The Magical Dysentery Tour
Trip Start
Apr 08, 2003
1
7
14
Trip End
Aug 2003
Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia
Sunday, May 11, 2003
This is what happened instead...
I grabbed a cab to le Gare Station at the bottom of Churchill Road in full anticipation of my train journey. I had crackers, sardines, nuts and plenty of water in readiness for the 16 hour journey.
I was a bit hungover from the night before. I met an American guy named Adam and went out drinking in the local bars with him.
He's been living in Uganda for the past year doing his PHD on Western Interference in the civil war between the government and the LRA. Interesting stuff and you can imagine the conversation got pretty lively after a few too many cheap beers. It also kept my theory going that in a place like Ethiopia, everyone you meet travelling has a very interesting story.
The bars are worth a mention as well.
A bar here means a place where the men come to drink and pick up prostitutes. The only women in the places are bar girls and they do their best to attach themselves to Westerners. Very, very dodgey.
We did discover though that if you buy the bar girls some drinks you can get whatever music you want put on. So by the early hours we had the seedy little dive next to the Taitu jumping to Bob Marley then did a runner so the dodgey girls wouldn't follow us and try to ply their trade.
So, back to the story. I arrived at le Gare to find that there was no train.
"What do you mean there's no train? I was here yesterday and the man upstairs said there was a train at 2pm."
"No train."
"What!!??!!??"
I found my point of contact at the train station and quizzed him.
Turns out that all passenger trains are cancelled. They're using the locomotives to ship aid from Djibouti port to Dire Dawe. I talked to an old Ethiopian man at the bar of the hotel later and he said they are suffering from a shortage of locomotives. Many of them got blown up during the civil war and they're so old you can't buy them anymore and new train engines won't run on the present lines.
Which means no train ride for me. Bummer.
I decided to spend a lazy afternoon at the Taitu before catching a bus direct to Harar in the morning (another 4am start).There I met 2 American guys, Jayjay and Jim, who had just finished guiding a white water rafting expedition down the Awash River (they had some hairy stories about the local Afar tribesmen!!) and an Englishman, Sebastian, on holiday from his job as a foreign affairs reporter on the Evening Standard. More interesting characters and also the largest congregation of faranji tourists I'd seen in Ethiopia since I left Alicia, Arnold and Mark.
I was bracing myself for the worst when I arrived at the Addis Ababa bus station in the morning. I hadn't caught a bus from there before and I thought the size would accentuate the craziness of the bus catching ritual.
Compared to some of the places down south it was civil and efficient. By 6am we were on our way to Harar.
Harar is an ancient Muslim city in the east of Ethiopia. Its usually been independant but every so often fell under the control of the Christian Emperors of highland Ethiopia.
Its trade importance as a conduit to the Somali coast and the Red Sea has waned now but its still thriving away as a mixing point for dozens of ethnic groups and cultures.
Its also where one of my heroes, Sir Richard Burton (not the actor), was the first Westerner to visit and get back alive.
The bus ride was 11 hours and passed through some spectacular scenery.
First we dropped down into the Afar lowlands around Awash. Here you see camels, as opposed to donkeys and horses, accompanied by Afar tribesman with their ever present AK-47 over their shoulder, barrel in hand. They wear their guns like jewelry and are a status symbol more than anything else.
We then climbed into the Chercher mountain range. The road ran along ridges bordering huge valley basins, every inch of which was seperated into plots of terraced farming. Its cool and fertile up there and crops grow in abundance.
Here I began noticing something which was going to occupy my thoughts for the next few days.
I noticed the crops seemed to be split between corn and chat (the drug which everyone chews here and I tried in Dinsho). The ratio was about 1 field of corn to 2 fields of chat.
As we progressed the ratio became higher and higher. 1 to 4, 1 to 10, 1 to 20 until we dropped down to the area directly around Harar where all the arable land was given over to chat cultivation.
Harar itself was much more tropical than I expected considering its only 2 hours bus ride from the Ogaden desert, the Ethiopian Somali region. It was also smaller than I had pictured.
The next morning I went with one of the guys from the hotel, Grima (as in Wormtongue from LOTR), for a walk around the old city.
The old city is a walled complex maybe 2km in diameter which dates back about 800 years or so. The streets are narrow, winding alleys lined with running open sewers and spread with hundreds of tiny mosques and Islamic shrines.
It was interesting and Grima and I spent about 4 hours exploring the back alleys and little niches hidden away.
I also noticed that everyone was chewing the chat.
I mean everyone. The naked beggar lying in his own filth on the side of the street is munching away, old women with piles of it for sale are chewing, business men, shoppers, workers. Even the goats were cleaning off any leaves left on discarded branches.
Chat in Harar is a city wide addiction.
We bumped into Grima's cousin on one of the streets and she invited us to her house to, not surprisingly, chew chat.
When in Rome...
The cousins (there was another at the house) were great. They laid out the full Ethiopian coffee and chat ceremony for me.This included washing, roasting, crushing and slow boiling the coffee, mixed with shots of araki, spicy tea and snacks at other times. All the while munching away like a bovine on the foul tasting drug.
We stayed there for 6 hours until dark. Now it was time to see one of the cool things about Harar - the hyaenas.
Hararis have a strange relationship with the hyaenas. Supposedly it goes back centuries.
The hyaenas stroll into town every night and scavenge in the rubbish ditches for whatever scraps they can find. They don't harm people, even street people sleeping rough.
There is also a tradition of feeding the hyaenas.
Every night several different guys go out with a bucket of off cuts and calls out the hyaenas, each by its own name.
After a while you see movement at the edge of the street light and suddenly a hyaena appears. Then another, then another, keeping spread out and watchful of their surroundings.
They're pretty amazing animals. Their back legs are thin and short while their front are strong and heavily muscled. Their heads and necks are like a wrestlers and their eyes crazed and feverish. And their cackle is something which makes the hair on the back of your head rise up.
They walk with a silent lope which first reminded me of a person walking on their hands and knees.
Derrachio, the hyaena man, sat down and proceeded to feed each of them by hand. He'd hold out an ear or a nose and a hyaena would politely shoot forward and snatch it from his fingers.
It was pretty cool.
I remembered the Hemmingway had wrote that the smell of death is the smell of a hyaena's breath. I'd always wondered what it would be like but hadn't thought of a way to find out short of being eaten by one.
But then I was invited to have a go feeding. Emboldened by the chat probably more than anything else I sat down and handed out the bits of leathery meat, inhaling curiously everytime one of the diners snapped forward inches from my fingers.
If you're wondering what it smelt like, I can't really explain. It didn't surprise me though. It was very subtle and pervasive.
I also quizzed them on local folk tales about the hyaenas. There were some good ones: one about the Afar tribesman eating a special herb which would turn you into hyaena for a night and the instances of men sleeping with an exotic woman stranger and then her turning into a hyaena while he slept and running away (succubi!).
I got back to the hotel at 9pm after an excellent and exhausting day. I grabbed a beer from the bar and settled back into my room to listen to music until the chat wore off and I drifted into oblivion.
I hardly slept that night and woke feeling terrible.
"Its just the beaucoup amount of chat you munched that day before. I'll sleep in and get up this afternoon," I thought.
Around 8pm Grima came and knocked on my door. He knew chat sometimes wiped out faranjis but by the afternoon they usually recovered. It was unusual for me to be still hibernating.
I'd been lying there in a fever all day, knocking back painkillers and feeling sorry for myself. Grima wanted to take me to a clinic to get checked out but I insisted on waiting to see if it would pass by morning.
It didn't and so we caught a taxi to a nearby local clinic. They took a series of blood tests and I returned later that afternoon to see a doctor.
My tests had come back with positive for Typhoid Fever, a particularly nasty gut infection.
I straight away thought about Graeme in Cairo in 2000, his run in with it and the Linda Blair-like vomitting displays. I'd luckily caught it early.
Back in the hotel and the full range of blood tests, doctor's consultation and medicine had come to $10US. The cheapness of the medical care was at least a small consolation.
I lay in my room sweating and miserable for 4 more days enduring waves of insomnia, vomitting and diahorrea. In the 5 days I was ill I ate a handful of oranges and 2 small bowls of spaghetti.
The Tewodros hotel staff were stars, especially Grima. They continully checked up on me, fetched oranges and medicine if I needed it and brought water for washing since there was a water shortage while I was there.
By the 5th day I was feeling much better and decided I needed to get back to Addis. I was going a bit stir crazy and was sick of the sight of my hotel room ceiling.
I purchased a bus ticket and that afternoon I felt strong enough to go for a walk.
Grima knew I was interested in the hyaenas so we strolled out to their caves on the edge of town. A thunderstorm was approaching the city so the horizon was bruised and lit up by forks of light.
We walked through a garden (chat plantation of course) that was incredibly lush, like a Garden of Eden, and as we approached a small rocky outcrop the hyaenas started appearing near us, passing suspiciously 2-3 meters away.
About a dozen pups scattered as we arrived and I noticed several big males making a cordon around us, keeping their distance but watching us to protect the rest of their family.
After 5 days of lying down with fever it was pretty exhilirating. But exhausting as well. I've lost all my fitness and the walk back to the hotel killed me.
I got back to Addis Ababa last night after a gruelling 12 return trip which included getting off the bus 5 times so the army could search it for smuggled contraband from Somalia.
I had a lot of time to think when I was sick in Harar and there was one thing that really made me angry. The prevalent use of chat.
Three seperate incidents helped define my feelings.
The first was meeting a Somali woman sitting down under a tree in the old city. It was 9am and already she was high. She was sitting there clapping her hands singing nonsense words to herself.
She saw me and invited us to sit. While we did so she explained, through Grima translating, that she liked George Bush because he gave them food.
I couldn't help but think that if Dubya saw that his food aid was allowing her to sit all day and get caned instead of working then he would stop sending it pretty fast.
The second incident was sitting in the bar watching CNN World Report when a piece about Ethiopia came on. It was set in Eastern Hararge, where I was, and was showing the aid distribution efforts of the east of Harar.
I was watching the scenes of trucks piled with wheat, emaciated locals and well-meaning Westerners in 4WDs and couldn't help but remember the fields after fields after fields of chat I had passed on the way there.
A few hours away people are starving but here growing and getting wasted on drugs is more important than supplying food to your fellow countryman. If the Chercher mountain region was used to grow food instead of narcotics the Ethiopian government would probably be able to feed at least the people of this region in time of drought.
The final incident was while we watched the hyaenas coming out of their caves. The rain had started and Grima and I were talking about chat.
He estimated about 90% of Harar chewed chat every day.
Conversation turned to the rains which had started and were so desperately needed by the people in the lowlands who had been on TV.
"People are very happy the rain has come."
"Why? Because they can grow some food now?"
"No, because we can grow much chat. Prices will be very cheap."
I was pretty stunned.
"You know chat is having a bad effect on this part of Ethiopia."
"Yes, you are right. It is making us a very poor country."
And its the same in Djibouti, Somalia and some parts of the Arabian penninsula. Everybody is just too damned wasted to care.
Anyways, I'll get off my soap box and wrap it up. The people here at the internet cafe love me because everytime I come to Addis I spend a fortune writing these posts.
I'm hanging here for a few days to recover my strength and to get checked by the doctor again. After that I'm heading east into the torrid lowlands of Gambella near the Sudanese border.
Next post in about 7-10 days.
PS: Email update - I finally got into my hushmail account (woohoo!). I tried to reply to as many emails as possible but couldn't do them all as it would bankrupt me. Always great to hear how everyone is doing though even if I can't write back.
