have no idea how high we are, how close to scraping the sky. Then, on the left, the world disappears. In the far distance is a vast plain. Between us and it is a dizzying drop….

APRIL 11: Wolkite to Awassa (Hawassa), Part 2

We’re at 3370 meters---11,121 feet--- says Birhanu, his wicked grin showing that he fully knows what this view is doing to us.! That’s Butajira over there. It’s 2500 meters above sea level. I do the math. The drop is 870 meters. That’s just shy of 3,000 feet. Straight down.

A straight sided peninsula juts out from the wall of the plateau into this space, nothing but air around it. A house sits on top suspended in the sky. Only silence and a slow shaking of the head are adequate responses to such a place.

The road to Butajira slaloms down the vertical face of the plateau in crimped and cramped turns so tight they would defeat an Olympic Slinky Toy. But, not Alex.

Last time through Butajira we ordered the Rediet Hotel’s Special Burger, a multi-layered, meat, egg, tomato, salad, bread, and French Fry construction of such towering abundance it would feed an aisle of Walmart shoppers. This time around, we skip the Special, but even the four of us don't make much of a dent in the pile of fries.

We pass through Marko, the town with the best berbere, Ethiopia’s complex chili pepper + 15 secret spices powder, (and my favorite dusting over just about anything), then the vineyards of the wine district, then plastic domed flower-sheltering greenhouses, as long as villages. Picked early today, the flowers will grace European tables by nightfall, perhaps sharing them with a bottle of one of Ethiopia’s excellent Castel wines, and pasta dusted with berbere.

We’ve descended into the Rift Valley, at 1600 meters (5,280 feet) exactly a mile high above the rest of Africa. From here the acacia studded open savannah slopes eastward and northward towards the lowest point in Africa, a few hundred feet below sea level. We’ve been there, a place of heat, sulfur, salt…and camels. A herd, the first we’ve seen this trip, crosses the road, headed ‘thataway’. On their return trip they’ll carry slabs of salt, hand cut in 120-degree heat from the surface of a salt lake in the hottest place on the planet.

We go north, to Lake Awassa, staying in the cool.

Our hotel has been invaded by a convention of medical doctors. Our reservation is a casualty, First-aid not available. Other doctors have performed a reservation-ectomy at Birhanu’s next choice.

Then we try a small one story place behind La Dolce Vita Italian Restaurant, and luck out with a double for 450Birr, about $22.50. It has hot water and a mosquito net, a shady courtyard with chairs, no other tourists, and La Dolce Vita waits for us out front. We don’t care that there is no power outlet for the refrigerator. At least it won’t explode.

At 7 the guys drive up for our last meal together. It’s our treat, their choice of spots. We leave La Dolce in the dust. Awassa is a big draw for Ethiopians looking for a lakeside break from Addis (and those doctors camping in our room), and there are lots of restaurants. But, it’s Lent, and most people are fasting. Restaurants adapt. Menus are lengthy, but bigger on intent than delivery. Few dishes are available. We don’t care much. The beer is cold.

Fingers fly over the 4 phones, Bluetoothing and Messaging photos---there are a gazillion--- back and forth among the 4. Tents in the rain Alex shoulder-dancing, and Birhanu contemplating a fried fish get the biggest laughs.

These two guys have been the best travel companions, fellow laughers, and all around great guys. We will genuinely, genuinely miss them.

They’ll spend the night then drive on Addis. In 5 or 6 days we’ll follow on the express bus. Birhanu we’ll see again in Addis, but Alex will be driving some other lucky travelers, to the South. We will see him next on Trip Number Three to Ethiopia, camping…if we can promise him it won’t rain.

APRIL 12, 2016: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 1

La Dolce Vita coffee is OK, but I miss coffee along the road with the bunna ladies. A first project will be to find ‘our’ bunna place. The tree covered patio is a great place to watch the road in front, always alive. There are monkeys in the trees, for starters.

We’re still nursing breakfast coffee when Birhanu and Alex drive up. They’re on a mercy mission to give me an Ethiopian SIM chip, get me some phone minutes and provide a lesson on my ancient travel phone. I am brain dead when it comes to this device. It may not be a smartphone, but it’s a lot smarter than me. Maybe I need to hire a 6-year-old to help me make phone calls.

There are hugs. The guys leave. We wave. We miss them already.

Back behind La Dolce Vita, vita is indeed dolce. We flop into armchairs under the trees and watch an adorable 9-month old play on the lawn and have a very serious conversation with the grass. That sounds like about the right amount of energy we’re willing to use, but forego sprawling on the grass. That’s his territory. As we have seen so many fathers do in Ethiopia, this one plays with his baby, holds him, cradles him, hugs and kisses him.

The rest of the day is lazy. Our brains work hard at sorting out the memories of the past 2 weeks. New ones will have to wait. There’s no room for them. We stay put.

Cold beer and wood fired, veggie-heaped pizzas end a good day.

APRIL 13, 2016: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 2

The young man drops to his knees, then bends forward, touching his forehead to the ground, his palms against the ground, in the universal position of supplicant. To the left, an even younger man, a teen, touches the pillar with his forehead, rests it there on the grey stone, this spot dark at head height. His actions mirror those of an old woman on the right. They are bookends of the faithful at the entrance to Gabriel Church. The church building is grey stone, contemporary, new. The Church of these people is also rock solid, but ancient, one of the oldest in Christendom, a foundation to the daily lives of Ethiopia.

The building is locked, but not the spirit it represents. On the women’s side, right as I face the church, a woman extends her arms towards the locked door, opens her hands and scoops a blessing back over her head and shoulders. There are far fewer men on the left side, and they are less demonstrative, as is usually the case with men. Under the trees lining the wide walk to the building women sit on the right, men on the left. The women are silent, the men chatting. Then, a man walks to the main door and stays on his knees, head bent to the stones, stays for many minutes. It is Lent, a sacred time of sacrifice and remembrance. For 55 days the Ethiopian Orthodox Christians will remember the sacrifice that is the cornerstone of their faith.

Much earlier, our day begins to the drumbeat rhythm of heavy rain on the roof. Outside it is bone dry. The ‘rain’ is the patter of many monkey feet running on the corrugated translucent plastic panels that keep real rain off the doorways. Preventing this monkey business is a part-time job for charming, pink-shirted, Adunya, all around handyman. When he rattles his pebble-filled plastic bottle, they scatter. He goes back to stooping over the lawn and ‘mowing’ it with a short hedge clipper.

Somewhere up above, in the trees, the monkeys review their morning. Adunya may have The Thing That Roars, but he is also stuck with the very short end of the stick clipping the lawn, and we’re all stuck down here on the ground. All in all, for them, they decide, la vita is quite dolce.

We still have today and 3 more days to explore Awassa. We are so ready!

After so many new experiences in new places every day, we are so ready to just sit and watch the scene around us in one place, walk the same streets, maybe talk to the same people, and let one place tell us a story and help us convert fuzzy, two dimensional black and white quick sketches into a full color, full flavor, full sound, 3-D memory.

Today is for ATMs, bus tickets, and learning the streets of Awassa. La Dolce Vita is in a leafy, quiet neighborhood, between the lakefront strip of restaurants and hotels, and downtown. It’s a pleasant half hour walk to downtown under trees and past lots of bunna ladies, candidates for ‘our’ bunna place.

We do our research from a distance, but the decision is made for us by two bouncy girls about 5 who rush over and hijack us. Photos follow. This will be our first bunna stop on our way back from buying our tickets on the 6:30 am Sky Bus for Addis.

Bus tickets in hand, we splurge a dollar each on fresh pineapple juice for me and a pink and green layered mango and avocado drink for Dennis.

But, bunna calls. We stop at The Place With The Little Girls. Of course they remember The Ferengi Who Gave Us Photos. So does everyone nearby. One man asks us for a photo of his truck, and we click our way into an Ethiopian Country and Western song. ‘The Little Girls’ have friends, the friends have parents, and so it goes. The bunna comes with a sprig of rue, as it should, and is delicious. It’s 3 Birr, fifteen cents. We’ll be back.

On the sidewalk under the trees near La Dolce V we meet Fuhkatuh, a charming retired Ethiopian lady, now living her dream as a sous chef. She says she learned how to cook in Finland. Finland?? I’ve had Finnish food. Once. Snow has more flavor... and color. (How many Finnish restaurants have you ever seen? I rest my case.) Finnish-Ethiopian fusion cuisine, however, might be a surprise, if it includes red, spicy berbere powder to dust over that Arctic blandness.

We’ll find out tomorrow. We’re invited for lunch at her house, two doors down from La Dolce V. That 3-D memory is getting sharper, maybe even tastier, but sharper, for sure. Stay tuned.

Back at La Dolce V, handyman Adunya demonstrates more parts of his job description: car washing, leaf sweeping, chair arranging. The truly dolce smile never stops. He joins Reception Manager Leah and 2 friends for photos. It’s an easy-going group.

We like it here. Our vita down here on the ground is good. I don’t care what the tree monkeys think.

APRIL 14, 2016: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 3, PART 1

The lady selling mops gives me one of those looks in between ‘wait til I tell the folks about this crazy feranji’, and ‘usually they’re harmless, but….’

Her forest of upended mops is not to be resisted. The scrubbing ends are in bristling, brilliant colors. A few have sticks shiny with colors from the other side of the color wheel. But most are gloriously unexpected beauties, handles stark white with black dots and squiggly stripes, a kind of ‘Albino Leopard Meets Tipsy Zebra’ look.

My camera begs. I give in, aim, focus, click, nod in thanks. Mop Lady smiles tentatively, shakes her head, decides I am probably harmless, though distinctly odd, but, taking no chances, she scoots back out of range into the dark alley behind her mops.

We’re deep in the Arab market north of the University and of ‘the piazza’, directional heart of Awassa. A one Birr (5 cent) ride in a tuk-tuking 3-wheeled bajaj bounced us here from the quiet and monkeys of La Dolce V.

The market is a knot of intense bustle and aspirations. Anything and everything is on sale here, organized into neighborhoods, ancestors of the sterile aisles in supermarkets: tiny piles of avocados and carts of pineapple on offer in ‘fruits’, used and new clothing, shoes, injera pans, baskets, floor mats, foam mattresses in exuberant floral patterns, heavy carved furniture…, all in their own crowded section of the confusion.

In the metal district, we enter a road company production of Star Wars. Tee-shirted guys in Darth Vader masks slice the air with laser swords, flame attacking metal. Metal yields, and another welded-while-you-shop thingamabob joins the pile of whatchamacallits in the mud.

There are kids everywhere, hauling, selling, hawking. One carries a pile of bright shopping bags half his size. When he sees someone buy something, he rushes up and offers to sell them a bag. Sellers shoo him away. He goes, tiny in the crowd, then notices us. He nods slightly to our pantomimed offer to take his photo, stands motionless for 2 clicks then shoots off to work the shoppers. His heap of colorful bags is easy to follow through the crowds. Wary eyes never leave our hands as we reach out to him slowly with his photo. He takes it, stares at it. The smile and nod are air thin but there, and he runs off. There's business to do, half a Birr, two and a half cents, at a time.

Life can be hard in Ethiopia, and is for many people. It seems more obvious in the cities and towns. So is inventiveness. We notice the kids. Here on the streets of Awassa, they’ve have cornered the market on Knowing Your Weight. All up and down the main street they have set up shop. All it takes is a wide spot on the sidewalk and a scale. I pass up getting weighed, right there on the sidewalk, even if it does cost only 5 cents. I’m tempted to get my sneakers washed and spiffed up at the sidewalk shoe shine ‘shop’ for not much more. Maybe that’s for tomorrow.

We can't resist scoping out the electronic goodies, cables, plugs, adapters at the many ‘tool’ shops, 3 foot by 4 foot, bright blue plastic sheets on the sidewalk. We do pass up the candy, gum, chewy-things store, a moveable feast, built onto a wheelchair, though we do admire the design.

 But…. none of these efforts disguise the underlying fact: life can be hard here.

 Our Finnish-Ethiopian fusion cuisine dinner delivers a powerful lesson about just how hard….

 'The boy was a year and a half old, wandering the street alone. No none claimed him so…'

APRIL 14: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 3 PART 2

…Aynalem, mother of six grown and successful children, two of them doctors, took him home and adopted him. Another boy joined the family a few years later.

Now Ayni has a family of 76 street kids living in 3 houses, one for babies, one for big boys, and one for girls and younger boys.

Their stories are heart-wrenching: parents dead of AIDS, or alcoholic, or disturbed, or raped. Some were infants thrown on the street to die. Some were willingly given away, by parents, themselves living on the streets, too poor, too sick, too beaten by life to raise a child.

All are now her children.

We meet Ayni over Fekerte’s delicious lunch. (There’s not a hint of Finnish fusion cuisine. It’s all delicious Ethiopian.) Fekerte and Ayni are great friends, both are grand ladies, of great color and character and speak excellent English.

Ayni’s story hooks us.

We spend the rest of the day visiting the babies, girls, and younger boys. They are bright, healthy, energy-packed, sweet kids, who swarm to greet us and hug and kiss her cheek, obviously crazy about her.

They call her ‘Mama’.

There are adult workers who help out, themselves former street people, and volunteers, including Belgian Johann, who helps run the place many months of the year.

There’s a dog, a street dog who wandered in and stayed. He chases monkeys, rough houses with the kids, naps in the shade, and likes to meet his ears scratched.

Some kids do have parents who care. One mother, thin and haggard, head bobbing, is visiting. She is trying to hold her son in her shaking arms. He looks about 10. He’s embarrassed when she comes, says Ayni, but she’s his mother, so….and she shrugs.

Donated computers, books and school supplies help the kids catch up on the education they missed. A recent area wide selection of the 16 top students included 12 of Ayni’s kids. She’s very proud.

None of the kids are yet at university. She’s sure many will qualify. They’ll be supported until they graduate. The others will go to vocational schools and when they graduate will be given the physical tools they need to earn a living.

We tell Ayni about our friend Menge, jobless now in Addis. Have him call me. I will find him something. Come back tomorrow and we’ll see what I can do.

Stay tuned.

APRIL 15, 2016: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 4

Swimmers splash in the lake, gleaming, slender, broad-shouldered, hipless slips of ebony, launching wet crystals against the green water. They soap up first, bubbles on black. Ethiopian geese, bronzed rust, verdigris, black, white, dark mascara circling deep red eye, protest and honk their comments at these invaders of their wet territory.

Dried and dressed, the swimmers, now land lubbers, run back to their boats, ready to row or putt-putt visitors to the hippos hiding in the grasses in the coves. It’s the slow season for Awassa, and even though this lakeside beauty is a popular spot with the Addis set, Ethiopian tourists are few, just some far spread couples sprawling on the grass. There are no faranji faces here, few anywhere in Awassa. The hippos will have some peace, but the swimmers may go hungry.

We wave down a bajaj. 10 Birr, says the driver. 1 Birr, says I. He tries for 5 Birr, then 2 Birr. I stick with 1. He laughs, nods, and waves us in. The ride is short and 1 Birr is the usual fare anywhere around town…unless you’re a faranji.

Pickings are slim, faranji-wise. We’ve seen only two other white faces in these 4 days. One was hovering over a laptop under the trees at La Dolce V, then disappeared forever. Another was striding, long legs pumping, Aussie-like, down our road. Neither looked like bajaj business.

Ayni has invited us to lunch with the girls and younger boys. It’s tasty. Ayni scolds me for eating so little. I blame it on the injera. It fills me too quickly. All that fermented sponginess inflates and leaves too little room for the real goodies. (And the effects of that fermentation further down in the digestive system are not helping with global warming.)

Afterwards we photo the boys, faces born for the camera. The phone’s screen is an even bigger hit than we are. We’re just us: seen us once, seen us enough. But that screen is magic. Fingers swirl over it. The kids expand their faces to be just huge eyes, teeth, lips, and laugh, laugh, laugh. Ayni has remade them. Now it’s their turn to do it and they love it.

Many, if not all, the kids, are from the Dorze people, famous for the weavings the men do. We have seen them at their looms in their villages. Thanks to Menge, we each have a sample of the Dorze weaving, bright red scarves, gifts last year, soft memories in cotton.

Ayni has helped six adult Dorze men by giving them a place to weave, using both the traditional looms we saw when we visited Dorze last year, and bigger Swedish looms. The cotton is hand spun, the cloth gossamer, the quality spectacular, the artistry honest and stunning. Ayni’s friends sell weavings for the orphanage in Europe.

We buy two pieces, and she gifts us with another. They’re the white scarves that wrap the faithful when they go to church. Our scarves have multicolor woven borders that take weeks to complete, a kind of devotion.

We chat and watch Ayni excavate clean, donated clothing from the bulging suitcases they traveled in from Europe, and sort them into piles for the three houses. My phone rumbles, then rings in my pocket. This is a first, a totally new experience for both of us. I am clueless. Where is a 6-year-old when you need one? Random pokings at miniscule buttons eventually produce a voice.

It’s the Bus Lady. Our early Sunday morning Sky Bus to Addis has been cancelled, but she can get us on another bus, leaving at the same time. It’s a dollar more and she needs the extra cash right away to issue the ticket.

Ayni’s offers her bajaj driver, Asmara, and off we go. In the office, money crosses the desk, tickets make the return journey, all voyages smoothed by Bus Lady’s profuse apologies.

Later, things get tricky….

APRIL 16, 2016: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 5, PART 1

…. yes, very tricky. We can’t figure out when the bus leaves. It says 6:00, but. …

Ethiopia uses the ancient Coptic calendar, itself based on the even more ancient Egyptian calendar. It’s a bit like the Julian calendar created by Julius Caesar with 12 thirty day months and a 13th month of five days. In most parts of the world, the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian calendar sometime in the 1500’s because the calendar had gotten increasingly out of synch with the solar year. Easter, the quintessential Spring festival was popping out of the calendar well into Autumn. Pope Gregory The Geek fixed it all with a few hot dates. Or something.

And now we're all in April, 2016.

Not so in Ethiopia. The result? We think we're traveling on April 17th, 2016. Our tickets are for a trip on the 9th day of the 8th month in the year 2008… seven and half years ago. And who says time travel is impossible!  All it takes is a trip to Ethiopia.

But, wait, confusion continues. The Ethiopian clock also has surprises in store. The hours here are counted from sunrise, conveniently pegged at International Time 6am, not midnight. Our noon is Ethiopian 6am.

Bus Lady has told us the bus leaves at 6:30. The departure time on our tickets is 6:00. Does that mean international 6:00, or Ethiopian 6:00, aka 12:00 on the rest of the planet? And what does 6:30 have to do with it? 12:30 also appears on the ticket, but we’re confused enough by the 6s, and prefer not to go any further around the clock!

Aida (yes, an Ethiopian beauty actually named Aida), our ever helpful Manager Lady, calls Bus Lady and gets it all straightened out. Don't worry about the date. The ticket is for tomorrow, not 7 years ago, in spite of what the ticket says. Be at the bus station by 6:00 International Time. The bus will leave at 6:30 IT. It should arrive between 10:30 and 11:00. The 12:30 on the ticket? A shrug dismisses that.

And what have we learned?

Ethiopians are ambi-dates-trous. Life is lived under two calendars. Dates for dealings within the country are in the Coptic calendar because that calendar regulates Ethiopia's all-important religious and ritual life. Everyone knows when to use the other calendar. Neither calendar is better than the other. You just have to know which one is being used, and if the year is included, that’s a snap. Time is mostly calculated the way the international community does it. When in doubt, which is frequently, ask.

Our last lunch is fried fish, back on the lakeshore.

On the shore, the process from water to waistline is choreography. The men clean fresh caught tilapia. Marabou storks clean up after them. Cooks pop the fresh fish into hot oil. Waiters deliver the hot and crispy/tender wonders to tables under the trees, $1.25 a fish. Eaters lick fingers and drool. Or, so we remember from last year. We can't wait to see how good a memory our tongue has.

And we find out: there’s no Alzheimer’s on these tongues. The fish is delicious, even at the inflated prices of $1.50 a fish. $1.25? That’s the morning price says the 12-year-old waiter. Could be.

I’m ending this here because of what happens next.

We meet a little boy…

APRIL 16, 2016: ETHIOPIA-AWASSA DAY 5, PART 1, OF 2

…one of the many small kids who hang around the tables. They scrounge the scraps. This is not easy for us. I offer the smallest a hard round roll. He takes it, nibbles and sits nearby.

When we leave, he follows us. He looks about 7 or 8, maybe a bit older, a beautiful child. He takes my hand and says ‘give me ten Birr’. Then, ‘hungry’. He kisses my hand. ‘Baba’ (father), give me one Birr’. It’s clear he won’t leave us.

We walk to the orphanage. It’s a long way from the fish market. He follows. Ayni isn’t there and no one speaks enough English to sort this all out for us. The orphanage folk seem kind, but there are a lot of them, and he is so little. They ask him questions. He seems to curl up, dropping his voice to a whisper, clearly afraid. Tears fall.

One man tells me ‘give him money’. I give him the 10 Birr he asked for. The child, takes it, his hand so tiny. I sense they tell him to leave.

He turns and walks away, a tiny spot growing smaller on the street.

There are at least two broken hearts watching him go.

APRIL 17, 2016: ETHIOPIA- AWASSA TO ADDIS

The road in front of Dolce V at o-dark-early is almost empty, almost quiet, but that changes quickly as the sun rises. The Dog Chorus trots by, hoarse, no doubt, from their night of Wagnerian carryings-on, but their feet introduce a soft deep erratic rhythm on the cobblestones. A flock of birds, tree-hidden, and in another rhythm entirely, add rippling arpeggios of high notes. A runner thump-thumps by in steady drum beats.

Our bajaj tuk-tuks up, adding its staccato Rossini beat.

It may be 06:10 on our watches as we tuk-tuk up to our bus, but it sure feels more like 0:10, which is what it is in Ethiopian time. Maybe Ethiopia is on to something.

Luggage tagged and fed into the huge maw of the under-bus storage compartment, we climb up and into our Selam Coach, find Seats 5 and 6 (left side, out of the sun as we head north), adjust the window curtains, and settle in for our 4 to 5-hour trip to Addis. The bus takes off at 06:41, or, as the on board clock has it, 0:41. The year is 2016.

There’s a movie! It’s in Amharic with some English phrases thrown in. ‘Oh, my God!’ comes up in just about every scene involving the staggeringly beautiful female leads as they deal with the 2 sheep-brained male leads (combined IQ of 10) and their nutty antics.

This is a perfect bus movie. When I doze off or my attention strays to the roadside views, I don’t miss much. It has the intellectual content of those mega-hits ‘Jackass’ and ‘Dumb and Dumber’, and of the soon to be released ‘Dumb and Dumber Meet Jackass’, and ‘Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump Explain the Bible’.

The plot involves the usual devices of the genre. I fall asleep after the 3rd explosion.

While I sleep the bus attendant delivers bottled water and cookies, better service than we ever get on a plane in the USA.

There’s no bathroom on the flight, but Ethiopia is a big country and we stop at 02:45 to use the facilities. The bushes don’t mind. The bus ticket is $8.50.

Birhanu takes time from his busy schedule to meet us and get us to Mr. Martin’s in one of Addis’ ancient 1970’s vintage Russian Radas.

Driving in Addis is for the brave.

Riding is for the blind-folded.

Riding in a Rada is for the deaf.

In Italy, our short ride through this kind of Gordian Knot traffic would have enriched the atmosphere with a dozen tasty aspersions on the characters of the driver, his mother, and all his ancestors, and/or launched several vendettas. In America? Perhaps up thrusting middle fingers and/or assault weapons would be involved. This is Ethiopia. Patience and good humor seem to be the rule.

Ababa accepts the key to Room 102 we forgot to drop off before we left for the Far West, and slides my cell phone holder across the desk to me. I never missed it. She assigns us to the same room. The beds recognize us, even though we left them over two weeks ago. We're home.

APRIL 18, 2016: ETHIOPIA-PARTY TIME IN ADDIS

 ‘You are family ‘says Menge.

We are all packed into Menge’s house, me, Dennis, Menge, ‘Mama’ (his wife), the 20-month old Whiz Kid who can already dial her mother’s number on a cellphone, her 2 older sisters (just as smart), and Mama’s sister, and we’re all fingers deep into a feast of Mama’s scrumptious fasting food. This lady can cook! After this food, and the equally delicious food we had at Birhanu’s house at the beginning of our trip, our taste buds are thoroughly spoiled. We indulge them.

Mama roasts fresh coffee beans over charcoal, then fans the heavenly coffee smoke over us, an essential step in the coffee ceremony…and a major gift to our noses. She grinds the blackened beans by hand, steeps them in boiling water, then pours the black liquid into tiny cups. It doesn't stay there for long.

The custom is to drink 3 cups, each named. The third cup is ‘blessing’ but we get side tracked and never get to it. There are gifts to open: charming drawings, framed in leather, of some of Ethiopia’s tribal peoples, and elegant shirts of supple hand woven cotton, the white a soft canvas for complex bands of color. They’re truly beautiful, gifts given and received with great joy.

The celebration of friendships begun in our 40-day trip at the end of 2014 continues into the evening. Of course, Menge has a friend with a van big enough to hold all of us, and we pile in. Menge and Mama are wearing the spectacular fabrics we have admired in their wedding photo, his in a shirt, and hers in a dress and cape, a great white cloud at once folded and billowing.

At Mr. Martin’s Cozy Hostel for a quick stop we run into Franzie and Philip, a young Austrian couple we chatted with most of the morning, and drag them into the van. There's room.

Menge’s friend negotiates the mysteries of Addis traffic with good humor. With the help of a few phones calls to Birhanu we pull into a ’cultural restaurant’ for a night of more food, music, dancing, and song.  Birhanu, his wife, Herane, and her sister, and our new friend, the driver, join us, so almost everyone in the family’ is accounted for. We're missing Birhanu and Herane ’s irresistible son, Asbe. And Alex, our driver for the past 2 weeks, he of the great laugh, is treating other travelers to that laugh in the southern part of the country.

The fasting food is delicious, so is the entertainment. Ethiopian ‘shoulder dancing’ is an Olympic event of demanding energy and skill, a marathon of rhythmic shaking that stars the aforementioned shoulders, with rippling support from the arms, hands, feet, and the hips, especially the hips.

The music is irresistible to our feet, but the shoulders refuse to cooperate. The 3 kids, however, dive in. The 20-month old Whiz Kid proves she is a born Dancing Diva, shaking those tiny shoulders with the best of them as she shimmies her way around the floor, through the forest of chairs and tables way taller than she is. This girl knows how to work a room.

Menge just laughs and shakes his head. ‘She’s very smart, like her sisters’. Indeed, and true all the way around.

Hugs are not sufficient when they drop us at Mr. Martin’s. We’ll see Menge and Birhanu on our way back through Addis on the 24th, but not the others on this trip.

Plans for another return to Ethiopia are already forming. This is family, after all.

APRIL 19, 2016: ETHIOPIA- LALIBELA, DAY 1

Wondale wraps his welcome around us in great absorbing hugs as we exit Lalibela airport. He was our guide here in 2014, a priest, and is an inspired interpreter of these subterranean monolithic churches.

We have flown north over the spectacular contorted landscape from Addis via Gondar to Lalibela, Ethiopia’s most iconic place. Last year we snaked up and down through this landscape for 3 days to get here. The flight takes an hour.

From above we see another picture of this topography. The top of the great flat uplifted plateau that is the roof of Africa stretches endlessly. Drops of rain from tens of millions of rainy seasons have washed onto it, then sought the center of the earth, drops, then rivers cutting through rock ever downwards. The valleys and canyons are millions of years deep, the rain dropped rivers now thin silver slivers wrapped in the deep and narrow valleys and canyons that are their offspring. Last year, as we followed the roads down the walls, layer after layer through the millennia, I described the landscape as time made visible. Now, from above, this landscape is also the power of gravity made visible.

Lalibela stretches over 5 hills like a giant hand, deep valleys separating the finger mountains. It's a stunning site and sight, 8000 feet into the blue Ethiopian sky. It is a sacred place, home to 11 underground churches carved down from the plateau into the lava rock by King Lalibela sometime in the 12^th century. Each church is a monolith, a single huge rock, chiseled down out of the surrounding rock, then hollowed out into a space for chant, ritual, and communion with God. One visit is not enough to absorb this place where geology becomes theology. So, we’re back, for 4 days, and in Wondale’s hands.

At Lalibela Hotel, Indie, manager and arranger of things, welcomes us with Ethiopia’s lovely greeting, right hands clasped, right shoulders nested together.  

Today we kick back and absorb the landscape, altitude and sky. Our travel companions, Gabriel and Tal, with only a day here, head off for one of the two groups of underground churches.

Wondale plans our week: a full day of rock-hewn symbols of faith, a visit to the farm family where we spent an afternoon in 2014, some easy trekking to a monastery even higher in the clouds, the Saturday market, a 03:00 AM religious service, and good eats prepared by the wonderful Sisko at Unique Restaurant (Raccomanded by farangis’), our favorite filling station...plus, nap time. Lalibela’s roads leap and drop across hills 8 thousand feet higher than Gulf hugging and flat Florida. ‘Nuff said.

APRIL 20, 2016: ETHIOPIA-LALIBELA DAY 2

The tunnel is pitch black.

It’s not much wider or taller than we are.

I feel the cold rough rock wall with my right hand, and the uneven roof with my left. This is definitely all touch and go…and the go part has a hundred feet in front of it. For a brain that flirts with claustrophobia this is a long hundred feet.

We’ve become troglodytes to move between the subterranean monolithic churches the way the monks and faithful do. These tunnels also help with drainage and help dissipate shock waves from the earthquakes spawned by the Rift Valley. Neither of these bits of information encourage dawdling in the dark.

It’s Lent, Easter is a week away. In between are Palm Sunday and today, the Feast of St. Michael, especially celebrated in this church. Unlike last year’s sublime ritual, this celebration has no music.

Draped over the rocky hills, a huge crowd of white-shawled faithful listens through the scratchy tones of a loudspeaker to a sermon, intense and alive even to us. Many carry plastic bottles they’ll fill with blessed water, potion for domestic and personal use.

(I remember fetching the same from church when I was a kid, ordered by my parents, who hadn’t been to church in decades but who insisted that their vestigial beliefs trumped my desire to play with my friends. Our house was pretty disaster-free, so maybe the water works. I hope so, for Ethiopia.)

Inside the church the faithful move through priests and deacons chanting psalms and ancient texts in Geez, a language few of the faithful understand. What they do understand is that this ritual is necessary.

The chanting is hypnotic and creates an unworldly rhythm, pulsing in the rock-bound space, until the stone itself seems to respond. Surely something beyond understanding happens in such a space, or so the faithful believe. Even we are affected.

Out in the air and atop the churches, we breathe deeply of the cool air, released by the stone and the mystery of these rituals.

 ‘I not believe’ says Sisko, wrapping us in great exuberant hugs on the steps leading down to her restaurant. The Unique Restaurant (‘Raccomanded by farangis’ and with a sign saying ‘welcome’…in Polish) is indeed that, because of Sisko’s cooking and her no nonsense, laugh-filled personality.

Last year we ate several meals here, and left her and her 3 beautiful daughters and handsome son with a pile of our ‘magic’ small instant photos. We’re amazed she remembers us in an instant at first sight.

We do veggie pizza for lunch. She doesn’t have the right change, so tells us to come back for lunch tomorrow and pay the 37Birr (just under $2). It’s good to know we have ‘street cred’, at least in Lalibela.

Nap time overtakes us, but by 3 we’re gung ho for some semi-serious butt-hauling up to 10,560 feet to visit a mountain top monastery, Asheton Maryam. It’s worth every knee-wrenching, lung-challenging step. (Uh, well, actually, in the interest of full disclosure, we rode up most of the way, though we did hike the last, toughest part.)

Carved out of the rock face, not down into the basalt, it’s technically semi-monolithic because the back is still attached to the stone. The carving is cruder than at the churches further down. That adds a rough, brooding quality to the place.

Inside, a priest shows us 600-year-old manuscripts and patina-ed silver crosses, safe here even from the 2 Italian invasions. The hike up to the heights discouraged those two absurd macho forays into misguided imperialism.

The peak is isolated from its neighbors. Air whishes all around it across stupefying drops into the surrounding valleys. Eagles ride the currents, below us. Rain clouds drift in, drop enough water to create a spectacular rainbow. One end is anchored beyond a neighboring peak. I have never been above a rainbow before, but I am now. Our end disappears into a valley eons below us. We are truly ‘Over the Rainbow’. Instead of bluebirds, we have eagles. We settle for that.

Gabriel, a new travel buddy, has hiked the whole way, and now feels queasy. We spread out in the rocks in our sky-high aerie and watch the day close.

Then we start down, stopping to inspect and buy tiny, rough, hand formed, black-fired, clay figurines, laid out on blankets in front of hopeful eyed little girls. Gabriel goes for the perky white-spotted Guinea Fowl, the reverse Dalmatians of the bird set. We spring for six serious faced priests and laborers, dressed in bits of old cloth.

The bargaining is ragged, both sides compromising. We shrug off the nagging question of exactly where these delights will fit in our over-stuffed museum in Florida. It’s irrelevant in the scheme of things. We like them and the kids need a sale. Done.

Dinner is at a place far removed in execution and spirit from Sisko’s Unique Restaurant. On top of a high peak outside of town, a Scottish woman and her Ethiopian business partner have imposed on the landscape a twisting hyper-modernistic IUD for a whale. A very large whale.

The food is decent in quality and price. The beer is glacial. The view is reported to be way beyond that. We see only quiet blackness, a fine curtain for a day magnificently performed.

APRIL 21, 2016: ETHIOPIA-LALIBELA DAY 3-PART 1, OF 2

The morning expedition climbing the hills and descending into the remaining churches tires us. Anything flat will be good. The bed comes first, then the stroll to the high school just down the road from the hotel.

We’ve been invited to visit the school and the principal this afternoon by Abel, the charming son of Sisko, the Restaurant Lady. Last year he showed us the wooden case he made for the remote control of his mother’s TV. ‘She is always dropping it and it breaks. This won’t break.’ Abel is excited that we’ll visit his school.

The school principal is young, articulate, committed, and frustrated. He manages 40 teachers and 1,000 high school students in two half-day shifts. There are no computers and not enough books. He’d like to have a hostel so students who walk one or two hours each way to class can stay on campus. Ethiopia doesn’t have the resources. Do we know of any possible sponsors? What can we say other than we’ll search when we return home? He’s heard that before. His eyes lose a bit of their light.

Light leads us back to the farm family we visited last year. We’re carrying 2 solar powered light sets for them, to save them the cost of fuel for lanterns.

First we give them the 5x7 color enlargements of the small instant printed photos we took last year. These are a big hit ...and they remember us.

Wondale explains the lights. In the flow of Amharic, we hear ‘solar’, and ‘battery’. Dad and high school age son unroll the cable, attach the lights, and bingo, the lights come on in every face and set of eyes.

Mama is speechless when she tests the lights inside the one room windowless tukul. ‘It was so hard before’, translates Wondale, ‘because it was dark and I could not see to work or cook. Now’….and she beams as she takes our hands, then hugs us. No translation is required.

Her beautiful first grade daughter, she of the magnificent eyes in our photos from last year, holds our hands almost the whole visit. Even the oldest son, a quiet, slender, deeply shy young man in his early twenties tries out a smile when we show him his picture from last year. He's delicately beautiful. Then he goes back to his oxen and plowing the fields.

His two school age brothers try to squeeze some English through their nonstop smiles. I'm not sure they welcome losing their reason not to study at night, but light has to be better than the dark, and not even their standard issue megawatt Ethiopian smiles can dispel the dark inside that house.

The smiles may be short lived….

APRIL 21, 2016: ETHIOPIA-LALIBELA DAY 3-PART 2

There is a 70 percent chance they will lose their land. All of it. Within a year.

They will be homeless through no fault of their own.

The government is expanding the town down into their valley and needs the land. They will have to move to town. The monetary compensation will last them about a year. After that…who knows? At least on the farm they can raise the food they need, and barter for other things. In the town they’ll need cash and where will they get that? There’s not a lot of light in that future.

But, for now, the rules of hospitality take over. Mama spreads spicy red chili paste between two sheets of injera. Adorable daughter pours water over our hands and we dig in. It’s good, especially when washed down with home-made beer. Wondale says Mama’s beer is his favorite and describes the process that converts a number of different grains into this tasty hooch. We lose track early on, but blame it on the beer.

While we eat and drink, Mama washes and rinses green coffee beans several times, then begins to roast them on a flat pan over charcoal, constantly stirring them. They begin to smoke. We begin to drool.

When they have been smoking long enough, she carries the smoking pan over to us and brushes the heavenly smoke towards us. We nod approval as if we knew what we are doing. She grinds the coffee by hand using a wooden mortar and pestle and carefully feeds the grounds through the narrow neck of the bunna carafe. There they sit waiting for the hot water that will convert them to Ethiopia's gift to the tongues of the world. Three cups are mandatory. Twist our arms!

This family has very little and could lose even that. They have offered us the best of what they do have. Can there be a greater gift?

On the climb from the farm to the ridge where affable Dorraba parked the car, we look back. The view is endless, stunning. The tukul is tiny, straw-topped, mud-sided, of the earth. On another higher ridge, one that separates this valley from the town, we see the silhouettes of multi-story skeletons. Sharp against the blue sky they are the other edge of the two-sided sword of tourism, the ugly edge.

Life is hard in this country, the fastest growing economy in the world. This day began in the depths of the churches where people seem to find solace and hope in the darkness. They will need it.

APRIL 22, 2016: ETHIOPIA- LALIBELA DAY 4

 ‘I love you’, she says, and follows up with a big kiss.

Wondale supplies the translation for Part One. Part Two needs none. ‘She’ is his 70-year-old deliciously expressive mother and I have just given her a print of her photo.

She reminds me so much of my mother’s mother, the delightful Rosa, with whom I spent every summer until I was 12 and for whom laughter was not the best medicine, but the only medicine. Time stops for a few seconds and I am 60 years ago in a farmhouse in Kingston, NY. Then we’re back in Wondale’s house on the edge of Lalibela, Ethiopia eating honey smeared on crispy pancakes with him, his 3 irresistible kids, sweet wife, and laughing mother in the twilight.

Momma is quite the bootlegger. Her home-made tej, honey wine, is both delicious and potent. The bunna from fresh roasted coffee beans probably offsets the effects.

Four-year-old Elias, non-stop energy, roars around the yard rolling his home-made hoop toy through the dust, terrorizing the chickens. He wants to be a pilot, says his dad…if he ever stops moving, says I. He does, actually, to kiss his sister, clearly his grandmother’s grandson in the affection department.

This has been a day free of churches and programs, time to branch out on our own.

Earlier in the day we spend some time with Abel, Sisko’s sweet high school age son. His English is excellent. We talk about his future. College entrance exams are coming up. There’s no university in Lalibela, and if he’s to work towards a degree in mechanical engineering he will have to leave. He lives simply now, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the restaurant, so he can make do about anywhere, but he estimates college and living expenses away from home are about $125 a month, a huge expense. His mother is helping his older sisters with their education. There's nothing left for his. College will be impossible without a sponsor. We leave it at that.

After another of Sisko’s delicious lunches, spaghetti with vegetables, we tuk-tuk and rattle up and down the hills back to the hotel. Tuk-tuks in Awassa were 1 Birr. Here they are at minimum of 30 going downhill, and 40 going up…if you bargain well. Fuel is expensive, and the hills eat it. Wondale has introduced us to Ashagrie and his impressively decked out tuk-tuk. He offers us a special fixed rate of 30 and 40, and is just a phone call and 5 minutes away whenever we need him. It’s a great arrangement and it works. And we get to ride in a tuk-tuk with pink fringe hanging from the ceiling, plastic flowers attached to the windshield wipers, and a big ‘I Love Ethiopia’ sign on the back. This is style and we love traveling in it.

‘Come see the house I’m building’ is an invitation we can’t pass up, so we join Indie, hotel manager extraordinaire, in a tuk-tuk and head out of town to one of the new suburban communities set up by the government.

There are many houses in all stages of construction. Indie’s house is about half finished, so we can see the construction, part traditional, part modern finishing. The base structure is traditional: closely spaced wooden poles as a matrix for the mud and straw filler maturing in a pile in front of the house. The modern touch will be wire mesh laid on top of that as a base for cement, and on the front, a stone façade over the cement. The other exterior walls will be painted. The roof is tin.

Two small bedrooms and a large non-traditional bathroom with shower, commode and tile will open off a comfortable living space, an efficient arrangement in the 400 square foot house.

There’s a beautiful view out front. Out back there’s room for a simple kitchen. Hey, says I, we’d stay here when it’s done. Wait a couple of years, says he.

As we leave, a flock of laughing kidlets greets and follows us, fearless and friendly. Some take our hands.

APRIL 23, 2016: ETHIOPIA-LALIBELA DAY 5

The goats are not happy.

It’s Saturday, Market Day, in Lalibela. And, it’s the last Saturday before the Easter weekend, when the favorite item on the menu after 55 meatless days is…you guessed it: goat.

Some people buy today, when prices are low, rather than next Saturday when they’ll be high. In between they would have to feed the bleating main meal-to-be, easy for farmers with fodder aplenty. City dwellers? Not so easy.

Early buyers lead their dinners-to-be out of the market, on a lead, but, more commonly, dragging them by a front leg or handy horn. I’m guessing the draggers are the folk who planned to buy next week, but couldn’t resist a hoofed…though protesting…bargain today. By the way, says Wondale, cows are really cheap today. We pass.

The crowd is a huge amoeba, tightly rolling over the road, paths, slopes, and valleys. Everything is available for sale or barter and everyone knows what is on offer and where. A big seller in the clothing ‘aisle’ is the semi-traditional black shirt and black shorts outfit the young studs sport about town, plain now, but embellished after purchase with fashionista flair. The current style is to sew flat white buttons onto the black in geometric patterns. Wondale says the guys do the sewing. I believe that. All the street side tailors ratatatatting on sewing machines are men. One reattaches the Velcro on my favorite travel wallet, a one-dollar purchase in Turkey now sporting a 25 cent Ethiopian repair.

Grains---sorghum, barley, wheat, corn kernels, and the three varieties of tef, Ethiopia’s ‘wonder food’---flow over plastic tarps. Small purchases or trades are measured in tin cans of various sizes, heaped a bit. Scales wait for the big spenders.

We survive the hand-woven scarf and blanket section, temptation yielding to reality, but just barely.

Lalibela is Ethiopia’s prime tourist draw, and tourists never refuse a market, but we see few tourists. Perhaps they have all been sold already?

But we do run into Wondale’s mother, grab hands, bump shoulders, laugh, say goodbye and watch her sail on, parting the crowd with her undeniable authority. She is quite the personage and would have given my grandmother (who she reminds me of) a close run for the money. What am I saying? Ethiopians can outrun anyone, even an Italian nonna running to check on her pasta sauce.

The big commodity here is news---OK, gossip---brought in from the farms, collected in asides along the dusty streets of the town, spread far and wide as goats, onions, buttons, the stuff of daily life, changes hands. News smoothes every transaction, its value affecting the final price, and worth an extra onion here, a few more grains of tef there. People come to see friends and relatives, talk about who has a son or daughter ready for marriage, or a heifer ready for breeding, to pay debts, repay loans, or just to add spice to a hard life. The hours it takes to get here fade in the wonder of being here in all this noise. And, by the way, they dress their best. This is not Walmart.

Back at Unique Restaurant, Sisko is barking orders at her daughter, niece, and the 3 other young women working backstage. ‘I go to market. I tired.’ And, that, definitely, is that.

The kitchen crew dishes up crisp pizza with spicy tomato sauce for me, ditto with veggies for Den, and injera with fasting vegetables for Wondale. Sisko approves from her perch, wedged imperiously into the corner, and next to us.

Then a bus load disgorges on the road and a crowd jostles into Unique, blowing Sisko out of her comfy corner. Her fasting food has good word of mouth. Lent is good for business, offsetting the dead season that can follow for months. She plays the room. None of these first-timers will forget a meal at Unique.

We try to make a quiet last exit, but she and Abel will have none of that. The hugs on both sides are genuine.

Our plan is to wake at 03:00am and walk up to meet Wondale and climb those slopes to the churches. Chanting will start at 03:30 (or thereabouts). The rain starts about 8pm. Oops. Visions of muddy slaloming down those slopes in the dark on our butts---or worse---replace interest is pre-dawn chants. We sleep in.

APRIL 25, 2016: ETHIOPIA-ADDIS TO HARAR- PART 1, OF 2

NOTE: IN HARAR THERE IS NO EASY INTERNET. WE HAVE TO MIGRATE TO INTERNET CAFES OR FRIENDLY HOTEL LOBBIES TO GET A CONNECTION.

We’re in the middle of a revolution.

More accurately, we---and our backpacks—are behind the revolution. We’re ballast, stuck in the back most seats of a minibus designed to carry 12 passengers, stretched now to 14, plus the driver and the imp-faced tout who has stopped the bus to push into the bus yet another would-be traveler who shares his tenuous grasp of the laws of physics. There are already objects in the suggested space, people, specifically 3 women who Will Not Have It. No guns are fired. None are needed. The pitch, volume, and speed of their verbal assault stop the tout dead in his tracks.

Victorious, the Revolutionary Guard are gracious in their compromise. It is raining. The poor man needs a ride. Put him in your space. The tout obliges, curls into the next size below imp.

The interloper is tall and does not fold easily. His head scrapes the ceiling at an angle that tests some other law, of biology perhaps. We’d offer him part of the backseat, but our legs are already nerve dead and we can’t move.  Crawling over the Revolutionary Guard to get here is Not An Option. Interloper remains folded.

We bounce through the rain, stopping to pop out and stuff in more people. We’ve become a hybrid of the Marx Brothers routine in which they stuff more people into a room than can possibly fit, and the circus clown routine in which more people get out of a mini-car than can possibly be in it. All told, we’re more Marx than mini.

The Revolutionary Guard descends imperiously without a farewell, sisters to the Marx Brothers’ abundantly bosomed dowager always sailing above adversity. The Interloper unfolds, slowly working the creases out of his bones.

An hour later our Marx Brothers sight gag makes its entrance into Harar. Nobody notices.

Today has been our day to research transport. First, there’s the cab from Mr. Martin’s to the airport, creaky but uneventful at 5am. Next, Ethiopian Airlines flight 200, comfy, and staffed by two women who anywhere else on the planet would be super-supermodels, flies us smoothly through the clouds eastward towards Dire Dawa. It’s a good flight. The fasting veggie hoagies aren’t bad either. Then there is the cab from Dire Dawa airport to the bus station, a vehicle ancestral to most on the planet, but the wheels turn, and it doesn’t take much to hold the door closed. Not too much rain makes it inside. And, penultimately, the Marx mini bus squishes us through the rain, a lesson in the physics of travel, cheap at $7.50 for us and our backpacks.

We stand in the cornucopia of noises that is Harar bus station, ready for our 5th vehicle of the day. It’s time to grab a tuk-tuk….

APRIL 25-ADDIS TO HARAR- PART 1, OF 2, CONTIONUED

There's a technique to tuk-tuking. If you hail one that already has a passenger, or pop into and out of one on its usual route (destination written above the windshield--- in Amharic), the cost is low, maybe 5 to 15 cents. If you hail an empty one and tell the driver where you want to go, you’ve hired the thing...and pay accordingly.

In Scenario One, you’ve hopped on a bus. In Scenario Two, you’re taking a cab.

Getting around town at the bargain fare of 1 to 3 Birr is simple, no? Well, yes, simple, if you can read Amharic, know the routes, and your way about town. The laws of physics and biology we can deal with, but the meaning telegraphed by the gymnastic poses of the Amharic alphabet still eludes us.

Of course, we attract a crowd, including a young man with an impenetrable speech impediment, glorious smile, semaphoring arms, and a cluster of friends. Equally of course, one knows our guide, Biniyam, so we’re all sorted out in a jiffy, then sorted into a tuk-tuk and delivered to Biniyam. He piles in, physics be damned, and 10 minutes later we pass under the gate to the old city, and down the only street in old Harar open to motor traffic.

This is Scenario Two, tuk-tuk as taxi, crowded taxi, so we pay a few dollars, Biniyam and we unpile, and wave goodbye to the clutter of arms and smiles remaining.

Five alleys and a dozen cobblestoned turns later we slip through metal doors into the courtyard of Rowda Guesthouse, deep in the old city, and one of only 2 traditional houses of the local Adare people open to guests. In 2014 we had coffee and popcorn here and admired its traditional style and lovely plant filled courtyard. Today we step around piles of rugs, furniture, pots, pans, clothing. We’re from Florida. We recognize the look: Early Yard Sale.

Venerable matron Hajeera greets us then goes back to sorting stuff. Biniyam leads us past semi-Alpine piles, through the main room of the house, and gets us settled in our room (double bed, sort of private bath, $20 a night, with breakfast), temporarily, it turns out, shared with other roommates: a large TV, an extra mattress, several mirrors, and an extension cord sprouting a colony of plugs and cables.

Wood shutters open through the two-foot-thick walls and over an alley. Across is a roof with satellite dish, then another house, painted turquoise and coral, then some tin roofs and way beyond a green hillside crew-cutted by a low cloud. It’s perfect.

We decide to meet at 9 tomorrow to walk the old city.

Later, Muhammed, the drug dealer….

APRIL 25, 2016: ETHIOPIA-ADDIS TO HARAR- PART 2, OF 2

…tells us his pharmacy is the oldest in Harar, 4 generations old, and shows us pictures of the city a hundred years ago. It doesn’t look much different now.

In excellent English he diagnoses my headache, runny nose, sore throat, and cough and offers an antihistamine, 8 doses for 16 Birr, 80 cents. (Note: the pills work. A day into my doses, I have rejoined the dripless, non-hacking, pain-free living. Amosigenalo---thank you---Muhammed.)

We don’t have much appetite and pass up the very tempting French fries turned out by a lady in the lane outside the guesthouse, the delicious looking frisbees of bread heaped in piles in the market, the fried-as-you-wait chickpea fritters, and the many other goodies offered from charcoal fires along the streets. We settle for a few sweet bananas for 30 cents and two small satchels of crisp peanuts for 20, faranji prices for the former, local for the latter, as we later find out.

A hyperactive middle-aged guy chats us up, thanks us for all the help the USA and European countries have given Ethiopia (his opinion), and then self-assigns himself as our personal bodyguard, parting the crowd for us, with exuberant arm flurries and quite impressive- sounding announcements in Amharic. It takes a bit, but eventually he figures we’ve been honored enough and waves an enthusiastic goodbye.

As we turn back into our alley a woman takes a ladle of glowing coals from the French Fry Lady, thanks her, and runs off, we guess, to start her own fires at home.

Home is where you make it. We bed down in Harar, home for at least the next 4 days.

APRIL 26, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 1-PART 1, OF 2

Hajeera is clearly a Revolutionary Guard Emerita. She runs her guest house, her two daughters, Medina and Sameera….and us…with straightforward authority. Breakfast, she commands, and it appears, poof! feather light, deep-fried pancakes and thick wild honey, a carafe of bunna, spread out on a pillowed raised platform in one of the other rooms.

We're the only guests, which is good because this is Ramadan Cleaning Time and the house has exploded into the courtyard. Ramadan is still a month off, but Hajeera is on top of it. Of course.

The walls, usually encrusted with colorful pots, pans, dishes, wooden bowls, were stripped and freshly white washed when we arrived yesterday. This morning the walls in the main room right outside our bedroom are upholstered with hundreds of these heirlooms arranged and applied with lapidary skill. The 3 women worked until midnight, but we never heard them. ‘Last night OK’ offers Hajeera. It’s not a question.

Medina and a friend carry a washing machine into the courtyard, ducking under the freshly washed plastic flowers hanging on the clothesline and disturbing the fluffy black and white cat that has appropriated the sunshine. They fill the machine from a barrel that collects rainwater from the roof, plug it in, dump in piles of cloth, leave it to its repetitive groaning, and flurry off to more house cleaning. The cat naps.

In the way of all communities where everyone knows what is going on and who is where, the sweet, speech impaired, young man from the bus station stops by to wave hello. He whips out a cell phone, tap taps, and shows us a screen with his name, Abdela. He understands what we say, and we're getting better at guessing his exuberant language of gestures, garbled sounds, and smiles, always smiles, rippling off his truly handsome face. We tell him Biniyam will come soon. He waves goodbye, radiantly. Later we discover he understands a lot of English, is very bright, and has a great sense of humor. I wonder about his speech problem. Dennis figures it out. Abdela is deaf.

We watch the turmoil in the courtyard. Hajeera and her daughters blur by in heaps of bedding, pots, chairs, orders flying. ‘Not today’ is Hajeera’ s answer to our request for a photo and she points down to her work outfit, stylish layers of colors and fabrics to us, not photo material to her.

We spend the morning with Biniyam, revisiting the streets of Harar, so twisting that there are only 2 places where they meet and cross at right angles. There are almost 400 of them, none straight for very far, the widest the width of two donkeys passing. In almost all the rest, one of those donkeys would have to back up. The narrowest are mere filaments, too narrow for 2 people to pass side by side. They’re called Streets of Reconciliation because when 2 people meet coming from opposite directions they have to accommodate one another.

Our favorite street is Machina Girgir Street, the street of cloth sellers and tailors, our favorite because of the tailors. All men, they sit in the narrow street outside the cloth sellers, each at his pedal operated sewing ‘machina’, at the ready to turn cloth into clothing on the spot.

The sound of the machina creating its stitched transformations is heard by Ethiopians as ‘girgir’, thus, the street’s name. Last year a machina girgir-ed my hat. This year, a Singer machina revived Dennis’ torn vest and has a date with the waistband of my pants.

I have a date with some berbere, the red powder basic to Ethiopian food and my current condiment of choice.

APRIL 26, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 1-PART 2, OF 2

Berbere is flame-colored and flame-hot, a complex mixture of red chilies and a dozen other powders, seducers of the taste buds. Biniyam takes us to the place where his mother gets her spices. It’s wrapped deeply in the spice market far from the limited world of ordinary smells, surrounded by bins, and barrels, and baskets of herbs and spices, leaves and seeds, whole, and ground, fresh, and dried, raw and roasted. Coriander, cumin, mustard, pepper, cinnamon, fenugreek, juniper, turmeric…Biniyam names them all and loses us in this lexicon of lusciousness. We taste so many, in so many forms that our tongues grow weary.

Harar is like its spice market, a rich, pungent mix. The Old City, within the walls and gates is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a place of special significance, of special character. The content of that character is recognized in its additional designation, as a World Peace City.

I ask Biniyam why.

‘We don’t have here mine is better than yours. Rich or poor we all live together We’re all the same. There are 5 ethnic groups, 3 languages, two big religions here. Nobody has culture shock. The kids all learn 3 languages. We get along. I am a Rasta. Sixty percent of my friends are Moslems’. As they have for generations, Moslem and Christians live together, sharing space in the same compounds often for generations.

The narrow streets of the Old City concentrate its energy, channel it to the open spaces by the gates and the squares in the center. That’s where the markets begin to set up, midway through the afternoon, time for people from the surrounding villages to reach the city.

We walk, and twist, and turn, first with Biniyam, then on our own. The guide book writes that just outside the main gate there’s a woman who makes the best samosas in town. ‘Go after 11 (5 pm)’, says Biniyam just before he leaves us, ‘but you might have to wait in line’.

We do. And it’s worth it. Her ‘shop’ is a just a squat spot on the road, room enough for her to work her magic. Into a pan of oil, roiling over charcoal, she drops, then extracts triangles of crisp dough filled with either smooth mashed potato and green chilies, or still crisp lentils and a spice mixture that distills the spice market itself. They’re 10 cents each, a fortune in flavors.

We share them with ubiquitous Abdela, who, once again has popped out of the crowd and into our day, bright eyes, semaphore arms, rubber face accomplishing what his tongue cannot. We share a cold drink on a balcony overlooking the square and Samosa Lady’s ‘shop’, then more samosas, then a walk as the day wanes and the night market takes over the road.

From yet another balcony we watch the market unfold, literally, as sellers open scarfs or tarps and spread their contents on the road. It’s a great blooming of shoes, and pans, and breads, and vegetables, and shirts, and pieces of cloth, of the stuff of life, colors washing off the grey of the road.

Back home Hajeera has commanded her minions. The main room is finished. We’re invited to lounge on the thick carpets, richly ruby. We do, briefly.

APRIL 27, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 3-PART 1, OF 2

Medina is getting married… in two days…on Sunday...announces Hajeera as we drag in after dark.

This means photos, changes of costumes, more photos, oohs and ahhs, more changes, veils and scarves draped, rearranged, dropped, added, then more photos. We feel welcomed home after our long day on the streets.

This is our maintenance day. First, I deliver my pants and their sagging waistline for a trimming at a Singer sewing machine on Machina Girgir Street. Afterwards, we walk back up the hill, exit the Old City through the Harar Gate, cross into the New City, and follow the pretty, tree-lined main street 2 kilometers to the Ras Hotel, the one place we know will have Internet access. Biniyam has given us the password, so we sneak on, and assuage our very slight feelings of guilt by ordering colas.

Emails accounted for, we start our search for an Internet Café with computers so we can unload photos from our stuffed phones onto storage chips. We find sweet-faced Benor, owner and sole employee of tiny Benor Productions.

With a cyber swish of the mouse Benor takes over the project copying photos from my overloaded and reluctant phone first to his computer, then to my 32Gig disk. His other business is laminating things, and there's a steady stream into the shop and over to the laminator thingy, documents pressed and sealed.

Under his third hat is a videocorder. Up pops a wedding video of his friend’s wedding, bride and groom both all in white, and a bit too well upholstered in over-indulged injera. There are scenes we’ve all seen elsewhere: the bride getting ready, kissing her parents and siblings, greeting guests, cutting and eating wedding cake, even some smashing of wedding cake into the groom’s mouth. (Note: it’s considered an honor in Ethiopia if someone hand feeds you.)

The video is quite sophisticated, with clever fades and transitions, and Benor is justifiably proud to play it for us.

Behind the scenes the transfer chugs away

The power gives out mid-chug. Shrugs abound. Come back ‘later’ says Benor.

APRIL 27, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 3-PART 2, OF 2

Right upstairs from Benor is Harar ’s best fruit juice bar, remembered from last year. It’s noon, time for a yummy avocado drink, so thick it is more like pudding. Trickled with fresh squeezed lime juice, this is heaven in a glass, and a good lunch.

It’s a great view from the balcony down to the street, full of people doing things, as they do on every road in this energized country.

A guy walks by leading a huge but placid bull, horns a yard wide. Behind him is a mixed herd of four women and a little girl, all ablaze in brilliant patterns and colors, and half a dozen piebald goats, equally decorative, if more subtly.

Across the street, brand spanking new tuk-tuks sit in their hatchery, still innocent of ways to terrorize the streets.

This is our third balcony since yesterday afternoon. Call it research. I'll be super ready if the opera ever does one of the Romeo and Juliette operas.

We dawdle, wander. About 2 pm we figure it is now ‘later’. We’re wrong. Benor Productions is locked tight. The neighboring shop owner scoots over some lime and mango plastic stools for us to sit on, whips out a phone, chats, and tells us ‘soon’.

And, quite soon, ‘later’ arrives. Benor verifies that my files have journeyed over and starts to copy Dennis’. The lights go out, the screen goes blank and outside the traffic lights die. This is a Big One, worth a few shrugs, doubled head shakes, and an I’m sorry. It’s our turn to shrug. We hunker down on the stone step and set about doing the only thing we can do, nothing.

For a while.

Dennis stays behind. I pick up my resized pants, a bargain at $5, on Machina GirGir Street, bump shoulders with the omnipresent Abdela, share a few chickpea fritters with him, and wander the lanes back to the guesthouse, alien geography morphed into familiar territory.

The Big One was a Big Nothing and Dennis almost beats me home, photos all where they should be. Benor charged us $1.50 for a few hours of work.

By dusk, our taste buds are demanding a replay of the samosas. We hope the very light drizzle hasn’t discouraged Samosa Lady. She is there, hidden, flipping and dishing her triangles of pleasure, at the center of a large crowd. We wait our turn, not patiently, take our 4, two of each flavor, wrapped in newspaper, unwrap, drool, devour, then go back for 2 more.

We walk home through the dark and narrowing alleys stepping into tiny packets of cobble-stoned light from Dennis’ cell phone.

Then we are welcomed home by all those faces bright as they begin to celebrate Medina‘s wedding in two days. We take out our cameras….

APRIL 28, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 4

A camel harrumphs into my ear.

Today is camel market day in Babile, a 40 minute and 60 cent, Marx Brothers’ minibus ride from Harar.

All around us are camels, more camels, and even more camels, spread in small humpdoms across the field, chewing superciliously. Wide-horned or humpbacked cattle, wildly patterned goats, black-faced Somali sheep, and Bethlehem donkeys, with their crosses clearly marked on their shoulders, do their mooing, bleating, bah-bahing, and honking best but cannot upstage the humped harrumphing centerpieces. They prance and pose. It’s THEIR day, and they know it.

Ethiopian camels are for transport not riding (as my hips and butt well remember), Mack trucks, definitely not Rolls Royces. Some of these may wind up hundreds of miles away hauling salt from the inferno salt fields of the Danakil Depression. Few, if any, will wind up in a pot.

Babile is in Ethiopian Somalia, a part of Ethiopia, and not to be confused with the non-functioning, pirate-spawning pseudo-country of Somalia to the east and south, or with Somaliland, a stable but generally unrecognized country due east. We go overland to the latter in a few days, passing through Babile again, then walking across the border into a country few people remember to visit.

Today, Babile is an appetizer before the banquet of the real Somaliland.

The Hello/Hallo Chorus of northern Ethiopia has morphed into the You…You…You Chorus. But it’s not ‘You’ the kids (and many adults) are chanting, Biniyam tells us. It’s ‘U’, as in the ‘U’ of ‘UN’, United Nations, plastered all over the UN vehicles that delivered aid here during the protracted disturbances a generation ago. The ‘U…U…U’ began as a way of announcing they know who the faranji were, UN workers, aid suppliers. Now, it has become what people chant at all faranji, (though not at the Chinese).

Biniyam drops us up in the New City. It has been good to see him again and walk his city with him. He’s a fine guide. We watch his long Rasta braids swing as he walks away. We’ll see him again on our return to Ethiopia.

The alleys in the Old City, spaghetti to our eyes a few days ago, start to form a map for our feet. We learn. Walk uphill to the gates on the west side, downhill to the east gates. Follow the crowds. They head to the market at every gate, at least in the afternoon. No matter how we twist and turn we wind up back near one of the gates, or the squares, or the one wide street the Italians bulldozed through the center of the Old City.

Tonight, we walk down the main street, away from Samosa Lady and towards Fateera Guy. Under one of our favorite balconies, Fateera Guy takes a piece of pizza dough the size of a deck of cards, flattens and spins it into a roughly two-foot square canvas, translucent, verging on transparent. It flies into a huge flat metal pan, heated by a charcoal fire, crackling as it hits the thin coat of oil. On it, FG paints a yellow/red/ivory abstraction of whipped eggs/tomatoes/onions, in a sort of Jackson Pollack meets Julia Child moment, waits a second, then folds two sides towards the middle, then the other two, into a 6 or 7-inch square package, now crisping on the pan side. He swirls some oil, flips the package, browns it for a second. It’s done.

Some eat fateera as is. For some, he rapid fire chops it with two blurred cleavers into a hash, eaten with chunks of crunchy local bread. For us, he takes the middle road and cross slices it into small squares. A swish launches it onto a plate, and Waiter Guy delivers it, still hot. With forks. One is not enough. Number two comes with a smile from Fateera Guy. Our double-dipping costs three dollars.

We walk back up the slope. There are no lights. The city is mostly dark, shadowy where light seeps from shops or houses. We carry a small light, enough to place our feet, feet knowing to turn opposite the SHAFT Clothing Store sign and into the alley with the Photo Shop.

Rumor has it that hyenas enter the city and prowl at night, at least near the walls, benign trash eaters, and never a threat. We haven’t seen any. I’m not sure how we feel about that.

APRIL 29, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 5

This is the Rainy Season. So far is has been more the ‘Occasional Sprinkle Season’, but today the rains come in roof-pummeling, street-emptying, gutter-washing torrents.

We are stuck for a few hours at the far end of the New City, but with access to Internet, water, coffee, and eventually, lunch, sheltering on the veranda of the Ras Hotel, the only place we know of to get a more or less consistent Wi-Fi connection. Today’s flavor is Less. Photo attachments from friends remain spinning in cyberspace. (When it comes to ‘news’ about the primary insanity in the US, however, less is definitely more than enough.)

The rain greys the city and flattens life, washing away the visual cacophony of the streets. Even the goats, usually up for anything, have had enough. I see 5 or 6, lined up, single file, nose to tail, just out of the rain, under the narrow eaves of a house, unmoving.

We start home during a drizzly break in the downpour. That’s a mistake. We arrive thoroughly soaked. On the way I get tangled in the ropes holding a flock of goats together. The goats are not helpful. And they are definitely not amused. Not so every two-footed observer in the vicinity. While I believe travelers should always entertain their hosts, I suggest not doing it in the rain. With goats.

Cattle also figure in our wet walk. We notice some tethered near two banks. Cash cows? No, says, Dennis, ‘moolah’. It’s a long walk home.

We have moved out of the main house to another room across the courtyard, supplanted by new guests who have booked the whole house. We lose the private bathroom, but gain a bed we don’t need.

There’s a little more room to spread out, and we use it to radically down size what we’ll carry into Somaliland. Each of us fits what we need for the next week into our small day packs: one change of clothes, meds, guide book, camera batteries, adapters and chargers, toothbrushes and paste, rain ponchos, laundry liquid. This is Olympic Gold Medal Packing, in the One Climate Zone Division, and a test run for future trips. Our big backpacks will hunker down here at the guesthouse until we return.

Hejeera sends over a platter with the makings for tea, perfect for a dreary day.

By dusk, the drizzle has stopped and images of samosas and fiteera vie and crowd out fear of another dunking. Samosas win. Samosa Lady is wiser than we are in the ways of the Rainy Season. Her spot is empty and dark. It will be

Fiteera Guy and his aerodynamic artistry then, under the balcony, and dry, but ten minutes away. The air suddenly thickens, wettens, goes soggy and drippy. We make it home damp, fiteer-less. Dinner is peanuts.

The phone rings. ‘Are you guys OK?’ It’s Birhanu. Severe flooding is reported here and two people have died.

APRIL 30, 2016: ETHIOPIA- DAY 6 IN HARAR – KILLER FLU FROM MARS

At least it’s not malaria.

The stuffed sinus, slight sore throat, and occasional cough I have rendered bearable with tiny pink anti-histamines from pharmacist Muhammed, have bloomed overnight into Killer Flu From Mars. I drip, wheeze, hack, raw-throated and achy-headed, through the night.

This is the 4th trip in a row into which the KFFM has descended. Surely, it has better places to land?

Then it hits me! We can tell NASA to stop searching for life on Mars. The KFFM has already killed off everybody up there on the Red Planet. We’re next, down here on The Little Blue Dot, me first.

Somaliland retreats over the horizon, chased by microbes from Mars. Closer in, Hajeera, not one to be defeated by microbes, makes me a traditional remedy (very tasty) and offers to take me to a local doctor.

I’m getting good at this. I have prescriptions and receipts from doctors in Iran, Spain, and India, and from para-medics in Vietnam and Ethiopia. Doubling up in Ethiopia will add depth to my collection, and a telling detail, that little ‘je ne sais quoi’, to my obituary.

Local ‘doctor’ is also a pharmacist, and also named Muhammed, not surprising since Muhammed is the most common first name for men in the world. Muhammed 2 is young, friendly, and asks good questions in excellent English. For $1 he sells me some cough syrup. He wants me back at 4pm to check the effect of the meds on my blood pressure.

One of the many reasons we like to stay put in the same place for several days is that people get used to seeing us, and begin to nod, and greet outside the world of ‘U, U, U’, and ‘faranji, faranji, faranji’. As I stumble up the cobblestones to Mohammed 2’s, charming Ayesha waves from her door way and asks me if I want to buy a house in Harar. Later, neighbors ask Dennis where I am. Maybe they have nicknames for us: ‘The Printer Guy’, and ‘Death Warmed Over’.

Hajeera checks in frequently. ‘Good?’ and brings tea.

Biniyam phones his friend, ‘Doc’, Dr. Tagal, a real physician, who is off duty, and doesn’t have his ‘Doc kit’ with him, but who makes a house call (remember those?) anyway, speaks excellent English, diagnoses from my description, and dismisses Muhammed 2’s cough syrup with a question: ‘do you want a quick fix, or to get better?’ I hate trick questions but go for getting better.

Doc and Dennis drive off into the dark to get the meds he wants. The pharmacies of the 2 Mohammeds are closed, the third has the meds, but they are too close to the expiration date for ‘Doc’. He finds them at the hospital pharmacy for $12. His charge for the house call, diagnosis, running around town at night is $25.

It’s Bini’s clients who are staying in the other part of the house. He leads them off to supper and brings us back a gift: hot vegetable soup for me and pizza for Dennis.

The temperature and spicy heat of the soup scour my throat of the raking fingers of those Martian germs.

MAY 1, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 7 – ‘YOU FACE BETTER’

I awake a little further from death. Mohammed 2’s ‘quick fix’ has kicked in overnight. I no longer look longingly at the electric socket for a quicker version of the ‘quick fix’.

It’s Easter Sunday in the Orthodox calendar. Resurrection seems appropriate.

I like my ‘sick room’.

Our ‘room’ is 3 spaces, side by side: a high platform for Dennis’ bed, a low, red-rugged, pillow-lined platform for eating and visiting, and an alcove, upholstered wall to wall with my bed, my ‘sick room’. A small shuttered window and a big double door swing open onto the courtyard, filling the room with light. It echoes and re-echoes across the Hajeera-scrubbed, Ramadan-ready, newly painted and shiny white walls, flashing on the red rugs and quilts, pink pillows, black and white baskets pinned to the walls, and colorful cup and saucers sets stacked in niches inset in all that shining white.

Microbes don’t belong here.

Ensconced on the visitor’s platform, perched precariously on a potentate’s pile of those puffy pink pillows, silky, smooth and threatening to avalanche every time I move,

I’m seduced from my microbe-focused wheezing through the gauzy curtain and the wooden doors into our courtyard, life-filled.

Hajeera loves plants, pots and pots of plants, smaller versions of the huge tree sprouting, captive, out of the cement of the smooth courtyard floor.

Our room, the big house, kitchen, living spaces for Hajeera, Semeera, and Khaleeja, a few bathrooms, and heavy metal doors (almost always open) are the 4 walls of the compound. The streets of Harar are the empty spaces around 1800 such compounds. Hajeera’s (really her sister, Rowda’s) guesthouse is unusual. There is only one family here. Most compounds are shared by several families, Moslem, Christian, Adare, Oromo, Somali, all mixed in, for generations.

The sun has returned. Ramadan cleaning can continue. Hajeera and Company have emptied clumps of loose cotton batting from dozens of pillows into huge drifts, filling the courtyard. A tiny man, jaunty in a blue-brimmed cap, thwump-thwumps the drifts with a beater, separating the clumps, and filling the air with cottony drizzle. ‘No good’, says Hajeera, shoos me inside and closes our door and window.

Then she says ‘Better? Thanks to Allah! Today, no Somaliland. Tomorrow, no Somaliland. Rest.’

My germs don’t have a chance against her.

The day unwinds. Khaleeja brings our hot and delicious fried breakfast pancakes, honey, and coffee. Bini stops by to tell me ‘Doc’, Dr. Tagal, will come tomorrow with all his gear to give me a proper exam. A sarong-ed neighbor wanders in to see if I’m better. Wondale calls from Lalibela to ask how we’re doing in Somaliland (which is where we should be by now). Midafternoon Khaleeja brings us tea just as Bini arrives with a package of goodies from his family’s Easter meal, special food that breaks the two month Lenten fast. The fluffy black and white Holstein cat visits with purr-fect wishes for a speedy recovery. I am sure it has nothing to do with Bini’s care package.

The food (especially the chopped spinach) is delicious, but, on an essentially empty stomach, and with my body still trying to figure out what to do with meds known to nudge the gastrointestinal system towards nausea and other, messier, side effects, I taste it all, but don’t eat much.

That turns out to be the right decision. Doc’s meds take a lesson from Hajeera and go for the no holds barred, clean sweep, and total flush approach...especially the flush part. I hope that uses up the page-long repertoire of possible side effects.

‘Medina’s wedding very beautiful’ says Hajeera as she stops after dark by to check on her patient. ‘Your face better’ confirms my self-diagnosis. She herself is in wedding-best, restrained elegance in head to toe folds of dusty rose, and I tell her so. ‘Somaliland, tomorrow. No.’ Maybe she just likes having us around, but it is good advice.

We’re in good hands.

MAY 2, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 8 – A DAY OF SMALL THINGS

The 7am Alarm-Cat is awfully loud. Surely, he’s not…yep, there he is, at the foot of the bed, locked into our room, with other things to do, and announcing same at the Not Pleased setting. I obey.

A tail swish of reproach, a muttered meow, and he fluffs out the door, sweeping past the torn plastic bag and pile of crumbs that started out last night as several slices of Dennis’ left-over pizza. It’s no longer of interest. Morning chores accomplished, minions dismissed, he licks his paws and stretches in the shade of the laundry hanging in the sun.

Dawn chanting from the Orthodox churches and the morning call to prayer from the mosque open the day, then go quiet. Muffled neighbor sounds seep over the walls. Khaleeja delivers breakfast and coffee.

Housebound by mistrust of the effects of my meds, I sit in the shady courtyard, now empty of drifts of pillow stuffing.

Above the fresh white walls of the courtyard, and beyond the UFO sized satellite dish, Paint Guy is slowly swabbing the neighbor’s higher wall---and himself---in the flamboyant Caribbean Sea/Swimming Pool Blue paint common here in the Old City. The color laps against the raucous coral of the next house, classic partners, but shies from the blue of the sky, not a good match, clashing even in nature.

Paint Guy and his guild mates have been busy. Harar’s alleys are rainbow canyons, colors whipped all out of nature’s sequence, random sweeps of Paint Guy’s swimming pool color, grass green, ripe fig purple, mustard, pale blue, yellow, deepest ocean amethyst, coral, olive, mahogany, wheat, alone or paired, tripled even, in stripes, chevrons, diamonds, circles, waves.

My chair is inside Hajeera’s walls, evenly split, battleship grey on the bottom, white above. The open metal door is a narrow window out onto passings through our lane, and in to the farangi in his sarong.

Neighbors nod as they fill their cups at Hajeera’s water taps. One collects her rug from the clothesline, rolls it and carries it off. Another rescues a curious chicken, squawking indignation at an adventure cut short. I don’t know if it’s water or white man that is the draw.

Alarm Cat sashays by, checks out the room for pizza, and tosses me a ‘I did order tuna, you know’ feline face, despairing that we'll ever be properly trained.

Khaleeja offers afternoon tea. Menge calls to see how we are.

Harar has the highest density of mosques in the world. At sunset the city throbs with the sound of scores of holy men calling to the faithful.

This is a day of small things.

It’s our 8th day in Harar and 42nd on the road. Microbes have detoured us to Hajeera’s courtyard and its quiet rhythm. This isn’t the adventure we planned, but the remaining 28 days on this road will be better for it…and our memories of Ethiopia layered, more pungent.

 

MAY 3, 3, 5, 6, 7 WE ARE IN HARAR TO SOMALILAND

See the blog SOMALILAND-2016

MAY 8, 2016: ETHIOPIA-HARAR DAY 9 - MIKI LOVES MEREW

MAY 8-HARAR DAY 9

Miki loves Merew. It’s scratched in the Love Wall with other hearts. It must be true, for a while at least. Other names are scratched out, love disheartened.

I’m wandering on my own, skirting around our favorite street, Machina Girgir, looking for new haunts. The Love Wall is deep in a quiet alley, a secret place, perhaps as hard to find as is a sweetheart in a place where many marriages are arranged.

I walk on, hoping Miki and Merew are still in one heart. I turn and twist, but always pop out of a narrow alley right into the whirring color of Girgir. Near the Recycle Market, just beyond the empty Spice Market, the whirlwind of Abdela sweeps me up into a shoulder bump. This guy is infectious, like peals of laughter. Biniyam says that if Abdela were not deaf, he’d be in charge of the town. We believe it.

On our balcony overhanging Feres Megela Square, the heart of Harar, I squeeze fresh lime onto my layered mix of pulsed green avocado, orange papaya, and white custard apple, then work down color by color, mining flavors.

Below, a Banana Lady weaves between huge bulldozers, owners of the third of the square that is now sand, and holes, and piles of rocks. She’s palm tree erect and giraffe graceful under the wide weight of a cluster of bananas hanging over the edges of her flat basket, balanced hands free on her head, as she glides over rocks and holes. She turns, reaches up, sweeps the basket off her head, and bends into a deep curtsey, smooth as a Swallow’s swoop. Bananas and Birr change hands. Hardly lighter, the basket levitates, and she moves on.

A band toots by on the back of a pick-up, deep red uniforms crossed by wide cream sashes. Peanut Lady crosses the square. Her lime green shawl peels away over a long skirt, brilliant oranges leading a bubbling pattern of hot colors. A young woman layers a hot pink scarf over a bright green blouse over a yellow tunic over a deep blue and carnelian floor length skirt. More combinations alien to western fashion ‘rules’, but essential here, sweep across the dust. Black polka dots on red over saffron. Zebra stripes over bronze and sea green, mixed, like seaweed in a tidal pool. Lilac over mustard over pink, all 3 wildly patterned.

Moslem women dress differently, wrap in solid color robes, head scarf and voluminous head to toe cover in one. They may be monochromatic, but they are exquisite in movement. A few are in black, but most are billowing, silky clouds of one color. They float, the movement alone holding my eyes. But the colors! They are so luscious I can taste them.

 One stunner does a variation—much appreciated---on the head to toe cover. She is in one color, yes, hot pink, but snugly form fit neck to toe around a very fit form. Her head scarf is the same color, pitted with tiny black dots, something sequinny along the edges. Her walk makes her message clear: I do not intend to be ignored. Message successful.

I get back home, just missing the rain, and just in time to say goodbye to Hanif and Khadija, off to Djibouti, a day before us. We’ll see them there, too, no doubt. If not, they’ve invited us to their house in the bush between Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya’s gorgeous beach-strewn coast on the Indian Ocean. There are those ‘cheap’ flights from Tampa to Nairobi, (and then on to Ethiopia, for our inevitable third trip). Color us ready.

Dennis has been chilling out. I toss him some roasted peanuts, crunch my own, and settle down on the pillows to watch the rain through the gauzy scrim in the doorway.

We awake hungry. Samosa Lady has disappeared from her spot beneath our uptown balcony place, and Famous Falafel Lady must be a legend, or has changed spots, because we never do find her. Even Fresh French Fry Lady from our alley has scooted, taking our own local Falafel Lady with her. The pickings are slim in the neighborhood.

Another meal of fateera and more fruity wonders at our downtown balcony do us just fine. Familiar now to Fateera Guy, he knows our order: two fateeras, three eggs each, everything but the tuna, pinch of salt and berbere on the side, upstairs when they’re ready. The eggs are cracked before we reach the stairs. (Later, we forget to pay him the $3, and he has to send someone to chase after us.)

Upstairs, soccer has replaced the befuddling but colorful and mildly entertaining Indian and Hispanic soap operas on the TV, so we lower our sights as we munch and watch the milling in the square beneath us.

We share coffee with the young Dutch couple from the guesthouse. She’s doing malaria research in the South. He’s just finished medical school and visiting her. We trade travel notes and give them Wondale’s number for Lalibela and Birhanu’s for a guide in the South. One of our hotel suggestions gets them a campsite they can afford amidst the trees at the Seven Olives Hotel in Lalibela.

I often wish I had some practical skill to offer to Ethiopia and the other places we travel. Maybe smoothing the road for people who do have something to offer will have to do. I sleep on that.

MAY 9, 2016: ETHIOPIA - HARAR TO DJIBOUTI – INTO THE HEAT

MAY 9-HARA TO DJIBOUTI

Abdela throws the money at Falafel Lady, grabs my arm and storms off, dragging us with him.

We've munched on 16 fresh fried falafels. The standard price all over the city is 2 falafel for 1 Birr (2.5 cents each), or 8 Birr for our 16. She wants 32 Birr, 4 times the regular price, and she’s backed up by a male customer. We know there are inescapable and inflated farangi prices for commodities such as tuk-tuk rides, and hotel rooms, and stuff in the market, anything calling for negotiation. But everybody knows what the price is for falafel, and no one bargains. We see strollers throw down a 1 Birr coin, grab 2 and munch away. Falafel Lady is out of line. The conversation gets heated and festooned with many repeats of ‘farangi’. We know what’s going on. Abdela will not have anything to do with it and is angry. Thus, our dramatic departure.

On our balcony we take pictures with the waiter we’ve talked with over every fateera and fruit drink.’ I’m going to be somebody and when I am I’ll show this photo of when I had to be a waiter’. He’s a recent graduate in Agricultural Engineering, but hasn’t found a job yet in the field.

For a 15-hour work day, 6 days a week, he earns 400 Birr, or $20 a month. The cheap room at the guesthouse costs that a night. We tip him well. A 20 Birr ($1) tip is almost a day’s wages for 15 hours of work.

So, our last day is a reality check for us farangi. Workers work for a month to earn what we can pay to sleep for a night. ‘Farangi prices’? I’ll try to avoid them, but if I can’t, anger, and affront are best left out of the deal.

It’s a day of goodbyes. Hajeera hugs us. We talk to Menge, Birhanu, and Biniyam, promising to be back within 2 years. Birhanu suggests what we’ll do. ‘Three days camping at Wenchi Crater’. Oh, yes! (I've already tweaked Kayak with the notion of also visiting Eritrea, the one remaining country on the Horn of Africa it's possible to visit.)

On the crowded mini bus to Dire Dawa, a baby, perhaps a few months old at most, stares at us wide-eyed over her father’s shoulder. Then she spits up all over daddy’s shirt. Daddy is very young, mid-twenties, I guess . Ten Birr notes pass from the back row over us. We take them and pass them to the Bus Guy, thinking it’s fare money. He shakes his head and points to the baby’s father. From behind a guy says ‘Mother died from cancer’. The passengers, strangers all, are taking up a collection for the baby. We add our ten Birr.

The baby starts to cry. A woman in the front row turns, reaches out of her head to toe robe and takes the baby, rocking it slowly into quiet. Daddy tries to clean his shirt. People to his right hand him a bottle of water. We pass him some wadded toilet paper. He wipes. This has all been silent, nods and human kindness the only languages needed.

Unfolding in Dire Dawa, we’re surrounded by tuk-tuk drivers wanting our fare. ‘Don’t agree to the first fare’ whispers one of the other passengers, then waves and walks off. We know the fare to the airport is 100 Birr, non-negotiable farangi price, and that’s the best we can do. Tuk-tuk Guy apologizes that he has to drop us off a short walk from the terminal. ‘Security’ he says and hops off to help us arrange our tiny backpacks on the push cart. It’s a nice gesture.

We lose our package of Biniyam’s ‘best berbere powder in Harar’ to security measures: no pepper on the plane. (Of course, thinks I, that’s a blinding irritant, weapons grade hot.)

Thirty minutes and 170 miles after take-off we drop onto the tarmac in Djibouti and we twenty or so passengers disembark into a blast furnace. At 6pm, Djibouti still glows red.

Passport control is the usual deadly event, light-years away from the handshaking, smiling and welcoming experience in Somaliland.

There are 4 of us in the ‘Passengers with visa’ line when the Passport Guy walks off. After about 10 minutes we figure out he has closed up shop, or perhaps melted on his way back.

Another PG eventually tells us to line up ‘anywhere’. We do. Our visas, all correct, and issued by the Djibouti Embassy in Washington, seem to confuse the assembled Passport Guys and Gals. Pages are turned, discussed. Phone calls ensue. Passports are waved as accents to the conversations. But, we get them back, stamped, from the sullen Passport Gal, walk through the wicket, wander around looking for the exit, get Djibouti Francs (176 to the dollar) from an ATM, find the exit door and enter Djibouti.

By now we are cooked beyond Medium Well, verging on Crispy, and definitely wilted.

The L’Heron Auberge is true to its promise of a free ride from the airport and a few minutes after the heat sucker punches us as we walk out the arrival doors, charming, helpful and colorfully muu-muu-ed Felicity welcomes us to the fan-cooled lobby of the hotel and suggests that while they replace a double bed with twins, we order in a pizza. Huh? Pizza? Delivered? Yes, to both. And it’s delicious.

This is an expensive city. Our 12-inch pizza costs what it would in the USA. High prices here are due to the presence of the huge foreign military, aid, and diplomatic communities. Farangi financing does not run to bargaining, and these farangi are loaded. And demanding. That’s also why the pizza is good and gets delivered anywhere in the city.

Djibouti is famous for seafood. It had better be very, very, very good.

MAY 10-11-12-13 SEE TRAVEL BLOGS-DJIBOUTI

MAY 28-NAIROBI DAY 1

MAY 28-NAIROBI DAY 1

‘Marry me. I can make you very comfortable’.

The laughing buxom lady winks and bounces her bountiful bosomy assets, world-class Dolly parts for sure. We’re in Nairobi’s outdoors weekend crafts market, and she is a charming and crafty flirt… anything to make a deal.

Bosom Lady’s other offerings (kitenge cloth re-thought---beautifully--- as pants and tunics) are more tempting, but we thank her. She chuckles, and bounces a farewell, as we move on. She’s a very pretty woman.

Some of the other goodies spread on tarps or hanging from makeshift frames are hand-crafted, genuinely of, and from, African hands, lovely. Many are shoddy, wham, bam thank you ma’am, pointlessly banal, artless, muzungu tourist schlock, smelling of Chinese mass production.

It’s a colorful, but difficult, world, this market. We browse, not serious buyers. For many, perhaps all, of the sellers it’s a serious place, a lifeline. The prices start stratospheric (and, why not?), can be bargained down to earth (if need be), though not too close to sea-level for muzungu (who have so much money they can fly across the world to get here). Most of the shoppers are locals. They know the ropes to pull the prices lower still.

Many people pay more than they should, rarely more than makes them happy. The sellers know their bottom price. A sale is a market mambo, a dance of the desire of the buyer and the need of the seller, the former cajoled into the dance by a tempting array, an engaging spiel, or bouncing boobies.

Determined to remain wall flowers at this dance, we eventually succumb, perhaps a bit left-footed. The damage is ten dollars, not quite rock bottom, perhaps, but acceptable to us, welcomed by the three women we danced with. Our trophies are two squishable soft toilet paper roll sized baskets, decorated with a few rows of Maasai beads, one beaded eyeglass lanyard, and yet another small fabric bag for my collection, a patchwork of pieces of kitenge cloth, leftovers in a useful, honest, and appreciated, reincarnation. Maybe it will replace my over-experienced passport holder (its zipper no longer cooperative). For this trip, anyway.

Dinner is a dozen tender chunks of teriyaki chicken with spicy fried noodles and veggies, more meat than we’ve eaten in our 68 days on the road. We wash it down with pineapple-mint juice, swampy green, but tasty, tasty, tasty.

Dined, if not wined, we pass once again under the smile of the welcoming security guard in front of the barrier that separates the hotel from the street, empty our pockets for the friendly guards at the door, get beep-beep scanned by one more happy, uniformed security guy, and enter the hotel.

I flopped into bed at about 03:00am this morning after the flight from Rwanda and was awake at 07:00. Coma begins to jelly my legs by 8pm.

Bed.

MAY 29-NAIROBI DAY 2 AND OUR LAST DAY IN AFRICA

MAY 29-NAIROBI DAY 2 AND OUR LAST DAY IN AFRICA

Where do you come from?

What is your name?

Do you want a safari?

How long will you be in Kenya?

Take my card.

Come to my shop.

I give you good price.

The Nairobi street routines don’t vary much. And they pop out of nowhere every few feet. A polite answer or smile, or nod, is agreement to continue the conversation, a mistake if we want any peace on our walk. Not reacting doesn’t work: ‘Why you don’t like to speak to Africans.’

I hit upon an awful solution. I place my hand on my ear and indicate I can’t hear. That gets me an expression of sympathy, a smile, a wave, and some relief. A few instant street ‘friends’ whip out a pad and pen, ever at the ready. That gets them a laugh. But I walk on alone.

I apologize to all who are genuinely hearing challenged.

I can't resist another pass through the Maasai Market. Once again, I am seduced into the market mambo and dance away with beaded, camel leather sandals, destined to walk the walls of the guest room, not the streets, and, inevitably, another bag, both bought for half the original asking price, so below stratospheric, and perhaps not too far above sea-level.

Life is better in Kenya than in many places in Africa. Muzungu flock here for the herds of large mammals. We are a source of income, famously voracious for services. But, we have to be tapped, and the competition is tough. I have to keep that in focus. And, as is true all over Africa, genial affability is the rule.

Nairobi is notoriously chaotic. Security is tight for a reason. Armed guards scan luggage and bodies every time we enter the hotel. The first level of guards stands at the street. He tells us not to walk to the right. It doesn’t look any different from what we see down to the left, but we do turn left and head for a late breakfast

It’s Sunday and the streets are quiet. Charity, the waitress at our coffee shop, delivers fresh mango juice and delicious cappuccino to both of us, 2 fried eggs to me, and an omelet with toast to Dennis. 1200 Shillings is $12. The other customer chows down on her ‘African Breakfast Special’, lots of carbos, and red beans that smell delicious. The young and smiling owner asks if we like the coffee. We do. He beams.

Nairobi eaters are a varied bunch, with eclectic tastes. On this street, grazers can and do chomp on pizza, fast food chicken, (local or KFC), ‘Japan Teriyaki’, traditional food, and top them with gummy ice cream extravaganzas from Coldstone Creamery, or go healthful with fresh fruit juices (mango, passion fruit, pineapple, mint, or a mix) available at any of them. The local physiques, tending towards the robust and ‘full figured’, suggest business is good.

Traditional dress is rare among the women, tights and short skirts not. Alas. Western dress is expensive for both sexes, but especially for women. Their mothers, aunties, and grannies can wrap head to foot in graceful meters of cloth, both beautiful and affordable. Nairobi’s sophisticates dress in bits and pieces, all expensive. Style costs, fashions change, wardrobes become ‘so last year’. And not every figure is enhanced in tightness.

I’m not sorry that 1.5 days in Nairobi is our last image of Africa. It reminds us of how extraordinary the preceding 66 days have been.

We’re already planning our return.

We're home

Folks,

Yes, we're home.

Last night at some time after 11, but not quite midnight, Roger and Greg dropped us home. It had been over 30 hours since we got on the plane in Nairobi and 43 or since we woke up there on May 29.

Thanks for your patience with my daily blabs, er, uh, blogs, yes blogs.

If plans work out there may be more from Africa at the end of the year. It's a big continent, we've only been to 15 of the 50+, and we want to see a few more before our Sell by Date. Our clock is ticking....