Thurs 6 Feb 2014 (29 Tir 2006) to Harar

Thurs 6 Feb 2014 (29 Tir 2006) to Harar ANOTHER early morning bus. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh. We know the routine by now - early showers; no breakfast; travel by taxi in the dark to Meskel Square; clothe the backpacks in their Ospreys, weigh them and see them get loaded beneath the bus; climb into our assigned seats. The Selam Bus gods have smiled upon us: we have seats 1 and 2 (right behind the driver), with fine visibility out the front and side windows. More of the passengers on this trip are wearing Islamic dress than on previous trips. Our driver is a voluble character with a bit of a heavy foot. We speed out of Addis to the south. He is either arguing or having a loud joshing conversation with the other bus personnel. Carol is a little bit concerned about his style. Somewhere south of town, we pick up the secondary driver, a guy wearing a "Texas Tech Mom" tee shirt. We pass Debre Zeit [Bishoftu in Oromo] and (with a jog northeastward) Nazaret [Adama in Oromo], both substantial towns (9th and 3rd largest in Ethiopia, respectively). We are entering Ethiopian wetlands, an area of lower elevation studded with crater lakes and noted for its birdlife. Carol spots a pair of blue herons or storks perched in a tree. Cattle graze near the water and the agriculture is more varied. As the day warms up the driver removes his cap. He is no impetuous youth, but a grizzled driver intent on bringing in his run. Rather endearingly, he waves at young awestruck kids standing on the side of the road (O, to be a long-distance bus driver). At some point he lowers his front blinds; our view is more limited but not cut off. Passengers must be entertained. Most buses play tapes, with the musical selections following the drivers' tastes. Selam and (probably) Sky buses show videotapes: Ethiopian films, mostly Amharic rom-com flicks. Certain popular actors seem to show up again and again, so without understanding the action it becomes hard to separate one plot from another. The stories also favor threesomes: 3 hapless male students looking for love or 3 buddies stumbling across a fortune in drug money and staying one step ahead of the cons and the cops. One of today's films features 3 very middle-class female college students who drive off on an adventure in the tribal areas of southern Ethiopia. Predictably, their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Each girl runs off in a different direction: one injures her leg, another falls into the clutches of bandits, and the other is found by a face-painted tribesman. In the end, the lost are found, and the last heroine decides to abandon big city life for the bare-chested jungle man she loves. Hey, it passes time on the long drive. As does the Selam bus specialty: a sweet cornbread served up with our bottled water. We are now in Oromo. Ethiopia has a number of regions - a map we saw at a school in Axum shows 8 regions, plus 3 autonomous areas (Addis, Dire Dawa, Harar). It has 85 languages, so languages do not correspond one-to-one with regions. Anyway, we are traveling to each of the autonomous areas, and 4 or 5 of the regions. We were in Amhara (north central), Tigre (far north), Afar (northeast desert), and Oromo (center and south center). The Somali region is to the far east and southeast - we sort of touch it. The other three are in the west and southwest. We aren't going there, and most tourists don't either. For whatever it is worth, most tourists don't go to Somali or Afar either. Anyway, Oromo is really important. It includes something like 35% of the Ethiopian population. It has its own language, Oromifa, which is not really close to Amharic. It has its own liberation movement, the Oromo Liberation Front (Adda Bilisummaa Oromoo). Its "capital" is now in Addis. In the early 2000s the federal government temporarily moved it to Adama, but after protests it was moved back. As you drive through Adama and all of the towns on this part of our trip, each sign is in several languages: Oromifa, English, and Amharic, with Oromifa usually on top. Oromifa, unlike Amharic or Tigrina, is written in Roman script, but with a hitch - accented letters are doubled. So "Hotel," which is "Otel" in Amharic script, is "Hoteela" in Oromifa. It is just different. The numbers are entirely different from Amharic. The word for toilet is entirely different. The word for house in Amharic is "bet," as in "bank bet," "post bet," "shent bet (toilet)," "buna bet (coffee bar). The word for house in Oromifa is "mana" as is "mana bunna," "mana fincaanii (toilet)," etc. The Bradt guide adds, "In theory, the consonants are doubled to denote a stress...while doubled vowels denote that the sound of that vowel should be longer than a single vowel. In practice...one signpost in any given town might read 'hotela', another 'hootteellaa', and others different variants". Have we driven into a new country? Hard to say, but we are seeing fewer women with netela shawls and more with covered hair and veils. About 4 hours into the trip, we are near Awash. Awash National Park is here. It includes the Awash River, which drains along the Rift Valley to the northeast. In the park, there is a (supposedly) very nice set of falls along the Awash River. There is also a 3-4 hour drive through the park, with the possibility of seeing some interesting wildlife (oryx, kudu, dik-dik: the gamut of Scrabble words). We had tried to arrange a park tour through some Addis tour operators, but they wanted to sell us much more than we wanted to buy. So on this day, we look at the park as we ride through, imagining that we might have spent a half day here under better circumstances. Past Awash we turn right, and start climbing out of the Rift Valley onto a long east-west ridge that will eventually lead us into Harar. We start getting views and exposure. We also see something new: areas that have not been denuded of trees. Our bus driver has not made a side-of-the-road stop for passengers so far. About noon, it is time for lunch. We pull into the small town of Hirne. There are several cafeterias by the bus depot. We are now getting savvy. We rush to sit down. We see the waitress serving another table two bowls of goat soup, kikil. We say "we'll have two of those". The soup comes fairly quickly (after all, we know by now not to order things that have preparation time). It is delicious! Some of the best of the whole trip: meaty, full of leg bones with marrow and cuts with cartilage to give the broth body. We eat quickly, dipping injera into the soup. We also order two coffees (the coffee is already prepared, but they foam it on the cappuccino foamer before they serve it) and drink them down. Even with restroom visits, we are back on the bus in plenty of time. GOAT 101: ....Ounce-for-ounce, goat meat has one-third the calories of beef. If you want to compare it to chicken, goat has about 40 to 45 percent of the calories. The fat content in goat is also lower, with about two-and-a-half grams of fat per ounce. That compares very well with beef's almost eight grams and chicken's just-over-six grams. And, in terms of saturated fats, goat has just less than one gram of them, compared to three grams in beef and just-under-two grams in chicken. .... On the bus, someone says we are almost there, but it turns out we have 3 - 3 1/2 hours left of travel. It is pretty travel though, some of the nicest of our trip. Nice ridge views, nice treeline vistas. Our bus has been well-provisioned with water bottles, so we drink freely and don't become as parched as on some previous rides. Eventually, we reach a tee intersection in the road. The Dire Dawa Selam Bus, which has been playing tag with us all day, turns left here, and the Harar Selam Bus, our bus, turns right. A few passengers who couldn't get their tickets on their desired bus switch here, and we are less than 30 km from our destination. Ethiopian schoolchildren (especially girls) wear school uniforms, which may run the gamut from a specially-colored vest or middy top to an entire monotone dress and matching hat. As we approach the more-developed area, we see younger students in magenta and teens in vivid dark blue. A pretty sight. We reach Harar a little after 4 PM. Harar, a Muslim citadel rich in history, (at least as far back as 965 CE) is famous for its old walled city (Jugal), which is approximately only one square kilometer in size. The walled city has 22000 residents and 82 mosques. (There are 17 more just outside the walled city, getting you up to 99, the number of names of Allah in Islam.) It is one of the holiest places in Islam - some of the locals say the fourth holiest, after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, but that is probably disputed by anyone outside Ethiopia. We've already picked out a hotel just outside the walled city that is listed in our guidebook. As we are getting off the bus we are met by a young tout. Now invariably we ignore touts, but this young man with good English wants to take us to the Rowda Cultural Guesthouse, one of two traditional Adare houses inside the walled city now welcoming overnight visitors. Both guesthouses are very highly rated by both of our guidebooks. In truth, we would have tried to stay in one on our own, but for the fact that the guesthouses are hard to find and have only 9 rooms between them. So when he says there is a room available tonight at the Rowda, and it is only 350 birr ($19 US) breakfast included, we say: "Lead us on." He places a call on his cell phone to notify the guesthouse. We don our backpacks. This nice guy wants to carry Carol's backpack himself, but she beats him to it. Several blocks further down the street, our guide walks us through a stone gate into the Jugal. He wants to show us a bit of the walled city, but he is also concerned that we might be fatigued by walking with our backpacks. We see some of the main commercial street. Then he leads us down an alleyway with walls painted in varied colors, in which individual properties have solid metal gates for doors. He knocks at one doorway. A woman lets us in. There is a main courtyard surrounded by several closed rooms. The woman lets us in through one wooden door. Within, there is a raised sitting area covered with rugs and pillows. A windowed alcove next to it contains a double bed with mosquito net hanging above. The sitting area is decorated with all kinds of small craft wall hangings. It is totally different from any place we've stayed at so far. We are asked to shed our shoes when in our room. OK. There are 2 bathroom areas off the courtyard to either side of our room. The one to our right has a tub; the one to our left has an open shower; both have a toilet and sink. So we will have to step out to use the facilities. OK. There is a nice-size water tank on one rooftop (reassuring in a town with perennial water supply issues) and the sink has water that is warm enough to promise a good shower. The young man who brought us to the guesthouse wants to serve as our Harar guide tomorrow. We plan to see the sights on our own, but we do want someone to take us out tonight to the hyena feeding site (more on that later). For a fee of 100 birr he will return at 7 PM for our evening jaunt. We do a quick unpacking and strike a deal with the proprietress for several days' worth of Mike's laundry and a few of Carol's items to be washed in the deep outdoor sink and hung to dry in the courtyard. The cost is 65 birr ($3.50 US). We thank her by saying "shukran" [the Arabic word]. She is tickled. It is now 4:45 PM. We head out to the next inner cross street, determined to see as much of Harar as we can in the late afternoon. In Arabic, a kasbah is the citadel of any of various North African cities; a medina is the quarter in which a kasbah is located. We lack the local words to describe this place, where most of the streets are too narrow for motorized vehicles, yet full of right-in-your-face commercial and family life. We try to visit this maze of alleys systematically. There is a main street going east-west, the one we walked in on. There is a main square on this street. We resolve to see the parts south of this street this afternoon, and the rest tomorrow. We start to the southwest. We come out of our hotel and turn to our right, going southwesterly, toward a city gate. Here, there are small shops (including a butcher or two), but also vendors who sit with their baskets in the street. From one, we buy some freshly-fried samosa-like triangle pastries filled with spicy grains and either lentils or chickpeas (yum). We are excited to see a basket full of what seems to be large fresh figs - but they turn out to have a hard shell, like nuts. Mike hears the vendor call them "jilbo" or "dilbo". We buy two. By this time, kids have gathered around us. Seems like the trick is to crack them open with a smart rap with a stack of sugar cane, then scoop out the contents with a finger. The jilbo innards are like dried-up date paste with a great many seeds. Not good eats. Very much an acquired taste. We end up giving most of the open one and all of the unopened one away to the kids. We have walked back (retraced our steps) to the main square. This time we go to the southeast. Here we come upon a number of markets, some butchers, some barbers. Such a mix. We keep going until we see the southeast gate, then retrace our steps back to the main square. From there it is a short walk down this street through a tangle of hidden residences, retracing our steps to a flower design on a side wall - our clue for finding the correct alleyway for Rowda. Our clean wash has been draped over the clotheslines crisscrossing the courtyard. Carol retrieves the clothespins from her pack. Mike's cotton socks and underwear will dry better if they can hang free; Mike's long-sleeve shirts can hang by their buttoned cuffs. At the far side of the courtyard there is a large open doorway with a beautiful carved wood lintel. Carol wants to look within. Turns out that two French couples around our age are sharing this multi-room space with soaring ceilings and much more elaborate wall decorations (and maybe, just maybe, a TV). They are diffident, to say the least. With her rusty French, Carol chats up one of the husbands. Our guide appears at 7 PM. It is now completely dark. Flashlights in hand, we head off to the central square, then down cobbled alleyways new to us. Then out the north Jugal gate into the city at large [we later learn that we are passing both the Islamic and Christian slaughterhouses on route]. Then we arrive at an open field ringed at this hour with small tour buses that have disgorged several dozen tourists [primarily Italian and French], each equipped with elaborate cameras and/or video cameras. Most of the tourists are babbling away loudly and shining their flashlights into the field. Sheeeeeesh. We think: "if I were a hyena, would I avoid this scene?" A little background: The origin of feeding the Harar hyenas dates back to the great famine of the late 19th Century. According to legend, the hyenas were fed by the inhabitants of Harar to appease the animals in good times, so that in times of drought they would not attack people or livestock. Truth is, feeding the slaughterhouse wastes to available nocturnal animals present outside the safety of city gates may have made a good deal of ecological sense. Today, the hyena men of Harar make a living by feeding wild hyenas after dark for the amusement of tourists and curious locals. A "hyena man" will call out to the hyenas to come forward, making sounds in a combination of his own "hyena dialect" and the local language of Afaan Oromo. Being a realist, he also lobs a few pieces of meat into the darkness. Eventually, a hyena will come from beyond the fields. Slowly, almost obediently, more of them will follow and emerge from the darkness. The hyena man will then place pieces of raw meat on a stick and hold it at arm's length (or even by his own teeth). If all goes according to script, hyenas will advance toward him and snatch the proffered food before scuttling back a few feet. PS: Hyenas don't resemble Shenzi, Bansai and Ed of "The Lion King", the henchmen of Scar. They look like overgrown tawny spotted canines with BIG teeth, and move like bears. No Westminster winners in this bunch. Wonder of wonders - our Swiss friend from Lalibela is in the crowd. She is staying at a different cultural guesthouse. Her flights were fine, but her luggage arrived in Harar two days late (maybe it went to Cairo, maybe to ...). Worst of all, her money was in her luggage, so she has had little to eat. Her guesthouse has been supportive as she awaited her clothing and belongings. She sports a traditional scarf - a gift from the staff at Seven Olives (momentary pang of jealousy). We see a total of 6 hyenas. It takes a lot of coaxing to keep them on display: they prefer to grab and retreat. They also don't seem to be very hungry. We wouldn't be hungry with these paparazzi tourists recording (and narrating) our every move, either. One Italian guy with serious machismo issues elbows his way onto the scene. He is determined to star in a feeding-the-hyenas YouTube video. He gets his millisecond of fame; another tourist tries but fails to attract a nibble. After a while, it is time for the tour vans to depart and for us to walk back to Rowda. The fee for watching all of this is 50 birr ($2.60) per person, payable to someone our guide points out. Our guide is still hopeful that we will hire him for tomorrow (and he IS quite knowledgeable and competent) but Mike holds firm. We have hardly eaten today - no breakfast, no dinner and only lunchtime soup and assorted nibbles. Our guide wants to take us out into the city to a restaurant to get a formal dinner. But we are too tired. So Mike gives one of the samosa vendors 10 birr (52 cents), buys 6 samosas, and we split them for whatever will pass for dinner. Back at the guesthouse, it is time for bed. We sort through our belongings and back ourselves into the bed alcove, flashlights still in hand. Under the covers and to sleep. For Carol, this includes settling inside the mosquito netting [following his Bahir Dar incident, Mike is still leery of treated netting]. But we HAVE drunk a good deal of water. During the night, Carol awakens 5 or 6 times, Mike 1 or two. Each time she passes through the courtyard, Carol readjusts our still-drying laundry. And so passes the night.