The Land

The next morning the manager and the two young men watched with mute disappointment as one by one I carried my bags out into the street and attached them to my bike. Their eyes followed each one with a “give me” appeal that for once went unvoiced.

It was a bright and cold morning and Sululta’s main street was already filled with farmers tightly wrapped up in their ‘shammas,’ the all-purpose cotton blanket that served as coat, headdress and bedsheet. I didn’t feel the cold as much and hadn’t bothered to put on my jacket. I knew that if I had I’d be sweating in three minutes and would only have to stop to take it off. One Ethiopian man, barely visible under his tightly wrapped layers, thought this quite mad and made exaggerated shivering gestures while pointing at the t-shirt clad ferenji.

The road out of Sululta rose and fell through a lush countryside of intensely cultivated fields. The only land not planted was inside the fenced-in squares that contained the little groupings of tukul huts, each square representing one family. Many of these squares had trees planted in neat rows along two sides for a windbreak. Smoke rising from a hut here and there completed a picture of a rural idyll, far from my preconceived image of Ethiopia as a savagely dry and desolate land.

I stopped for breakfast in the small town of Chancho after 15 kilometers of uphill cycling. It was a larger place than Sululta and had around 10 hotels plus a brand new Total gas station. From the gas station’s second storey balcony I had a clear view of the surrounding countryside and it struck me that the broken down and potholed road that I was following was essentially the only road out here. It really was just a thin ribbon in a vast expanse of mountains and river gorges. Most of the country and its people were still back there, in and beyond the hills, deep in the mountains to the north, village upon village, farm upon farm, and little of it even today with road access of any kind.

The longer I let my eyes wander over the landscape the more villages and farms suddenly popped into view. What were hazy lines became an intricate network of foot trails connecting them all together and then passing over the horizon to more farms and villages and then over the next horizon, continuing I presumed, right across the country. When I used my binoculars I saw the life and commerce of those trails – men driving heavily laden donkeys to regional markets, women returning from nearby streams with clay urns filled with water for their families, and children smacking cattle with their dulas, hurrying them along the trails and out to the fields to graze. Compared to these ancient trails worn by countless generations of feet the road with its buses and trucks was a recent addition, an upstart. Looking from the road to the hills and river valleys I had the sensation that I was looking back in time.

The Flies

As the sun rose the chill of the morning disappeared and the temperature climbed dramatically. The sweat began to flow freely and I could feel the sun’s rays, powerful at this altitude, burning the back of my neck, my forearms and even my ears. The local people were much more sensible than I and carried umbrellas for protection from the sun or at least covered their heads with a scarf, a hat or, most commonly, their shammas wound up something like a turban.

I began to wish I had brought some sunglasses, not so much for the sun, though the sun was bright, but more for the insects that kept flying into my eyes. Ethiopian flies like flies all over the world had an unerring ability to fly straight into my nose, into my mouth, into my ears and into my eyes. They never seemed to land anywhere else as if they knew exactly where on my body they could land that was going to annoy me the most. Nor were they easily discouraged. I only got rid of them for brief periods when I reached a steep downhill and could accumulate some speed. But every time I went through a village I picked up a hundred new ones and they pounced on my heavily sweating face and neck and began the torment anew.

Even if I wasn’t aware of them there was almost always one or two scrambling around my nostrils and I soon learned to take the time to stop, take out some toilet paper and blow my nose properly. Sniffing was not a wise idea. A good hard sniff and up they went deep into my sinus cavities. I blew my nose hard after those incidents, but the flies that went in had an annoying habit of not coming back out. It was best not to think about it.

The village children that crowded around me whenever I stopped were themselves walking colonies of flies. The younger children were sometimes a horrible sight with up to a dozen flies around each eye drinking the fluid there like cows at a trough. It was all I could do not to reach out and brush them away myself. It was awful to think of the long years of exposure to these flies that had conditioned them to the point that they didn’t even feel them anymore.

When the children crowded close my flies would join with all of theirs and for a moment we’d form one giant amorphous mass of flies. The sheer volume of them would send me backing away, flapping and waving my arms in a panic. On the road again my personal colony would have doubled or tripled in size and I’d ride fast and hard till the wind got their number back down to a reasonable size.

The Life on the Road

Through the incessant buzzing of the flies around my ears I heard another sound, a deeper more pervasive sound, a hum almost like a car’s tires on pavement. At first I thought that was what it was and I kept looking in my rear view mirror for the car or bus coming up behind me. Then I stopped the bike to listen more carefully. The hum was everywhere. It seemed to be coming from the fields and with a shock I realized I was hearing the sound produced by millions upon millions of tiny insect wings. It was a deeply disturbing sound and I tried to block it out as much as I could after that.

When the rare bus did appear either ahead of me or behind me it wasn’t the sound of the tires or engine that gave it away but the ear-splitting din of the music that poured out of the few open windows. Each bus was an outdoor concert on wheels and my amusement knew no bounds when a bus approached and the unmistakeable sound of Manalbash Dilbou singing “Asa Belobelo” floated through the air. It appeared it was something of an Ethiopian top forty tune and I looked forward to the time when I could tell someone that I not only had met the famous singer but had danced with her.

The bus drivers invariably honked their horns and gave me a smile and a big thumbs up. The passengers when they saw me were jerked out of their long distance daze. Each head in the window snapped around to follow me with their eyes and as the bus passed a wave of whiplash moved from front to back. Those at the back were alerted by the commotion ahead of them and had more time to react. They followed the bus driver’s lead and if the window was open stuck out a hand with the thumb pointing firmly to the sky.

If my presence enlivened the long distance bus industry it practically brought farming to a standstill. I often had the sensation I was cycling through a wax museum for farmers upon seeing me froze into statue-like immobility and remained frozen until I had passed from view. I chuckled to myself that productivity and harvest yields must be plummeting everywhere along my route.

The Children

On children of course I had the opposite effect. Rather than stun them into immobility my presence sent them into a state of total delerium. They nearly killed themselves in their desperate rush to reach the road before I passed out of reach. They sent up a bloodcurdling cry of “ferenji ferenji”, “you you” and “give me one birr” and gave chase. Those too deep in the fields to reach me in time screamed “ferenji” into the air. This cry passed from lip to lip moving with lightning speed up the road, telling every child for miles around that I was on my way. Already on only my second day of cycling I dreaded the moment when a child spotted me and set up the “ferenji ferenji” cry. I dubbed it the “Ferenji Early Warning System” or “FEWS” and it left me with no hope of ever going undetected or getting away unscathed.

The FEWS also meant that if I needed to stop the bike for whatever reason I could only do so on a downhill slope. Then as the crowds of children descended on me I had at least a chance of getting away. If I stopped at the beginning of a climb and the FEWS was triggered I was lost. The children could jog and even walk at the same slow 5 or 6 km/hr, which was all I could manage on those steep roads. Other children in the fields would see how easy it was to keep up with me and would race at an angle to intercept me. The crowd following me could easily grow to fifty children – in villages and towns to well over a hundred – and the screaming and harassment would reach a level that threatened my sanity.

The main point of all this attention was of course to beg from me. But beyond that it was simply the sheer entertainment value that I represented. To scream at me, poke sticks at the wheels, pile rocks on the trailer, and grab the handlebars was the equivalent of ignorant people at a zoo tormenting an animal in a cage just to make it do something, to see what it would do.

Sometimes though, the children would want to help me. They’d see me sweating and breathing hard pumping those pedals and they’d grab hold of the trailer and push to help me up the hill. Unfortunately this was never done with any consistency and the sudden shoves from behind would send me wandering dangerously all over the road and sometimes came close to jacknifing the bike and trailer.

And it was never long before one of the children would realize that if pushing me was fun then holding me back was a riot. A dozen hands would grab the trailer and without warning give a sudden heave backwards dragging me to a stop. I could warn them off, but that just became a part of the game and they would hover just out of reach and then all dive in to grab the trailer and drag me to a stop once again. Getting to the top of the long hills became an agony and a torment.

A Volley of Rocks

My first encounter with children en masse upon leaving Chancho that morning was new enough that it still held some interest for me. I had stopped to check the trailer mount on my bike, crouching low in the delusion that I wouldn’t be noticed, when I heard a tremendous furore. I looked up to see a crowd of children converging on the road and heading in my direction. I quickly got back on my bike and started cycling again.

The first group consisted of about twenty younger children about seven or eight years old and they were fairly polite. They didn’t say anything, but every single one of them held out their hand toward me with a big smile on their face. They didn’t seem particularly upset when I cycled past them without distributing the stacks of thousand-dollar bills they knew were in my trailer.

The fifteen or so larger and older boys were not so reserved. They broke into a run beside me and I became very glad that after the pickpocketing in Addis I had ‘kidproofed’ my bike and bags. They grabbed at the bags and the pockets trying to open them. Hands ranged everywhere trying to find something that could be torn loose. Eventually they focused their attention on the one thing that was not under lock and key: the facecloth that I had stuck under the trailer’s bungee cords so that it could dry out.

If they’d known how harmless and (normally) gentle I was they could easily have made off with their prize. But I was an unknown quantity and they dashed in and out quickly, not daring to linger too long within reach of my dula.

When I approached the beginning of a long sloping descent they realized I was soon going to get away and their efforts at the facecloth intensified and the screaming and yelling reached a fevered pitch. I made the slope still in possession of my facecloth if not my sanity and shot off down the hill. The frustrated boys did the only thing they could and sent a volley of rocks arcing through the air in my direction.

The Eyes of an Eagle

It was mid-afternoon. Hot and still. I’d passed through a bunch of small places where with a bit of searching I probably could have found some lunch, but each time the hordes of children overwhelmed me and I decided not to stop and kept cycling. All I had to eat were some dry buns leftover from Addis and I took them out and munched on them as I rode along. Between bites I put my hand back on the handlebar and held the buns there between thumb and finger.

When I was halfway through the second bun I saw a group of children emerge from some tukul huts and run out onto the road. I braced myself for the usual madness, but as I approached them doing a pretty good clip the smallest of the children, barely more than a toddler ran out into the middle of the road and came straight at me. I rang my bell just in case he wasn’t aware of me. That was the only reason I could think of why he would do what he was doing. Either that or this was some new kind of game, like chicken, and at the last second he would veer away, another way to have fun with the ferenji – scare him half to death.

But he didn’t turn and ran smack into the handlebars full tilt. Luckily I’d slammed on the brakes just before impact. If I hadn’t done so I would have knocked him flying, probably hurt him quite badly because with the bike and luggage I was over 300 pounds on the move. But this kid when he ran into the bike he thrust a hand forward, jammed it into mine, tore away what remained of the second bun and ran away.

Of course I puzzled over this incident for the rest of the day trying to figure out what it was all about. I had to wonder if it was because he was hungry that this child was willing to risk his life to get at that bun. But that didn’t make any sense. Nobody I’d seen looked hungry enough for a bun to be so irresistible. I wondered if perhaps my earlier guess was correct and it was just a game. But silly as it sounds these considerations were nothing compared to the one question that really bugged me. How in the world had that child, from that distance, seen the bun in the first place? He must have had eyes like an eagle.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Muketuri was on my map and I was learning that if a town was on the map it generally had a hotel. These small-town hotels were perfect for my purposes. Like the Tiru Gondar they were a combination restaurant, bar and simple hotel. But unlike the Tiru the rooms were behind the restaurant and arranged around an inner courtyard. The courtyard also contained the water supply (if there was one) and kitchen area. The water supply could be a tank with a faucet which they filled by hand or as at the Hoteela Wucaalee in Muketuri an actual tap with running water. After spending any amount of time in rural Ethiopia you soon start to marvel at the little conveniences. When the light turns on and stays on you are pleased and relieved. Running water is a cause for celebration. A flush toilet with a door would mean you’ve been abducted by aliens.

The courtyard had its own entrance wide enough to accommodate vehicles and it was a simple matter to wheel my bike, luggage and all, right up to my room. The price was right too: around 5 birr or one dollar Canadian. A full meal cost around the same and a bottle of mineral water only about twenty five cents. In total I found I was spending about $3 a day.

I was surprised to discover that the diet out in the countryside was even more meat based than in the big city Addis. For dinner in Sululta my first night I was served a huge plate of chopped up sheep meat, called ‘tebs’, and injera. For breakfast in Chancho they only had tebs. For dinner in Muketuri tebs was on the menu. When in the morning I asked about the availability of breakfast (“kers”) the restaurant manager raised her eyebrows and inquired, “Tebs?”

You have to careful I know in processing this kind of information. I couldn’t assume that tebs was the only food available. Quite often what happens is that they do things differently for the ferenji. For example I think tebs is generally considered the best food (or at least the most expensive) so they always offered it to me. When I ask if there is anything else and they say “no” they might be saying that there is nothing else that they think a ferenji would like.

My problem with tebs was not the meat per se. To stick to vegetarianism here would be impossible not to mention silly. My problem was that the meat could be very tough. It took forever for my poor teeth to break it up and bits of meat invariably got jammed between my teeth. I couldn’t dislodge them and it was very painful as my teeth got pushed apart. I tried digging at the “meat jams” with the cap to a Bic pen (the only thing I had) and I nearly dislodged a tooth. Afterwards my bite felt completely different like one tooth was a bit higher than it used to be.

This concern to give the ferenji the best cropped up all over the place. If I’d asked someone in Addis if there was a hotel in Mukateri they would have said no. It would not have occurred to them that I would happily spend the night in a place like the Hoteela Wucaalee. And in these hotel restaurants they instantly turned on the radio whenever I came in. It was loud and distorted and annoyed me terribly, but they were trying to please me. If there was a TV they’d turn that on as well in an attempt to make me happy, but it only drove me out of the room.

I got room number four at the Hoteela Wucaalee. It was about twelve feet by twelve feet. The walls were wattle and daub and were painted a bright red for the first six feet and then white from there to the ceiling. The ceiling was a sheet of galvanized tin laid over a confusion of sticks and pieces of wood. A single light bulb dangled from a wire, barely visible through a thick blanketing of cobwebs. The door was more cardboard than anything else. There may have been wood once, but over the years the wood had rotted away and it was replaced bit by bit with whatever junk was handy. There was the suggestion of a window in the wall, but it too had slowly disintegrated and been replaced by cardboard. The bed, however, was a cyclist’s dream – big and fully made up with clean sheets, blankets and pillows. The room may have been more of a stable than room, but with a bed like that they could have put it in an open field and I’d have been happy.

I had been in a foul mood when I arrived at the Hoteela Wucaalee. The day had been tiring and difficult and the Muketuri children turned out to be far worse than those I’d encountered in the countryside. A huge number of them pursued me from one end of town to the other grabbing at me and the bike, screaming, whistling, pushing, pulling, shoving, begging, jeering and laughing. Even the adults gave me a hard time.

My mood wasn’t helped any when just like in Sululta a number of the hotel employees made themselves comfortable on my bed to enjoy the show of me unpacking. I didn’t want to put myself through that again but at first didn’t see how I could prevent it. The door, just as in Sululta, did not have a latch on the inside so even if I threw them out there was nothing to keep them from coming back in. Then I hit on an idea. I grabbed my soap, said that I needed to go wash my hands, shooed everyone out and locked the door behind me with my padlock. I returned to my room when I was finished and when the room filled up with people once more I grabbed my Dromedary bag and said I had to go get water. And again I shooed everyone out and locked the door behind me. I did this one more time (claiming I needed to wash my face) and after that they stopped bursting in. I guess they figured I wasn’t such good entertainment value after all.

But once settled into my room the famous Ethiopian hospitality began to take over and in the face of many friendly gestures and encounters my mood softened and a bit of my sense of humor (and sense of the absurd) returned. In the restaurant over dinner I was surrounded by interested and friendly men who wanted to hear all about who I was, where I came from and what I thought of Ethiopia. “Konjo. Ethiopia konjo,” they told me. (Ethiopia is beautiful.) They wanted to know what I thought of the air in Ethiopia (which they considered to be the freshest and best in the world). And they were very proud of the weather. 13 months of sunshine they told me, parroting the ubiquitous tourism slogan. We drank beer together and I muddled my way through the mixed English and Amharic conversation until fatigue claimed me and I had to leave.

Back in my room working on my bike, filtering water and otherwise getting ready for the next day I started to wonder seriously if travelling by bicycle might in fact be a mistake for this country. By that I mean that Ethiopians appeared to have a split personality. In private, for example in the Hoteela Wucaaleee they were friendly, honest, open and extremely easy to get to know. In public, for example out on the streets and roads, they turned into Mr. Hyde. They were rude, aggressive, bent on stealing anything they can get their hands on and hostile.

Cycling put me in direct contact with the Ethiopian Mr. Hyde for 8 hours a day. At the end of the day when the Ethiopian Dr. Jekyll invites me into his home I’m too tired to enjoy it and can only collapse into bed.

I wondered if perhaps I was seeing some of the worst effects of international aid. It seemed to have created a society of professional beggars and I don’t mean in the sense of hungry people asking for food. They asked for and demanded everything I possessed simply on reflex. Even at the Hoteela Wucaalee after I’d stopped people from coming right into my room to look for plunder they simply set up a vigil outside my door and pounced whenever I emerged. Even in the latrine or “shent beat” I wasn’t safe. I went there late at night finding my way through the piles of shit with a flashlight. I was just settling down when a man emerged from the darkness, grabbed for the flashlight and demanded, “Give me!” In the morning washing my hands another person wanted my soapdish. And of course everyone wanted my bicycle.

I decided that the next day even if it got smelly and mouldy I was going keep my washcloth inside one of my bags and not put it under a bungee cord to air dry. Of course I wasn’t worried about the cost of replacing it if it got stolen. It was just that 8 hours of hundreds of little Mr. Hydes making dives for it can really wear you down.

Tags: bike, Ethiopia, Ethiopia Bike Trip, Hoteela Wucaalee