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Provided By: Muslim Harji
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Travel Log - From Cairo to
Cape Town
UPDATE FROM ADDIS 20 Feb. 2006
Dear friends and family,
After a long delay, we finally have the opportunity to send you a quick update. We have reached Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, and to our horror, even this large metropolitan city is still functioning only on DIAL-UP! I don't think we realize how spoiled we are in North America until you come back to the basics and are only working at 50Kb/s.... it pretty much takes all of my patience to sit and wait while pages load. I would have written earlier but the thought of wasting so much time in an Internet cafe while there are so many other exciting things to do was really not too appealing.
So here we are in Ethiopia, a land so completely different from the Sudan it is unbelievable. A couple of members of the Tour D'Afrique group left the rest of the bikers early to spend some extra time in Addis Ababa. I think I have just reached a point when sitting on a bike is the last thing I want to do. I know the feeling will pass, especially after some R & R in a nice city. Ethiopia is really a beautiful country, not at all what I expected. I think before coming here, I just pictured a country ravaged by war and famine, but Ethiopia is so alive and so beautiful. The places we have seen look like what I pictured Africa to look like in my dreams - rolling hills, misty mornings, and lush, green vegetation. Of course, interspersed with all this beauty are war tanks and other machines that have been left behind. We found out that the tanks were left here by Mussolini's army when they tried to attack Ethiopia in the late 1930s. Ethiopia, in fact, boasts that, of all the countries in Africa, it is one of the few that were never really colonized by foreigners. When Mussolini came, his army was very quickly thrown out on their backsides. He came with something like 60,000 men and for the first few days, nothing happened and the Italians progressed into the heart of the country. Then, overnight, almost 200,000 Ethiopians came out of the wood work and pushed them back out. The only remnants of the Italians still in this country are the burned-put tanks and, to my great delight, delicious Italian food everywhere we go - pizza, pasta, and pastries!
We biked through the Blue Nile Gorge yesterday, an amazing but scary experience. The gorge is 18 kms of straight downhill biking and then straight 22kms uphill on the other side. In previous years, this whole gorge was paved and I think that would have made the experience much more enjoyable, but the pavement was recently torn out so everything was loose rock, gravel and (of course) more corrugation. The ride down into the gorge was so steep that I didn't pedal more than 20 strokes for the entire 18 kms down. I also didn't take my hands off my brakes! My brake pads are definitely completely worn out and will need to be changed before we hit the Kenyan border soon. It was really a scary experience and several times, I was almost thrown off my bike. By the time I was at the bottom, I was just so exhausted that we hopped onto the TDA bus instead of trying to pedal 22 kms straight up a rock face. The Blue Nile Gorge is sort of like the Grand Canyon of Africa, to help you all get some sort of idea about what we experienced, and at the bottom, we crossed a short bridge to the other side of the Blue Nile. Even on a bus, the ride up the gorge was frightening. The roads are incredibly narrow and steep and if I looked out the window, I was looking down a vertical drop of more than a kilometer. I really have a lot of respect for the people who pedaled up the gorge, but I know that there is no way I could have done it. All I have to say is thank God that there was a bus there to help us out.
My feelings so far about Ethiopia are still quite mixed. People here are a lot more aggressive than in the Sudan, especially the children. We have had many kids throw stones and other stuff at us, and many of them just yell "You! You! You! Give Money!" or "Give pen!" Most of the children have no idea what "You!" even means but they imitate the older kids who yell that at us. Besides that, we constantly have to watch out for our belongings because many people try to steal our things. One girl had her camera stolen the other day, and one very common ploy is while you are struggling to pedal up a hill (of which there are MANY), kids will offer to help push you up. While they are talking to you or pushing you up, their buddies are pulling things out of your backpacks. If that wasn't enough, some kids chase us and try to poke sticks through our bike spokes or hit you with their shepherding sticks. And then, to top it off, there are the rabid dogs that chase after us, growling and baring their teeth. All in all, I find biking in Ethiopia really very tough. Biking here is mostly uphill and very tiring on the knees. Every day, we finish, exhausted. If the entire country was like this, I would have thrown up my hands and stopped, but we have also had some really nice experiences here. In the small northern town of Gondar, we met some very nice Indian people working with the UN and teaching at the local university. Shekhar Sahib and his family are here from India under a contract to teach business and tourism to local Ethiopian students. After hearing about what we were doing, and without knowing the slightest thing about us, he very generously invited us to his home for dinner. Some real Indian cooking (with real Indian spices and my favorite, Basmati Rice!) was really wonderful and hit the spot. There are surprisingly many Indians in Ethiopia, all here under the auspices of the UNDP teaching everything from computer programming to economics and business to engineering. In fact, according to many of the Indians we have talked to, the UNDP will only hire Indian profs because the country is just booming and advancing at a rapid pace.
After Gondar, we biked to the booming town of Bahir Dar, where on our rest day, we took a beautiful boat ride on Lake Tana to see the source of the Nile River and many island monasteries. The Orthodox churches in Ethiopia are stunning in their simplicity and beauty. In small, circular straw and mud huts (called tukuls), we found intricately painted and vividly colored murals of the entire history of Christianity according to the bible. They have depicted everything from the Original Sin to Jesus' Last meal and Crucifixion to the lives and deaths of the Apostles. These monasteries date back to the 1300s and although much restoration has taken place, are still in excellent condition. Some documents that we were shown are originals and are so well preserved that they still look like they were recently written. The one thing that was a bit odd was that there isn't the same care and attention given to these artifacts as we would expect. One bible written in Amharic on velum in the 1300s was being manhandled and exposed to the sun as if it was just a random pamphlet. You would expect that these invaluable pieces of their history would be better maintained and cared for with more attention but oh well...
In Bahir Dar, I also had a heart-warming experience with a young Ethiopian girl who invited me into her home and let me participate in a traditional coffee ceremony. I got to see a woman wash the coffee grains, roast them over fire and incense, grind them and then heat them with water. Ethiopia really has some of the most delicious coffee I have ever tasted in my life and I’m making sure to take full advantage of it while I can.
I'm not sure how many more days we have in Ethiopia but I think that we will be hitting the Kenyan border quite soon. This section of the Tour D'Afrique has been one of the hardest, by far, but every day brings a new challenge. If I look back to where we started a little over a month ago, I can't believe where we are and what we have seen and done. The funny thing is that many of our group members and I have talked about how when we finish here, we are going to need REAL vacations (Mount A girls, keep that in mind!)! As a very wise person (my mother) once said to me, even after the darkest days, the sun comes out. I think that even after all these grueling days and really difficult terrain, it will get easier and better and we will have these days under our belts. For the next two days, we are just going to relax and enjoy our well-deserved time off in Addis Ababa. There are some excellent places to eat, get massages, and enjoy natural hot springs, so we are going to take advantage of those. If I get another chance soon, internet permitting, I will try to write again!
Take care and lots of love to all,
Ayesha and Muslim
Ethiopian Customs and Immigration Office
“I pictured Africa to look like in my dreams - rolling
hills, misty mornings, and lush, green vegetation. Of course, interspersed with
all this beauty are war tanks and other machines that have been left behind. We
found out that Mussolini’s army left the tanks here, when they tried to attack
Ethiopia in the late 1930s. Ethiopia, in fact, boasts that, of all the countries
in Africa, it is one of the few that were never really colonized by foreigners.”
A typical Classroom in Rural Ethiopia
In the small northern town of Gondar, we met some very
nice Indian people working with the UN and teaching at the local university.
Shekhar Sahib and his family are here from India under a contract to teach
business and tourism to local Ethiopian students. After hearing about what we
were doing, and without knowing the slightest thing about us, he very generously
invited us to his home for dinner. Some real Indian cooking (with real Indian
spices and my favorite, Basmati Rice!) was really wonderful and hit the spot.
After Gondar, we biked to the booming town of Bahir Dar, where on our rest day, we took a beautiful boat ride on Lake Tana to see the source of the Nile River
“One bible written in Amharic on velum in the 1300s was being manhandled and exposed to the sun as if it was just a random pamphlet. You would expect that these invaluable pieces of their history would be better maintained and cared for with more attention but oh well...”
“We biked through the Blue Nile Gorge yesterday, an amazing but scary experience. The gorge is 18 kms of straight downhill biking and then straight 22kms uphill on the other side. The ride down into the gorge was so steep that I didn't pedal more than 20 strokes for the entire 18 kms down. I also didn't take my hands off my brakes! My brake pads are definitely completely worn out and will need to be changed before we hit the Kenyan border soon. It was really a scary experience and several times, I was almost thrown off my bike. The Blue Nile Gorge is sort of like the Grand Canyon of Africa,”
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