The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  Ethiopia and Eritrea

  November 1999

  ‘Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail’

  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

  I chugged across Lake Tana in the Northern Ethiopian Highlands nursing a heavy cold I had brought from England. Sitting in the stern of a small passenger boat under a patched pink canvas canopy, I watched the pelicans, African darters and swallows skim the olive surface of the waters that feed the Blue Nile. All western Mediterranean civilisation that was rooted in the culture of ancient Egypt owed its existence to Lake Tana. We were coming back from Kidane Mihiret, a 12th century monastery constructed like an African roundel under a grass roof with four great pairs of doors, each leaf cut from a single plank of cedar. A young monk with a ready smile, a yellow robe and holding a key to a rusty padlock had put his shoulder to one of these planks and sunlight had poured in to light floral chintz curtains. These twentieth century garlands of roses were drawn back to reveal the bright colours of the Christian story naïvely and sometimes brutally depicted. Jesus and his family were, of course, black.

  I had come to Ethiopia for its extraordinary Christian culture, its bird life, its dramatic landscapes and its people. I had come with some urgency believing that its current political stability in a corner of Africa hardly discovered by tourists needed to be savoured quickly; I was mistaken, there was no rush. The Ethiopians are proud (they are the one country in Africa that has never been colonised) but they are hopelessly, desperately poor. This was fundamental poverty exacerbated by a civil war; it will take a generation just to provide sanitation.

  “You!” The finger pointed straight at me. “You, out.” The battered bus had stopped by a barrier of multi-coloured ropes knotted together at Wondo Genet, a small town in a fertile valley of Southern Ethiopia, cut into the escarpment of the Rift Valley before the ground eases gently down to the lushness of the Omo Valley and Lake Turkina. The customs post monitored the sale of chat, the mildly hallucinogenic leaf of a shrub whose young growing tips are plucked and chewed occasionally by Ethiopians but are almost part of the national diet of the Yemeni. It forms an important export trade through Djibouti. The shoots are packed into round nine-inch long bundles, wrapped in banana leaves and secured by strips of acacia bark. The customs officer, distinguished from other villagers by a leather jacket and undarned trousers, had seen me photographing the loading of the morning’s consignment but it seemed he only wanted to assert an authority quite disproportionate to his official duties. A little while later he had taken my photograph, I had taken his, a few birr had changed hands and all was well.

  Wondo Genet lies half way up a thickly forested mountainside and its attraction, apart from the lushness of its surroundings, is its thermal pools. These are owned by a small hotel, which included a separate and far better appointed bungalow previously used by Haile Selassie. A smaller, shallower pool had been constructed for him since at 5’ 3” (1.3m) he was a foot shorter than his fellow, long-limbed countrymen. The water comes straight out of the mountainside at 90°F (32°C). On our previous two stops, hot water had been unobtainable but here, typically in this country of inconsistencies, it was cold water that was unobtainable. The overnight dew lay heavily on small plantations of bananas, papaya, coffee and pepper. Higher up the valley it was maize and tefe, the small-grained wheat with which the Ethiopians make a solid, tasteless bread. Hornbills honked in the fig trees, a hooded vulture (that disarmingly grunts like a pig) stared with shrunken shoulders from the frangipani and a troop of colobus monkeys, trailing their white tufted tails, looked down inquisitively from the tamarind trees.

  In a country as poor as Ethiopia, clothes are an important indication of status. Elderly men invariably had a jacket, a hat and either a walking stick or a rolled umbrella, although I never saw one opened. Women, on the other hand, often used an umbrella against the sun and wrapped a long cotton shawl with a broad embroidered border around their bodies and over their heads. Sometimes these were brightly coloured but were always white for church. Laundry lists invariably listed petticoats and aprons. Urban teenagers wore the discards of a richer world and there was a thriving second-hand clothes market where savvy dealers knew the value of designers’ labels whether counterfeit or genuine.

  The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has its own seat on the World Council of Churches and in a remarkable line of religious conformity, dates back without interruption to the 12th century. At Axum, by legend if not in fact, lies the Ark of the Covenant and in almost every church St George is depicted slaying a dragon and St. Michael and the Angel Gabriel – each with black curly hair – guard the doors. The Sunday congregations that fill every church would make an English clergyman pack his bags for orthodoxy and this in spite of a service so long that special sticks are provided with a T-piece that fits under an armpit and allowed one foot to be rested on the knee of the other leg. Thank God those missionaries were never sent forth in this country to reap their destruction of local culture and ethnic customs. Here, uniquely in Africa, Christianity was firmly in place before St Augustine and the Ethiopians have remained religiously unblemished.

  I had started at the agricultural southern half of the Ethiopian highlands. Wheat, maize, sunflowers, tomatoes and potatoes grew from soil tilled with a single timber plough behind a pair of oxen. This was also cattle country and brahmins, longhorns and zebu were herded by small boys with long sticks. This country has water to spare, but it is nevertheless back-breakingly hard to move from source to user and involves donkeys strapped with old jerry cans, probably left over from the civil war, lengths of inner tube tied each end or more often, huge clay calabashes balanced on the head or tied to a stooping back.

  Around Nazret, the land was divided between five different tribes – one of which, the Danakil, required a young bachelor to kill a male from another tribe and as proof, cut off his penis and hang it around his neck; he was then sufficiently manly for marriage. As we drove through the villages, every man seen with an ornament on a thong around his neck caused hoots of excited recognition.

  Although the country was almost self-sufficient in food, anything requiring manufacture needed to be brought in and that meant containers and their recycling was a business of its own. In Addis Ababa, half a shelf was taken up by peanuts sold in bottles – curiously all Johnny Walker Red Label. Barrel ends were cut and lipped for cooking pots, small saucepans were made out of tins and stalls whose sole business was to provide containers of every kind, shape and material were in every market. On internal flights with Ethiopian Airlines, plastic cups were gathered in carrier bags, paper napkins were torn into quarters and plastic spoons often washed between courses.

  For a week spent in the less visited south, hot water had been unavailable with sanitation inevitably suffering in consequence and it was often smelly (of Dettol if you were lucky). But now, moving into more discriminating territory inexplicably no cold water was provided. There is something quite alarming the first time you see steam coming out of the loo cistern. Having manufactured a bath plug (the cap of a deodorant spray fitted nicely), I ran a bath and came back in an hour and a half after it had cooled to a temperature that left the body ‘à point’ rather than ‘seignant’.

  One of the southern stopping off spots was the Awash Gorge where the camp sat perched on a rocky rim 1,000 ft (300m) above the muddy but fast-flowing river. The accommodation was in caravans which were labelled ‘Lindwalt Corp., Indiana’. Perhaps at the time they were bought, at least 30 years ago, they were bankrupt stock or an end of line bargain. The caravans provided adequate accommodation and were rather cosy, but it was disappointing that local materials had not been used which would have at least blended against the background of Ethiopia’s premier wild life park. This was one of the places where hot water was unavailable and arriving late I read the notice pinned to the inside of the door: ‘To call room service, please be to open the door and call “Room Service”.’ I duly bellowed into t
he dusk but no one came. In the morning, I saw that the staff quarters were out of hearing range and reading the notice more closely found additional words on the bottom. ‘Please do not call loudly as others may sleep.’

  The Amharic language is a joke. If you took the alphabets of Arabic, Cyrillic, Sanskrit and Greek, broke them up into pieces tossed them in a calabash, randomly glued together the legs and curly bits of this entomological stew you might get something that was close. There are 216 letters which are then arranged backwards for reading right to left. Many small boys would attach themselves like a leech at the various tourist spots to give you their address, written on a small piece of paper and ask you to be their ‘letter friend’. You might distrust their ability to write a Roman script but they do so with an easy flow of capital letters. I suppose if you had to grapple with Amharic, this was something of a doddle.

  Moving north, the mountains grew sharper and the tourists increased tenfold as they followed the Trail of Historic Cities. This is a well trampled route that takes in Axum, Gonder and Lalibela. This last tethering post is in the central highlands and has secured a UNESCO commendation for its unique churches. Sliced into the soft rock there would be no sign of them were it not for the flotsam of tourist tack that surrounds them.

  With a sturdy horse and its bearded owner, I trekked one day up to Ashetan Maryam where there was a celebrated church cut into the cliff face. The way was steep and stony, the views (the church lies at 10,300 ft (3,150m)) stupendous and the caretaker monks persuasive with their plea for alms. I walked up and back, no doubt to the relief of the horse, but to the consternation of its owner who was clearly anxious that his tip might be in jeopardy. I had secured carrots from the hotel kitchen before setting out and at the end of the trip prepared to give these to my untried and possibly undeserving steed. At first, its owner thought the carrots were for him but then with much grumbling he took off the bridle so that I could offer up my vegetarian gift. The ungrateful beast chewed them once and then spat them out.

  Returning to my hotel down the dusty track to the village, I came upon a teenage girl laden with school books; I had passed her school earlier. Two weeks in Ethiopia develops an immunity towards teenagers in multi-patched trousers and discarded tee-shirts. They tag along and engage one in conversation with words that seem to originate from an identical text book. They are soft words and are usually effective, since they come with friendliness rather than grabbing opportunism, but are seldom rewarded since a gift to one requires gifts to a dozen. This teenager had disarming frankness, her continual chatter and her tee-shirt emblazoned ‘Chicago Bulls’ were probably responsible for the fact that it had not crossed my mind that she had clearly spotted a middle-aged, male and affluent European and chased after him. But Zed was different; she was a girl – sixteen she told me – and a girl had never fallen in step beside me; they were too disciplined by the morality of a peasant society that is severe on any hint of female promiscuity. “Just call me Zed,” she said breathlessly, “everyone does.” Her full name was Zwedtu Genanu, so Zed it was.

  Her parents had died in the famine of 1985 and her elder brother now had useless withered arms as a result of malnutrition. She had been brought here by one of the aid agencies and later had been able to recover a little of her parents’ money. Not that this information was volunteered since she prattled on about her school, her teacher, her friends, her wish to become a guide and her worries about her brother. Any questions I asked as to her circumstances were answered promptly and then she set off on a different subject. It seemed that she accepted her orphaned status, her dependant brother, her prospects of continual hard work and no money, simply as the rather trying and irritating facts of life. Here the harsh realities of survival were linked to a likeable honesty.

  We reached the centre of the town, circled a baobab tree, stepped back to allow mules to pass laden with a great heaps of dried haricot beans and retraced our dusty steps down the hill. “Please come and see my house,” Zed said, “I would like to show it to you.” I was wary and apprehensive of a monetary or honey pot trap. Also, it was getting dark and a cold beer and a shower beckoned. “Look, it is just there.” She pointed down a small path that wound over a stream beside a patch of potatoes. It sounded interesting, genuine and intriguing. “Well, just for a few minutes.” She led me over the stream, past the potatoes, round a huge boulder which had hidden the view of two small girls who herded their goats to the evening safety of a thorn enclosure and up a few steep steps cut into the earth. For the equivalent of £10 she had bought 800 sq ft (25 sq m) of this hillside, dug into it to provide a level space, terraced below it for her garden of maize, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, potatoes, squash, marigolds and a pink rose. Then she had built her round house out of wattle and mud, roofed it with dried grasses and secured the door with rusting corrugated sheet. She invited me to sit on a log of wood, placed with other boxes and logs on a spotlessly clean earth floor and introduced me to her disabled brother. Her whole life and all her possessions were here; some of these, such as school books and a jar of oil with a string wick for a light, were tucked into hollows in the wall. In an area half the size of my English country kitchen she had built a house, a garden and her life.

  She collected water for her plants from the stream in a huge clay calabash, balancing this on her back bent double and with a woven strap around her forehead. She was also growing wheat so that she could grind her own flour and bake her own bread and was largely self-sufficient except for charcoal, oil, meat and clothing. As I got up to go, I asked her how much these things cost each month; 20 birr she said, with the expression of a worried housewife and the tone of voice that made it clear how outrageous she felt this was. I gave her 50 birr (about £5) which would support her for two months and she dropped to her knees and burst into tears. When she had recovered a little, I asked her what she would really like and she said some files for her exercise books since they were badly made and kept falling apart, and an English dictionary. I promised to send these.

  As I stepped down the earthen steps, past the pink rose and the lines of vegetables and climbed back up the hill to my bath and beer, I felt I had made a good investment in Ethiopia’s future. (Back in England I dispatched a large parcel via DHL but I never heard back. I had to draw a map on the outside; I hope it was understood.)

  Turning east, past the stylae at Axum and then through a parched and stony landscape, I crossed into Eritrea. Here was a country that had spent 20 years fighting an enemy ten times its size, and yet, only two years after winning, there was prosperity all around. Asmara, the capital at 7,400 ft (2,400m) in the Central Eritrean Highlands, was spotlessly clean, its people well dressed, not a beggar in sight, new Opel taxis cruised the palm lined streets and prices were half those of Ethiopia. In a country about the size of Britain, it offers dramatic mountain scenery, harsh desert, miles of white sand along the Red Sea and above all, a delightful and tolerant people. No doubt this toleration stems from Muslims and Christians (the latter being the Catholic Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) living side by side for almost 1,000 years and the huge determination of a people united in rebuilding their country. The debris of war was still there and rusty Russian tanks lay in unexpected places – the middle of a corn field, at the bottom of a chasm or stuck through the wall of a house; six wheels of an upturned APC were now garlanded with bougainvillea and thousands of strategic hill tops were fortified look out posts. But mountain roads, severely damaged by the tracked vehicles of an Ethiopian army half a million strong were being rebuilt, hotels had been repaired, cinemas were opening and public services functioning.

  Solomon Abraha of Travel House International beamed excitedly. “You have signed the first American Express ticket ever in Eritrea. I will blow it – is that right? – and hang it on the wall.” He introduced me to my driver, Belai Haile Mariam, one of five brothers. The oldest was a distinguished resistance fighter partly responsible for the huge underground hospital built into the mo
untains and who was now governor of one of the five provinces. Two brothers had died in the war and another was at Frankfurt University. They seemed to exemplify the struggles of the past and the hopes for the future.

  The road to the Red Sea port of Masawa must rank as one of the most dramatic on the continent. Dropping 8,200 ft (2,500m) in 55 miles (80kms), it twists through three different climate zones and countless geological formations that range from huge boulders to shale and a palette of rock colours that change through red and orange to black and white; sometimes in vertical stripes, sometimes in horizontal layers. Acacia thorns give way to hillsides dense with cacti, giant lobelia, eucalyptus and the scrub of the desert coastline. Herds of goats and sheep were everywhere and groups of camels, carrying salt from the evaporating pans along the coast, were a continual hazard. Most of the camels were on the way to the Sudan, 250 miles (400kms) to the north and the main road was their most convenient way up to the highland plateau.

  Masawa itself is two linked islands joined to the mainland by a causeway constructed during the Italian colonisation. Here was some of the fiercest fighting of the war – not a building was unscathed. Much of the damage has been made good but my small beach hotel was still riddled with bullet holes. I was the only guest but the tables were laid for 20. I shared the dining room with six cats and my bedroom with several families of geckoes. Typical of the air of optimism and enthusiasm, the owner was extending already and Italian beach parasols and chairs were arranged in anticipation of brighter days.

  The influence of the Italians was still strong. The infrastructure was their real achievement and this included an extraordinary cableway up from Masawa and at 46 miles (75kms), the longest in the world. This had not worked for years and had recently been dismantled and sold to Pakistan. That distinctive fin de siècle typography of the Italians was on many administrative buildings (along with Amharic and Arabic), “ciao” and “cappuccino” were part of everyday language and pasta was on every menu.