I woke up the next morning more tired than when I went to bed, and set out to see if I could use a sit-down toilet I’d noticed the previous afternoon. I hadn’t seen any water hook-up to the toilet, but I assumed it could be flushed with a bucket of water. I hadn’t seen a bucket either, but I figured all this would become clear. I found the room locked with a padlock and after asking around, I was presented with a copy of the key. I wondered if they knew how funny it was to padlock such a disgusting room. They couldn’t possibly be worried that a stranger would go in there and dirty it up.

I took the key and moved to the door, but a man shouted, “shower or toilet?” With everyone standing around watching and listening, I proudly declared, “Toilet!” “No,” he said. “For toilet, use this one.” And he banished me to the wet, dark, cement cell with the calf-wrenching squat toilet. The whole operation was acutely embarrassing, since my digestive system was in an uproar and the door was a makeshift affair with lots of gaps and no latch on the inside. Directly on the other side was the water trough where assorted women were constantly sloshing water around and washing clothes. I could hear my various pants and groans and squirts and farts echoing throughout the area.

Satisfied that my intentions were pure, I was then allowed into the other room where I hoped to take some kind of a bucket bath despite the absence of a bucket. The single tap in this room was about 3 feet off the ground. There was nothing for it but to crouch under the tap and let the cold water fly. It took some major contortions to get the water flowing to all the nooks and crannies of the body and then to ferret out the soapsuds, but I managed it with, however, one slight mishap. I stood up prematurely and caught my lower back right on the tap. It nearly broke me in two.

One of my happier purchases in Canada was a special toiletries kit that folds open and can hang from a hook putting everything in perfect and easy reach. I’d bought it anticipating exactly this kind of bathroom where there was nowhere to put anything that wasn’t covered in the eternally sloshed dirty water. It also had a small built-in mirror and I shaved as well as I could with the cold water, opening only one major artery.

I emerged bloody, bent over, shivering, and exhausted, not really prepared to face my second full day in Ethiopia.

Breakfast was a surprise. I assumed I’d order a breakfast enjera, but the woman suggested eggs, bread and coffee. It was served like all their meals on an immense steel tray about two feet across. The three pieces of bread (slightly sour rolls called “dabbo”) sat equally spaced around the rim with a steel plate of eggs in the middle. The eggs were an odd orange colour and half-scrambled with delicious spicing and strips of fiery hot green pepper. I sent it all marching towards my colon to do its worst.

The real treat was the coffee. Ethiopia is either the real or fabled home of the coffee bean. The coffee I got was espresso style with just a few ounces of dark black gold in a glass tumbler. On the bottom lay a thick sugar sludge that I could stir up or not as I wished. My first sip sent me into coffee ecstasy. It was strong and full and delicious.

 

Tags: Canada, Ethiopia, Ethiopia Bike Trip, Toilet No