The Toe TAL Hoe Tal

The town that Azmo had sent me to was called Amanuel and it was as he said only 5 km away. But it was all uphill and I was soon reduced to pushing the bike almost continuously. I tried from time to time to pedal, but my rear wheel simply spun out from under me on the loose rock.

I looked at my speedometer as I pushed and I was doing a steady 3.5 km/hr. There were a lot of people walking along the same road heading towards Amanuel and they all passed me at one point or another, the men, the women, the children, the grandmothers, the grandfathers, all of them. The real low point came when a chicken, not running but just strolling along, passed me as well.

Word of my approach had spread and I found a reception committee of 50 people waiting for me in Amanuel. I stopped my bike and they gathered around me in a semi-circle to get a look at the crazy wild man they’d been hearing about. For some reason the women were particularly excited and crowded close laughing and trying to outdo each other in witty comments about me. But they were friendly and when I brought out my camera to take a picture of this crowd around my bicycle they didn’t scatter as I thought they would but stood a bit straighter and arranged themselves in neat lines.

There was supposed to be a Total gas station and hotel in Amanuel, but when I asked about it I only got blank stares. They wanted to help me, but no one knew what I was talking about. I thought perhaps I wasn’t in Amanuel at all but when I asked them that question I got the same friendly but blank stares.

I often wondered what people thought I was talking about when I asked about the name of a town. In terms of sign language the only thing I could think to do was to point at the ground. “This place, here.” They’d look at the ground where I was pointing, eager to help me out, but could never figure out what was so special about that particular piece of ground. I tried pointing around me in a circle to indicate this place and they would look around obligingly but still not come up with the name of the town. My last trick was to list the names of all the preceding towns in order leading up to where I was now and kind of trail off waiting for them to fill in the blank. “Dejen, Debre Markos, Eyola…” pointing to the ground, waving my arm in a circle, waiting… Sometimes this last effort worked, but most often I just ended up with everyone repeating the names of all the towns I mentioned.

I eventually gave up on this crowd and cycled into what I thought was Amanuel and from time to time stopped to question other people. “Total Hotel? Alga alle? Megeb alle?” (Total Hotel? Are there rooms here? Food?” All I got were more blank stares until someone had the idea to send off for the local English speaker. This turned out to be a kid who had been studying a bit of English in school and I guess showed some aptitude for it.

“Hotel alle?” I asked him.

He pointed directly behind me and said there was a hotel right there.

“You want food?” he then asked me.

I said yes I wanted food. Food, a room, a place to sleep.

“Ah,” he replied, “you want Toe TAL Hoe Tal.”

It took me a second to get it, but I agreed happily.

“Yes,” I said, “Total Hotel. Toe TAL Hoe Tal.”

Now everyone was smiling and nodding and repeating the name. Toe TAL Hoe Tal they all said with a strong emphasis on the TAL (which rhymed with the name Al). He wants Toe TAL Hoe Tal. They had no idea what this “Todle Hodel” thing was that I was rambling on about, but the Toe TAL Hoe Tal was a landmark in Amanuel. It was the premiere hotel, the gas station, the bus stop, and otherwise the centre of town.

By that time of course I was committed. I knew I was in the right village and could find the hotel by just cycling up the road, but it was too late for that. I’d asked the question and now I had a guide, my interpreter. He was a classic street ragamuffin with clothing holding on by just a thread, plastic slippers with his toes poking through and a very possessive attitude about me. He ran ahead of me down the road crying out “Come here, come here, come here, follow, follow, follow, come here, come here, come here.” He didn’t dare leave a moment’s silence where he wasn’t actually directing me because his competition, the 15 other children running with us, might jump in and stake a claim. One or two of them tried to add their voice to his and cried “come here, come here”, but my guide picked up some rocks and drove them off. He was my guide and let there be no mistake about it.

About a hundred meters up the road we came to the Toe TAL Hoe Tal and gas station. My guide marched right up to it still calling out “come here, come here” and I think he would have brought me right to a room and installed me in it if I hadn’t spotted a man who looked like the manager and stopped my bike.

It was a pleasant enough place. The gas station and restaurant building was up front next to the road and behind it the rooms were arranged in a ‘U’ forming a kind of courtyard. There were a number of trees and it was shady and cool. They showed me a room and I was all set to move in, but somebody else piped up that I should get the “favorable” room. The ‘favorable’ room looked the same as the others (just cost a couple of birr extra), but I didn’t argue and said it was fine. My guide was still hovering of course (despite the manager’s attempt to send him away) and I gave him two birr for his help. This was a lot more than he was expecting and he immediately split it with a boy who was standing beside him and they ran off.

THE CONVERSATION

While they were busy putting sheets on the bed in the favorable room I went out to the gas station and had a couple of bottles of Pepsi. A man sat at a nearby table and in garbled English told me his life story. I understood very little, but it seemed he had become a refugee during the years when Mengistu was in power. He lived in Eritrea, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and even Zaire for a time. The point of this story was that in those countries he’d had a lot of exposure to white people and he knew what we liked to do. So if I wanted to go into the village he would take me to the church and to the monastery. He knew that white people liked to go look at things. I wasn’t going back out into that sun for anything and said no. I preferred to sit right there and watch the village from the comfort of the Toe TAL’s shady verandah.

I tried to order some food in the restaurant, but all they could offer me was eggs and bread. I really had an appetite for some tebs, but it wasn’t available. “Tebs yellem.” (There is no tebs.) I didn’t trust this particular “yellem” and went back to the kitchen to see for myself. I thought maybe the refugee from the front had dispensed his wisdom about white people and told them that we couldn’t eat Ethiopian food. But the kitchen, though large, was completely empty. I pressed about getting some injera from somewhere else, but apparently in all of Amanuel there was only eggs and bread. I gave in and they brought me a small plate of scrambled eggs and a couple of buns. That was my supper. It was also my breakfast and lunch. I wasn’t doing so good when it came to meals. I knew I should make more of an effort, but I was still suffering mental aftershocks from the sickness that I’d picked up at the Blue Nile Gorge. I just didn’t like putting food into my system. If I went hungry at least I was just hungry and didn’t run the risk of being sick.

The girl who served me my eggs told me that her name was Melcome Birhan. ‘Birhan’ meant ‘light’ she told me. She looked at the information I’d written in the hotel register and wanted to know what my name meant and what the name of my hometown meant. I told her that my name didn’t have a meaning, it was just a name, just a sound, but she found this hard to believe. I could see her point. When you thought about it it was strange to have a name with no meaning, to be identified by just a nonsense sound.

She also asked me (as did every Ethiopian – this was all part of “THE CONVERSATION”) about my religion, my age, whether I was married and of course how much my bicycle cost. When I arrived in Ethiopia I made up my mind to tell people the truth no matter how difficult or complicated that was and for a time I stuck to my guns. But I didn’t have the energy for it anymore. The ‘truth’ as I understood it was simply too foreign to be easily accepted. In Ethiopia there was no such thing as having no religion. Melcome’s question properly translated was not about my beliefs but whether I was Muslim or Christian. These were the only two options as she understood them, the only two possibilities in her world and so I told her I was Christian.

What I said about my age depended on what I said about my marital status. If I told her my true age, 36, I had to be married. There was no other option. No one had a problem with me abandoning my imaginary wife and children in Canada to go traipsing around Ethiopia for 7 months. But to be 36 and single was a big problem. This had to be discussed for a good half hour and the people to whom I told this ‘truth’ usually ended up quite upset. In Melcome’s case she was giggling and seemed to prefer the idea of my being single and so I told her I was 26. This was a good age, right at the cusp of marriage, and the Ethiopians to whom I told this ‘truth’ ended up being very happy for me because they saw marriage in the very near future.

The ‘truth’ about how much my bicycle cost had been changing constantly. Even I didn’t like to think about how much the bike plus all my other gear had cost. The actual cost to an Ethiopian (in Ethiopian birr) would appear astronomical, probably obscene and I’d never once told the real value. It would have translated into more than most of the people who asked this question would earn in their lifetime. They knew, however, that it was expensive and in asking the question they wanted to be titillated so I eventually settled on the figure I told Melcome, $500 or about 3,500 birr.

The Chamber of Horrors

When my room was ready I rolled my bike around to the back and started moving in. I was amazed at how heavy my bags felt, particularly the Yak Sak. In the morning it never felt as heavy. It had some heft, sure, but it wasn’t that bad. But as I carried it into the favorable room after a long day I thought my back was going to snap. “What do I have in here?” I wondered. “Rocks?”

The manager and Melcome and a few other people crowded after me hoping to get a look inside those bags and see what could possibly cost as much as $500, but I simply barred their way and then closed the door. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I had my room to myself and could unpack in peace, but there was another problem. With the door closed and no windows and no electricity the room was pitch black. Feeling silly (though no sillier than usual) I put my Petzl flashlight on my head and by its light went through the routine of settling into my room. The mosquito net went up easily. There was no need to change the lightbulb, since there was no electricity and no light. I didn’t even glance at the door. It was so twisted in its frame that in order to close it far enough to throw the latch I’d had to lift it with all my strength and then throw my entire body weight against it. A simple tightening of the hinges was not going to do it this time. It needed a team of carpenters to set it right.

I emerged to find the manager still standing outside my room and I asked him if he could show me where the toilet was. He took me to the far end of the courtyard and I was not pleased to see that the bathroom door was closed with a giant padlock. He unlocked the door for me and I went in to check it out. It was a real chamber of horrors. It wasn’t as dirty as most I’d seen and the toilet stalls were more defined and separate than normal. But the mud and straw walls were crumbling and had large holes cut deep into them. Over the years spiders had moved into these holes and constructed the most elaborate system of spider webs I had ever seen. The walls were literally moving and billowing with a thick film of white gauze. I hadn’t seen anything like it outside of cheap horror films where they used cotton batten for the spider webs. It wasn’t the webbing made with concentric rings but the kind that funnel spiders used. It lay vertically and horizontally like blankets or hammocks. Inside the hammocks, lying at their ease were immense spiders. It was like a retirement home for spiders – big old fat spiders swinging back and forth in their hammocks waiting for the next juicy fly daiquiri. I didn’t imagine they’d turn up their nose at a ferenji midnight snack either and I shuddered. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get up the nerve to squat in there, in the dark, when the inevitable time came.

The Mystery of the Little Bowls

I never did have to face the spiders, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. At 3:00 a.m. I woke up and knew I had to use the bathroom. I didn’t want to believe it and lay there for a time trying to convince myself that it could wait till morning, but it was hopeless. With a sigh and a groan I got out from under my nice warm blankets and sleeping bag, parted the mosquito net and put my bare feet down on the cold cement floor and felt around for my flip-flops. I fumbled around in the dark till I found my Petzl headlamp, put it on my head and then put on a shirt and a pair of pants. I heaved the door open, pulled it shut behind me and locked it.

It was pitch dark outside and I narrowed the focus on my Petzl headlamp to a spotlight. I walked to the end of the courtyard and the whole time I’m walking I’m hoping that the bathroom door won’t be padlocked. But I glanced ahead with my spotlight and sure enough the door was closed and glinting back at me off the latch was the padlock.

I was just thinking that it was a good thing I wasn’t sick when I heard a tremendous moaning and groaning. I looked down and saw a mattress on the ground in front of the bathroom. On the mattress was a man, the security guard. Not only had they locked the bathroom they’d placed a guard on it. I guess it was the best bathroom in town and they didn’t want the riff raff of Amanuel sneaking in there and messing it up.

The sound of my flip flops along with the flashlight had partially roused the guard and he started making noises at me. “Who goes there?” and “State your business” sort of stuff. It was likely that this guard was also the keeper of the key, but I made a quick decision that there was no way I was going to stand around at 3 in the morning with a a flashlight on my head and discuss my bodily functions with a half awake stranger. I made soothing noises, told him everything was all right, that he could go back to sleep and slowly backed away. Unfortunately while backing up I flushed a group of 3 dogs sleeping near the guard and they tore off into the night. The guard was challenging me louder now and I took off my headlamp and shone it on my face to reassure him. “It’s just the ferenji,” I told him. “Go back to sleep.” And I flip flopped back in the direction of my room.

“Well, it was pee on a tree time,” I thought. And of course there was no problem with this. Ethiopians peed anywhere, anytime, no matter who was around. Men walking down a crowded sidewalk would suddenly stop, turn to the side and pee with almost military precision. Quite often during the day I’d be facing one guy talking to him and then I’d hear a splish splash behind me, sometimes all around me. I never turned and looked because I knew what was going on. Other men had stopped to look at me and simply stopping had triggered the urge to take a leak. Everybody just turned and peed. A fountain went off around me all day long.

I decided against the tree, though. I knew that if the security guard heard me he’d come rushing over to investigate. A ferenji peeing on a tree would be too good a show to miss. Then I thought of the little plastic bowl that was sitting outside my room. I’d seen these colourful little bowls in almost every hotel. They’d be lined up outside the vacant rooms like soldiers waiting for duty. Every night they all disappeared except for the one outside the room where the ferenji was staying. I never gave them much thought assuming they were for carrying water to wash your hands. But now I recalled a line from a tourist brochure that talked about no-star hotels without private bath but a chamber pot in each room.

That’s what these little bowls were. Chamber pots. It hadn’t occurred to me what their true use was because chamber pots in general were something of a mystery to me. I couldn’t imagine urinating into it and then leaving it out on the floor all night to stink up the room. And I never saw people emerging from their rooms in the morning carrying their chamber pots to the toilet and emptying them out. But it all made sense to me now and I incorporated the chamber pot into my hotel routine. It at least saved me the hassle of dealing with heavily guarded bathrooms and of course the spiders and other horrors that lurked within.

Tags: bike, Ethiopia Bike Trip, Total Hotel, Zaire