“Father, father, where are you go?”

Five minutes into the new day and I already had my first entourage of children. They didn’t call me “ferenji”, however. Not even “you you.” It seems I’d been promoted. I was now “father.” “Father, father, where are you go?” cried the children.

All in all I thought it a great improvement. The ‘father’ denoted a certain respect and the ‘where are you go?’ had a fairy tale quality to it, like the opening line of a child’s bedtime story. “I’m off to grandma’s house,” I wanted to call back.

Unfortunately they spoiled the mood and after every ‘Father, father, where are you go?’ came the torrent. “Give me pen, give me money, give me one birr, give me, give me give me.” When I didn’t give them anything I got a rock in the back.

For my own sanity I decided to set some ground rules in my dealings with these children. It was obvious that they weren’t going to go away and there was no power on earth that was going to stop them from following me and exercising their little but powerful lungs. And the throwing of stones, much as it bothered me, was equally impossible to stop. And neither behaviour was actually dangerous. The yelling didn’t hurt me physically and the stones 99% of the time were thrown to miss. I’d seen these children hit the horns of cattle from twenty yards away so I knew they weren’t missing me through a lack of ability. If they wanted to they could peg me off the head nine times out of ten.

The behaviour where I decided to draw the line was in pushing and pulling on the trailer. As long as the children just ran beside me they could scream their little hearts out and I was going to be the Buddha, untouchable, unperturbed, remote in my aerie of cross-cultural contemplation. But touch the trailer, lay a hand on the bike, and ferenji retribution would be swift and merciless.

I experimented with various types of retribution. At first when the crowds got out of hand and the games with the trailer began I simply slowed the bike to a stop and then turned to the children, a beatific smile on my face, and through sign language and my limited (probably incomprehensible) Amharic made it clear that the trailer was inviolate. Do no touch

This, of course, lasted about as long as a mother in a grocery store trying to use logic and reason to keep her 4-year-old from pulling over the stack of pudding cans. Then out came the dula. My mighty weapon. I brought it down on the Yak Sak with a blow that would have done Paul Bunyan proud (I swear I felt the ground tremble). The explosive sound of impact bought me only about ten seconds of peace, but I did note with satisfaction that by pure chance I’d totally liquefied a fly who after sating himself on my sweat was hitching a ride on the trailer.

The technique I finally settled on was as effective as it was sneaky and a little bit nasty. I waited till just the right moment when the little devils had their hands on the trailer and were just about to drag me to a halt. Then I beat them to it by jamming on the brakes. The whole crowd, taken unawares, would go flying ass over tea kettle and land all in a heap around me. The Cheshire cat had nothing on the grin that spread across my ferenji mug as I looked down on the havoc I’d created.

After that the children kept a healthy distance between them and the trailer. They looked at it as if it was a coiled cobra ready to strike. Just for fun I lightly pumped the brakes making the trailer jerk and the whole circle of children jumped as if goosed and moved back another couple of feet.

With experimentation I learned that there was no need to jam on the brakes fully. Doing so risked injuring the children (like I was really worried about that) and brought me to a complete halt, the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. All I needed to do was pump the brakes rapidly. The sudden jerks scared them into letting go of the trailer (they ripped their hands away as if the trailer had suddenly become electrified), but didn’t actually trip them or cause them to fall.

The really great thing about this technique and what gave me vast amounts of semi-sadistic pleasure was that I could watch the children in my rear view mirror as they gathered up their courage for the assault to come. They weren’t aware that I could see them and I loved watching them sneaking up on the trailer, talking amongst themselves, whispering their plans and giggling at the joke they were going to play on me. But I was the grade school teacher with eyes in the back of his head, watching the troublemakers prepare their joke, knowing all the while that the joke was soon to be on them.

The men on the road also called me ‘Father’ and to my surprise when I greeted them or even if we only made eye contact and I gave them a simple nod they scrambled to doff their head gear and gave a small bow. The women gave low bows and even kissed their hands in my direction. I was as uncomfortable with this as I was with the behaviour of the children. I didn’t think I was so horrible as to deserve a stoning, but I knew I wasn’t worthy of this kind of deference.

I realized after a time that much of this was my fault and stemmed from my being so unsure of myself out here amongst these people. Just like in Addis I was behaving like a beauty queen in a parade, waving to everyone, greeting everyone, smiling at everyone, looking them deep in the eye asking them to love me. Most of the men and women would not have bothered with me except I made contact first. And this contact caused them all kinds of problems. The women invariably struggled with large and awkward loads on their backs. To respond to my eternal self-conscious greetings was a physical effort for them and threatened their precarious balance. The men often had a couple of layers of head gear including the carefully wrapped shamma. Taking it off and putting it back on was not as simple as putting on a baseball cap but involved a long process of careful rewinding. I could almost hear them grumbling as I passed. “A guy just manages to get his shamma wrapped the way he likes it and some ferenji on a bike comes past and expects him to take it off.”

It was difficult, but I tried to stifle the urge to greet all and sundry. I played with the limits of this behaviour and found that I could make eye contact and people appeared to like that and as long as I didn’t nod there wasn’t this sudden impulse to treat me like a conquering war hero. It finally dawned on me that the bows and the doffing of head gear was not in fact a result of a misplaced respect for me, the dumb white guy on a bike. They were responding to what they saw as an elaborate show of respect on my part. In the west a nod is the most casual of greetings. It’s even a macho kind of thing where two men can acknowledge the presence of the other without speaking and without giving away a thing in terms of status. But I wasn’t in the west and I was on a bicycle and already more or less bowed over the handlebars. My nods were taken as an attempt at a bow. Ethiopian hospitality demanded that such a greeting be returned with at least the same level of courtesy and like the idiot I was I was forcing the entire Ethiopian farming population to waste half their day bowing back and rewrapping shammas.

The sun was as intense as always and the land continued to surprise me with its fertility and exhaust me with its contours. I topped 2,800 meters and bottomed out at 2,600, but most of the time ranged inbetween those two gaining then losing those two hundred meters with every passing hour.

Small mountain ranges played head games with me. They would appear in front of me, but no matter how long I cycled they somehow never got any closer. It was as if they’d wait until I wasn’t looking then get up and take a few thousand steps backwards. When I did finally catch up with them they presented such a difference face that I didn’t recognize them for the mountains I’d been pursuing so ardently. The next thing I knew they were behind me leaving me puzzled as to how they got there.

The road surface was extremely rough, the tarmac having long since worn away leaving only exposed stone and gravel. But traffic was almost non-existent and I could safely ride down the very centre of the road where a raised patch of smoother surface remained. When I heard the tell-tale strains of “Asa Belobelo” from an approaching bus I had more than enough time to move to the side and out of harm’s way.

On the steeper slopes the road was forced to loop back and forth in long lazy switchbacks. The trails, however, could take a more direct course up the mountains and those on foot and driving animals either kept pace with me or surged ahead. On the long climbs I became accustomed to seeing the same people and animals over and over again as we passed and then repassed each other.

I noticed that many of the animals were hobbled in one fashion or another and this cleared up a misconception I’d had since Addis. While sitting in an Addis coffee shop one day a boy had come along the sidewalk driving a flock of 20 sheep. One sheep was hopping along on only one front leg. When they got close I saw its right leg was broken and tied up, doubled over with a rag. I thought the pain must have been excruciating and my heart went out to the poor sheep.

Now I saw many more sheep with the same tied up front leg and I realized that far from having a broken leg these particular sheep had very good legs and tended to wander away. They were the malcontents who wouldn’t stay with the herd and so had to be hobbled to keep them close to home.

“This Part Ethiopian”

I stopped for the day in a small crossroads town called Gomando (rhymes with ‘commando’). The much larger town of Fiche (the only town indicated on my map) was 3 kilometers away down a side road and since it was early I decided to walk there and look around.

Fiche was by far the largest town I’d seen so far on my journey and had several banks, many nice houses, even a military base. Gomando was by comparison little more than an overgrown truckstop. And yet because of its position on the main road one felt the momentum had shifted to Gomando and it would grow and prosper while Fiche became a backwater.

The road connecting the two was bone-jarringly rough, which I experienced firsthand on my return in the back of one of the stripped down share taxis. At first I hesitated to climb into the back because the passengers were exclusively women and I didn’t want to embarrass them by wiggling my big ferenji butt inbetween theirs. But I could have saved myself the worry. They were a confident, proud and physical people and were not intimidated by me in the slightest. Indeed during the day as I was besieged with unwanted attention I often wished they weren’t quite so self-possessed.

Taking a shower later that afternoon (the hotel was a more modern affair with running water) I caught sight of myself in a mirror and laughed. My upper body was a bizarre composite of colours: I had a blindingly white chest, nicely bronzed forearms, and painfully red ears, nose and neck. (My ears were so badly burned that for days I couldn’t bear to put them on the rock hard pillows and had trouble sleeping.) The tops of my hands were a very dark brown because they usually laid flat on the handlebars and got the full impact of the sun all day long. But my fingers and knuckles, which were normally curled under the handlebars, got no sun at all and remained a stark white.

I compared myself to one of those strange creatures that lives at the bottom of the ocean and never sees the light. One of the young men who worked at the hotel, however, declared me a new kind of hybrid, part Canadian and part Ethiopian. He came up to me where I stood on the roof and shyly touched my white biceps and said, “This part Canadian.” He then pointed to my much darker forearm. “This part Ethiopian.”

Tags: Asa Belobelo, bike, Ethiopia Bike Trip, fly, Paul Bunyan