by Ted Simon
I get to Gedaref in two heart-stopping hours, and find another place to eat fish, but this is a different kind of town from Atbara or Kassala, busier and more crowded, and the crowd is curious and pressing. They are all round me, peering at me, and I am glad to get away on the road to Doka. Until I see what the road is like. My alarm takes me to the verge of despair, and then turns to laughter. It is too ridiculous.
The washboard corrugations continue, as before, but not consistently. The ground here is obviously softer and heavy vehicles have been going through in the rain. The road is saucer-shaped, that is, it has a steep reverse camber. At the bottom of the saucer are deep slots, usually two side by side. They are only a couple of feet apart, and must have been made by lorries travelling with one wheel in the road and another on the bank. The space between the slots is not flat, but rises to a crown, and also narrows from time to time or disappears altogether as the two slots merge into one. It is not possible to ride between the slots without, soon, falling into one. The slots are fifteen inches deep and the same width. They might have been tailored to fit the bike. The pipes just fit inside them, the side panniers just clear the tops of them. I am forced to ride in the slots, but I see a great danger of breaking my legs against the side if the bike should lurch one way or another, and for much of the way I have to keep my legs raised in the air.
Where the slots are shallower or broader the ground is corrugated or covered with loose sand. For several hours I am unable to average more than ten miles an hour. My feelings have changed now, though. I see this as a part of what I must do, and I am resigned to the fact that each day the hazards will multiply until I meet the dog with eyes like cartwheels. My worries are now all for the motorcycle. With one suspect piston I am worried about overheating. Three times I fall; once when riding between the slots the bike falls into a groove and is almost upside down. Each time I stop and relax, and let the bike cool off. I'm trying not to let the riding overwhelm me so that I forget where I am and what I'm doing.
The soil here is pitch black, and flat, but far ahead I see it rising steadily towards the Ethiopian plateau. On either side of me are fields of cotton and millet, and the cotton is just bursting out of its pods in little puffs of white. Not a soul anywhere, not a vehicle or an animal or a person. What does it matter? I have water, rice, tea and sugar, and salt. I can take as long as I like, stop where and when I like.
So, plodding along, horse-back fashion, I arrive in Doka just past four. The police have a large open space with a fence round it. I don't need their fence, but their hospitality is welcome and they share their food with me. New day, new problems. The road is rising now, in short steep swoops. Where it does the road is stony, big loose stones ripped out of the rock and flung loose. Something enormous has been travelling this road. It has also ground the rock into a fine powder, a pink talc like face powder which reflects the sun and kills all contours. I cannot see the rocks before I hit them, and since climbing necessitates some speed and momentum, I find myself bouncing from one side of the track to the other, hoping to find a safe line through. Twice more I fall, spread-eagled across the track, and here it is worse because the rocks catch on the panniers, ripping them off, and denting the pipes. Once I am trapped with my foot under the rear wheel. The strap on the boot is caught on the axle, and I can't move. As I lie there, mustering strength, I remember the boy in the store selling me that boot and telling me that the strap was 'for when you come off.
Why don't the tyres tear to shreds under all this punishment. Why no punctures? I think a puncture might finish me, I'm so beat. I say prayers of gratitude to Avon who made them. Why doesn't the Triumph just die? It has no need to go on, unlike me. It protests and chatters. On one steep climb it even fainted, but after a rest it went to work again. I hate to think what havoc is being wrought inside those cylinders. We have such a long way to go.
The morning passes in effort and short stops. The countryside is more pleasing as it rises among trees. The mountain kingdom of Ethiopia must
be near now. The Sudanese side of the border is called Galabat. I see some men in uniform outside a building and ride up to them. They are soldiers and ask me to eat with them. We squat on the ground outside their garrison in front of a large bowl, scooping up the food with handfuls of kissera. All the usual politenesses and courtesies are offered, the symbols of mutual respect. Soon I shall leave Arabia behind, and I suspect already how much I shall yearn for it, and the Sudan in particular.
A deep dry gulch divides the two countries. The Sudanese customs official is correct and helpful, despite a lost document. His office is tidy and efficient, the compound neat and clean. He is shaven and wears a freshly laundered galabeia. These are the things I remember as I ride down the gulch and up the other side into Metema.
The differences are shocking. Here is a crowded shanty town, slovenly unshaven soldiers, absentee officials, dirt, dilapidation and already a whiff of corruption. The army checks me out for explosives. It is three in the afternoon but customs, they say, won't be back until next morning. I ride up the road to find a hotel. Every hut is a hotel, or pretends to be on a painted sign in blue or magenta. The best hotel in town is a square room under a tin roof, with rough daubed walls and an earth floor, a wooden bar, shelves of drink and, strange to see on an earth floor, some upholstered chairs and a sofa round a table. I had forgotten about upholstery. Then, the biggest shock of all. A woman, quite a pretty woman, in a plain cotton frock with an emancipated neckline and a hem just below the knees walks across to me, looking me in the eyes, and shakes my hand. It is as explosive as a kiss. I had forgotten about women too.
She gives me a small cubicle at the back. The culture change is too great for me to risk sleeping outside here. Metema has a true frontier town feel to it, and I smell lawlessness and a hint of violence.
I learned something about Ethiopia travelling through the Sudan. The prostitutes in Atbara came from Asmara, and did a lucrative business. Occasionally the police rounded them up and shipped them over the border by truck, but the story went that the girls would have bribed their way back and been in business before the police even had time to get home.
Where the women of Islam are so concealed and repressed as to form virtually an underground society, the women of this most ancient Christian kingdom are shamelessly exposed, unprotected and exploited at the opposite extreme. Both the women in this hotel are prostitutes, and have several children. They keep their money in a big iron chest under one of the beds. Even the smallest sums are immediately put away there, and all their actions indicate that they must-watch out for themselves constantly. They say they have saved to buy this place, that it must keep them in their older age. In the morning they make a poignant sight, nursing their illegitimate babies and their tightly rolled wads of Ethiopian dollars. I admire and sympathize with them.
There is much more colour here than in the Sudan. Literally. A camel passes with two men sitting on it, back to back and laughing out loud. One is wearing a vivid carmine cloak. Another camel has birds sitting all over it, feeding off its coat. Even the birds have bright red bills.
At the border post they say 'No customs until the afternoon.' Obviously it is not possible to believe them, nor am I going to make an offer, but I must have my customs carnet stamped. A policeman who seems to know what he is talking about tells me I can have it done in Gondar. I decide to chance it. The travelling is so hard that I must keep moving. I need the momentum to balance the hardship.
Gondar is the target, the point where I rejoin the main highway system. I cannot help thinking of it as Gondor, the gloomy mountain fortress towards-which Tolkien's hero, Frodo, had to carry the Ring of Power. All my thoughts are still dominated by the physical battering that I and the machine are taking on this road. Before leaving today I have to clean up a terrible mess in one of the boxes. The vibration has loosened the lid of the cod liver oil and glucose pot. It has also caused the aluminium film canisters to grind each other into a powder. Ever
ything in the box is now smeared with a paste of cod liver oil and aluminium, the most bizarre example yet of what vibration can do on a bike. Happily the cameras were no longer in there, and nothing is ruined.
The fourth day of the ride from Kassala begins. The road here is like a cart track on a mountainside, not bad on the level sections, but treacherous on the inclines with that same blinding dust obscuring loose rock. Gondar is almost five thousand feet up from here, but there is a series of lower ranges to cross, and the road is climbing or falling almost constantly. This much, however, I became accustomed to yesterday. What new monster must I wrestle with today?
'Here it comes. A river. I stop to look at it, and my heart sinks to my boots. How can I ever get across it? There is a ford about thirty feet wide. The water is not too deep, a foot or two at most, though fast running, but the river bed looks impossible on two wheels. It is littered with black boulders the size of footballs. How can I possibly expect the bike to stay upright, even if the tyres can grip the stone which looks slippery.
I am very frightened of what will happen, almost certain of disaster. Only the thought of those thousands of miles behind me forces me to confront the problem. I have never forded a river before. For five or ten minutes I walk up and down, looking for a better way, trying to stifle the panic in my breast and find some calm and resolution. It comes. The fear is somehow anaesthetized. I know that if I am going to do it, it must be now.
'There is a first and last time for everything,' I tell myself, and launch into it, trying to guess the right speed. There is nothing for me to do but hold on tight and pray. I'm going too fast to be able to change direction or choose a path. The bike leaps about like a mad thing. To my complete astonishment, I find myself riding up the other side. I stop, quivering with relief. All the strength has left me and my leg will hardly hold up the bike while I fiddle with the stand.
What a wonderful place this world is. It really does look as though I am meant to get through.
My boots are full of water, and I go back to the stream and wash my feet, wring out my socks and take a drink. The ford looks more manageable now that I've crossed it, but there will be others. For sure.
There are four more that day, and the last one is the most monstrous of all. The bike stalls just before the other side, but I am able to keep it upright in the water. This ford is doubly unlike the others though, because here there are people. Some men come to help me drag the bike out of the river. They seem very friendly, and I discover they are building a bridge here and have a camp. They tell me to stay the night with them.
They are different from other men, these road builders. Some kind of esprit de corps animates them, as though the roads and bridges they make are only the physical symbols of a desire to help the world along. I have observed it many times before, in other countries.
That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another, I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft, far, far away from any world I ever knew.
The men are gathered round a fire, talking. The language is Amharic, and quite impenetrable by me, but I can hear when they are just making conversation and when they are telling stories, because they have two voices. Comments are made in normal speech, but for stories they speak in a higher register, in a voice that trips and burbles along at a fast rate, full of mimicry and giggling laughter. I feel my raft floating right back to the beginning of time.
The fifth day out of Kassala, and the slopes are immediately steeper and longer. It is clear that the bike can barely cope with the combination of load, work and heat. The road is scarred and ripped to rubble. It is like following the track of some stumbling monster of destruction. Halfway up a particularly hard climb, I lose momentum and the bike simply dies on me. I don't know what's happened, what to do. I wait a while and kick it over. It starts and revs up fine in neutral, but when I engage the clutch it dies on me again. I am quite near the top of the hill, and I unload the heaviest boxes and carry them up myself. Then I ride the bike up, and load again. The plugs and timing are okay. What else can I do but cross my fingers, and try to keep up momentum?
Another long steep climb and I take it as fast as I can. When I get to the top, bouncing like a mad thing all the way, I find that I have lost one of my boxes at the bottom. It is way out of sight. As I walk down, I hear a big engine approaching. Further down is the monster that makes this road what it is. A twenty-ton Fiat truck, with ten gears, is grinding uphill in first. It fills every inch of the track on its sixteen huge tyres. The driver points to his left hand side, then stops. He has the box with him, unopened, and I climb in beside him and ride back to the top, very grateful for his honesty.
It takes a while to fix the box, using largish pieces of flattened tin as an anchor where the fibreglass has been torn away. The road continues as before. I fall again, twice within a minute or two. The weak arm is wrenched again every time the stones snatch at the wheel and try to tear the handlebars from my grip. The climbing is intensely difficult. Up and down and further up and down again and still further up, always a new mountain ahead as the road rises through the eroded edges of a high and massive plateau. At one fall, some boys see me pick myself up from the dust, and rush away, only to reappear with a kettle full of cold mountain water for me to drink. Another time, two boys in rags with gourds tied at their waists leave their cattle to watch me. One carries a flute and hands it to me, but my brain is too addled by heat and effort to know what he wants. I hand it back and he plays the musical equivalent of a mountain torrent. His dexterity is astounding. He pours out notes with the speed and confidence of an absolute virtuoso, creating not a single stream of melody but a cascade of sound, which seems to be in several keys and registers simultaneously. He bathes me in his music and I know, as I listen, that I will never hear anything like this again. When he finishes I try to show my gratitude. We have not one word in common, and foolishly I feel it is impossible to repay such a gift with money. Afterwards I am ashamed to have made him the victim of my idealism. A dollar would have suited him better than my lofty sentiment, no doubt.
Still, his music is the sign that this ordeal is almost ended. A towering finger of rock appears, standing alone on the right of the road. Then I breast the final escarpment and run free on the plateau at last.
Chelga is the last village, about fifty miles from the highway, a mountain village, houses and people huddled more closely together, faces lined and angular, showing cunning and suspicion. There is a 'hotel' that serves meals. The food is 'injera and wat'', a variation on the Sudanese meal. The bread is different. It comes like a pancake, or rather an enormous soft muffin, covering the whole of a circular tin tray. Under it is a small bowl of chopped mutton in spiced sauce.
Gathered round a table at the far end of the room is a group of men in Western business suits of solid dark worsted. Their skin is black, but their features are prominent and European. Several of them wear dark glasses. By their prosperity, the way the hotel owner treats them, by their assumption of nonchalance and the careless glances they cast over me and others, I know they are some kind of power elite.
After a little while the hotel owner asks me for my passport. He hands it obsequiously to one of the men who studies it lightly, makes a laughing remark to the others and passes it back. The word that springs to mind is 'mafia'. When they have left, a bearded man to my right starts to speak.
'That man is a police general,' he says in good English. T have to keep silence when they are near, but you will find that there are many like me who are ready to throw them out. Ethiopia is like France before the revolution.'
He is a teacher, and asks me to make contact with students in Addis if I want to find the truth.
'But look out for bad people on the road, who will try to stop you. If you joke wi
th them they will steal from you. You must keep a good face. And it is not good to walk round Gondar alone.
'But after all your travelling you will have your own trick.'
I am glad he says that. I know it is no good to go around expecting trouble. Better to hope that, in the last resort, you have found 'your own trick'.
The last fifty miles of road are shown on the map as 'improved'. The improvement consists of several inches of loose stone spread over the surface. I find it deadly, particularly on bends. There is one more ford, and one more fall. I feel now that I have been treated to every variety of bad surface that I could ever expect to meet. All that awaits me now is to ride the same surfaces in the wet, but that privilege is deferred to another time and another continent.
At Azezo I ride out on to the highway and for the last eight miles I am on smooth tarmac. It is like a flying dream. I cannot feel my wheels touch the ground, and I enter Gondar floating through the air. I have ridden four hundred and fifty miles from Atbara in seven unimaginable days, and in many different ways I feel I have arrived.
Ethiopia means trouble. On the highway to Addis Ababa I sense it most of the time. Perhaps, unknowingly, I even symbolize it. The men I pass, stubborn-looking men with hard, impassive faces, sometimes raise their sticks as though torn between the impulses to salute and to lash out. Small boys, almost naked, crouch and raise their fists in
defiance. Sometimes they throw stones under the condoning eyes of adults, and I feel sure they are acting out their parents' wishes.
It seems natural that something as rare and strange as a helmeted figure on a motorcycle approaching at speed should arouse whatever are the dominant emotions. Here I would have to say that the first emotions to spring to the surface are fear and resentment. In Wollo province, three hundred miles from my route, thousands are said to be starving to death, but I can see no sign of it. The livestock looks fat and grain grows everywhere, but the country is seething with rebellion and the Emperor's long, harsh and corrupt reign must be nearly at an end.
