A Ghost in a Silent World

The next morning my eyes snapped open at 4:30. A drunk man was wandering through the Nile Hotel banging on each door in turn, looking, as all Ethiopians seemed to do in the early morning, for a friend. I called out to him when he reached my door and I offered to be his friend if he would go back to bed and let the world sleep. He was startled for a moment but shook it off and continued his banging. I sighed and tried to go back to sleep, but it was hopeless. I was awake and another day on the road in Ethiopia had begun.

I turned on my Petzl headlamp and shone it around the cramped room. There was my bike jammed inbetween bed and wall, still shiny and new despite the harsh treatment it had received. My pannier bags were packed and sat on the bed, one on each corner. My five water bottles filled with water from the nearby river were lined up neatly on the rickety chair.

There was something absurd about my bike and other gear in that setting and I smiled. I thought about the friendly sheep who’d butted against my leg and all the hilarity I’d caused and my smile widened. To think that in a very few minutes I was going to put together my gear and begin cycling down more Ethiopian roads with who knew what kinds of encounters waiting for me. I reflected that any sane person would turn the bike around and start heading back towards Addis and the airport rather than deeper into the mountains. I laughed aloud at that and used the momentum of the laugh to throw my blankets aside and climb out of bed.

I assembled my gear quickly and within a few minutes was standing astride my bike in the dark streets outside the hotel. The “keeper of the keys” who’d unlocked the door to let me out shook his head in wonderment at the crazy ferenji and then mumbling went back to his mattress in the hallway.

I didn’t start pedalling right away but took the time to look around me. Infrance of course was barely visible. The low buildings could be seen only as unnatural square shapes blocking parts of the starry sky. Here and there hung a single bare bulb, but their brightness only served to emphasize and deepen the surrounding darkness. Even a glance at them wiped out whatever night vision I was developing and I had to stare at the ground and wait till I could see again.

I flicked on my Petzl headlamp and took a look at my map. It confirmed what my informants had told me, that another finger of the mountain range came down across the road just outside of Infrance. I’d been told that this finger was much smaller than the one I’d come over past Adis Zemen, but that the road was rougher and steeper. For that reason I was glad to be on the road so early. I hoped to cover the 8 kilometres to the top of the ridge before the sun was much above the horizon and it was still cool.

I put the map away and switched my headlamp to a bright and focused spotlight. Like the bare bulbs in the village this had the effect of darkening the entire world, but at least I could see what was directly in front of me on the road and that was important if I didn’t want to inadvertently run into a cow or into the ditch. I also turned on the reflecting light that was attached to my rear pannier rack. This high-tech gizmo could be set to any number of complex flashing patterns and in a straight line down the road would be visible for kilometres. I flipped through the settings till I found the funkiest and most elaborate pattern, something between a disco mirror ball and a UFO gone berserk. I imagined truck or bus drivers coming up behind me and being totally mystified at the strobe light ahead of them. In my role of entertainer I figured I might as well be as entertaining as possible.

I felt the usual touch of euphoria as I put my feet to the pedals and began to move. There is something about moving under your own power like this that was intensely pleasurable, as addictive as any drug. Perhaps that was why I found myself leaving earlier and earlier every morning. It gave me a brief window of time of few distractions in which I could wallow in this sensation. Later on when Ethiopia had fully woken up and the real challenges began it would be more difficult to get in touch with this wanderlust.

Two kilometres outside of Infrance the batteries in my headlamp died and I was plunged into total darkness. I got off the bike to put the headlamp away and at the same time I turned off the reflector light. There wasn’t any traffic to be worried about and the light was so visible and so obviously foreign that it just attracted a lot of “you you you you” and “give me money” even at that early hour.

I thought I would have to wait by the side of the rode till dawn, but after a few minutes I found that by straining my eyes to their limits I could just make out the outline of the road. As my confidence grew I enjoyed the feeling of cycling in the dark. I felt I was invisible, no longer an exposed dumb white guy on a bike, but a ghost moving through a silent world.

From time to time a single shooting star appeared above the western horizon ahead of me. Then they started to arrive in pairs and groups leaving behind brilliant trails of reds, blues and greens like straight rainbows. Suddenly the whole sky was ablaze with them. It was a meteor shower unlike anything I’d seen before and I watched with a growing sense of wonder.

Behind me, as if jealous, the eastern sky began to brighten and add to the light display. As I watched it in my rear view mirror it moved from pink to yellow and then a light blue. As the blue darkened and took hold the stars all around began to wink out. Soon all I could see were the shooting stars and then these too were gone.

Who Could Blame Them?

The road once it began to climb into the mountains was as steep as anything I’d yet encountered and I settled into my usual grinding crawl. A young boy in a beautiful red and purple blanket climbed up onto a wooden platform to watch my approach. As I got nearer he held up both hands and said “salaam.” I said “salaam” back and he immediately started pointing to his mouth and holding out one hand. All I had were packages of a kind of hard tack biscuit, but he seemed glad to get those.

The hills and valleys around me were covered in cultivated fields and throughout them I saw many more of these crude wooden platforms. As the sun rose I saw children emerge from below them and climb rickety ladders to the top. They took out their slings, their ‘wenchefs’, and without putting a rock in their pockets began to whip them back and forth creating loud and vibrant snapping sounds. This sound was repeated from other platforms till the whole valley was alive with snapping.

I continued to see these platforms throughout the day and there was almost always a child on top with a wenchef. On the roads I came across groups of children gathering up rocks and putting them in tin cans. I spoke with some of them and eventually I put it all together. At night these platforms were shelters under which the children slept as they guarded the fields. During the day they climbed up on top and with their reserves of rocks and their slings drove off the birds that came to eat the ripening crops.

It wasn’t a bad job as farming chores go and I imagined they got some pleasure out of being up there all day with nothing to do but wing stones at birds. Of course it had to get a bit monotonous and who could blame them if the moving target of a dumb white guy on a bike proved too great a temptation and they hurled a few stones my way?

Just Another Animal in the Herd

6 kilometres from Infrance the early morning bus from Infrance passed me. From a distance I thought it was empty, but when it got close I saw that it was quite full. The Nile Hotel was right beside the “bus station” and I had watched a couple of buses arrive and depart. Crowds of people selling things descended on each one, but the crowd of hopeful passengers was even larger. These were distinguished by the bundles they carried, the clothes they wore – dressed for travelling – and the look of desperation on their faces. All of them were turned away and screaming matches erupted at the door. As always I felt sympathy for them. They lived a life where even a bus ride into Gondar was something that was in short supply and had to be fought for.

I watched the bus navigate the switchbacks above me trying to guess as I always did where the road was going to go next. And as always I guessed wrong. At one point the bus reached a spot that totally mystified me. I could not see how the road could get from where I was to the bus’s location. I looked for the secretive switchbacks but saw none. Then it all came clear. The road didn’t accomplish another switchback but simply doubled its steepness. It was like cycling directly up a ski hill.

As I rode I entertained myself by listening to the sounds of the valleys. I heard animals of course – birds, cows and sheep – but I also heard human voices shouting. Not at me for a change. They were just out shouting, going about their day’s work. I guessed that a lot of them were shouting at their animals. They used a lot of verbal commands to drive them, particularly the cattle. From what I saw, however, the animals didn’t pay very much attention to these verbal commands. They were too focused on the dulas, whips and rocks.

Coming around one switchback I ran into a large herd of cattle and behind it there was a young child, no more than a toddler. He wore only a tank top shirt with no pants or shoes. In his hand he carried a tiny stick, his first dula, and he used it to whack the cattle and drive them along, oblivious to the fact that they outweighed him by tons. I stopped my bike and watched, amazed as always to see how young the children were that were put in charge of the family’s animals. The cattle were spread out in a long line and I thought the toddler would eventually lose control of them, that one or two would take off or get ornery. But there rarely if ever was a problem. They learned to dominate these animals from a very young age.

It occurred to me that the behaviour of the children towards me – throwing stones, whacking me with sticks, chasing me with whips and wenchefs, whistling, shouting, making obnoxious noises – was exactly the same as their behaviour towards their animals. It went a long way towards explaining why they did these things and where they got the courage from. I may be big and foreign and scary but ultimately I was just another animal in the herd to be driven along.

“You Unbearable Monsters!”

I was still riding in the shade of the valleys and it was very cold. My hands were the most exposed and had frozen into rigid claws. Above me I saw the sun touch the top of the ridge and then begin to move down. I gauged the progress of this line and looked forward to the time when we would meet and the sun’s warm rays would breathe some life back into my stiff fingers. But cycling is always a tradeoff. You never get anything without giving up something else in return and when the sunlight arrived the world around me exploded into flies. It was as if the soil of Ethiopia was made of flies – add sunlight and stir.

I pretended for a while that I was tougher than I was and contented myself with only brushing them away when they actually made up their mind to go spelunking in the various orifices my head and face offered. But soon my facade crumbled and I was waving my arms frantically and cursing loudly. “Flies! Flies! Flies!” I screamed.

I realized I was going to have to do something and for the first time I got out my Muskol insect repellant. I hadn’t used it before because Muskol is 100% DEET, a chemical so powerful it numbs your lips and melts rubber. But it was either that or go mad and I applied it lavishly. My sweat quickly transferred it to my eyes and mouth and my eyes burned and my lips lost all feeling, but it had the desired effect on the flies. I spent the rest of the day giggling and laughing and cheering as fly after fly dove towards my ears or eyes and then, its internal radar confused by the DEET, crashed into me and literally bounced off. Some of them managed to land but a millisecond later took off as if their tiny little feet were on fire. “Take that!” I screamed at them. “Take that you hideous fiends! You unbearable monsters!”

Though far more effective than I’d hoped I did find the Muskol wore out and evaporated with my sweat and I had to stop from time to time to reapply it. Ethiopians saw me applying this liquid and thinking it was something good, something they wanted to get in on came up to me and asked for some for themselves. I tried to tell them it was insect repellant and a savage chemical, but they weren’t having any of it. They knew it was some kind of wonderful medicine or skin cream that only rich ferenjis had access to and they wanted some, especially young girls. In the end the only thing I could do was wait till I was on an isolated stretch of road and apply it quickly before anyone spotted me.

Unfortunately this meant I got it all over my hands and not wanting to spread it to the rubber parts of my bicycle I then had to go through the complicated process of washing my hands after each application. It became a very involved and time-consuming process, but the stinging defeat it inflicted on the flies was worth it and applying Muskol became another routine part of my cycling day.

Kids Today

I was more than a little surprised when at exactly 8.2 kilometers from Infrance I reached the top of the ridge and started down the other side. I wasn’t used to having local information turn out to be so accurate. When getting advice I usually dispensed with the dash of salt and shovelled it in by the pound. Women in particular were hopeless informants. Their world did not extend much beyond the boundaries of their village. Men were a bit better and could be surprisingly accurate about distances to the next one or two villages up the road. Beyond that, however, only the foolish would put much stock by what they said. Sometimes on a whim I’d ask about other parts of the country and they were quite up front about their inability to help me out. “That is so far away,” they’d say. “How can I know?”

The view on the other side was very pleasant especially with the sun just peaking over the hills and spreading that nice dawn light. The road, however, was hideous and I crashed and banged all the way back down to the Lake Tana flood plain. I couldn’t take my eyes from the road for even a second without risking losing control.

Not long after reaching the bottom I came across two young boys standing in the middle of the road. “You you you you you…” they cried as I approached them. They seemed nice enough and I stopped the bike and nodded and smiled. “Photo, photo,” they said. I wasn’t in the mood to take pictues, said “camera yellem” and after saying goodbye started pedalling again.

I hadn’t gone 50 yards when a huge rock went whipping past me and clattered up the road. I stopped the bike and looked back and saw that one of the kids had his wenchef out. He was reaching down for another rock when his friend nudged him and pointed out that the ferenji was turning around. I only intended to frighten them a little bit, but when the kids stood there defiantly I thought, “what the heck, let’s go get them” and roared back up the road.

Long before I reached them the kid with the wenchef took off at right angles to the road. I put the bike down intending to chase him, but my legs were so weak I could barely run. The climb up the ridge had tired me out and the quick sprint back to these boys had finished me off. So I loped and jogged in the direction the kid had gone. There was a low ridge not far from the road and I thought that perhaps he was hiding on the other side and I could give him the scare of a lifetime.

But when I reached the top of the ridge the kid was a good kilometre away and still running like mad, his feet kicking up spurts of dust like in a Roadrunner cartoon. To catch him I’d have had to chase him all the way into the mountains and probably back to his village.

I went back to where I’d lain down my bike and the other kid who hadn’t slung the stone was still there tending his herd of cattle. He was looking a little too safe and smug for my liking and instead of getting back on the bike I crossed the road and started walking towards him. He backed away, the panic growing on his face, and then hid behind a couple of cows. I walked around the cows towards him and an old man standing nearby shouted something in Amharic. I didn’t know what he said, but I assumed it was something like “run for your life” because the kid tore across the road in the direction the other kid had gone.

It was all kind of amusing and with a smile on my face I watched the kid disappear over the ridge. I heard the old man chuckling behind me and when I turned and caught his eye he smiled in a friendly way and shrugged his shoulders. “Kids today,” he seemed to be saying. “What are you gonna do?”

The Injera Encounters

I stopped for something to eat in the small village of Tedat. There were two restaurants there, one on each side of the road and I parked my bike in the middle to look them over and make up my mind. One of them had a large water container with a tap outside. On top of the container was a bar of soap and a man was washing his hands. I looked at the other restaurant and it didn’t have a place to wash your hands so I went to the place with the jug of water. I always liked to reward initiatives like that.

I was surprised to see that it was also a hotel. The rooms in back were small and dark and grim and dirty, but they would have served if I’d wanted to stay the night there. The restaurant itself was fairly typical and filled with the usual assortment of layabout men that never seemed to have anything to do with their time but lie about.

I was a source of great amusement for these men for a long time. The laughter poured out of them and whenever it threatened to die down someone would toss a new comment into the silence and the laughter would begin again. I didn’t mind. It all seemed pretty good natured. I got the impression that they were teasing the owner of the restaurant more than me. “Now, you’ve done it,” they seemed to be saying. “You’ve gone and made your restaurant so nice with the water container and these nice tourism posters on the wall. And now you’re in big trouble. Look! The tourists are coming! Do you even know how to serve them? What do tourists eat, anyway?”

This tourist ate injera (not like there was a choice anyway) and when it came I looked carefully for the big pile of orange nuclear spicing but couldn’t find it. This spicing was usually placed at the very edge of the injera and you could mix in as much or as little as you liked into the wat in the middle. Being a digestive wimp I usually ate around the spicing. It took rather dexterous fingers to tear the injera around the spicing without disturbing it. Sometimes I’d make a mistake and pull the injera too far and then let go without tearing it. The rubbery injera sprang back into position and catapulted the entire load of spicing into the middle with dire digestive consequences. In this case there was no need for care because the spicing was already mixed in with the wat. It was fiery hot and my tongue quickly went numb and much to the further amusement of the layabouts the sweat poured off my forehead.

Just outside of the restaurant and around the corner a woman was making a new batch of injera and I stopped to watch. The griddle for the injera pancakes was a black clay disc about two feet across. It was balanced neatly on three large stones and was covered with a dome-shaped lid made of a woven basket encased in a clay/mud mixture. A large knob of woven reed or bamboo stuck out the top, which she could grab in order to move the lid. Long pieces of wood stuck out from between the rocks and as the wood was consumed she pushed them in to keep the fire at exactly the right temperature. I thought this a very neat and efficient system, since it meant that the wood did not have to be chopped up.

The injera batter was inside a large plastic bucket. She ladled the batter from the bucket into a gourd, which had a long narrow spout. She removed the lid from the griddle and wiped it down with a cloth, which I assumed had some kind of grease or butter on it. Then she picked up the gourd and with a practised hand poured out a thin line of injera batter all the way around the outer edge of the griddle and slowly spiralled it in to the centre till the whole griddle was covered. It bubbled just like a pancake and cooked very quickly. She cooked it only on one side and then deftly removed it and placed it on a big pile of injera to her left.

She invited me to take pictures and I documented the entire process from beginning to end. When I was done and set to leave she said that she was very thirsty and asked me for two birr so that she could buy a Mirinda. A group of men were leaning out the window watching and hooted with laughter. They knew as well as I did that if I gave her the two birr she wouldn’t spend it on a Mirinda. It was like a beggar in the West asking for fifty cents for a cup of coffee. They’re not really interested in a cup of coffee, but it sounds better that way than asking straight out for money. So in exchange for the photos I “bought her a drink” and got back on my bike and cycled away.

On the bridge at the edge of Tedat I stopped to chat with a couple of farmers heading out to the fields. One of them had a gallon jug of water slung over his shoulder. The other had a round container made of a hard leather and sewn together with leather thread. It looked to be very old and I asked them what this container was for. They set it down on the wide cement railing and undid the leather straps holding the crude lid in place. When the lid came off I saw that inside it was filled with injera and wat. The injera was much larger than the container and they simply folded the edges of the injera over the wat in the middle. There were several layers of injera and I guessed that this “lunch box” contained lunch and dinner for both of them.

Beyond the bridge I stopped to watch a farmer and his young son in the process of threshing tef, the grain that is used to make injera. The farmer had three cows tethered tightly together and was driving them in a small circle over a pile of harvested tef. The idea was that the impact of the cows’ hooves would separate the grains from the stalks. I imagined turning round and round in those endless circles was intensely frustrating work for the cows. The inside cow was essentially just standing in one spot and sidestepping. I thought they must get very dizzy. And to prevent them from eating the grain the farmer had tied up their mouths very tightly with lengths of a green plant. The cows constantly lowered their heads to take a mouthful of grain only to find they couldn’t do it. The task of the farmer’s son was to walk behind the cows and catch their dung before it hit the tef below.

Several fields down the road a young boy was engaged in the next step of the injera-making process. His cows had finished their threshing work and were occupied with their reward: their mouths had been untied and they were hungrily eating up the tef stocks. The grain itself was spread thickly over a nearby patch of ground and the boy piled it into a plastic tub and then slowly let it fall to the earth, allowing the wind to separate the chaff from the grain. Like many of the Ethiopians I’d been meeting he was a ham and he urged me to take out my camera. When I produced it he directed me like a young Spielberg telling me exactly where to stand and when to take the picture for maximum effect.

As if some mysterious host were taking me on a guided tour I found the next few fields were filled with men harvesting the tef. I parked my bike and walked out into the field to get a closer look. The men were all down on their haunches and moved steadily through the fields. With their left hand they reached out and gathered together clumps of tef. In their right they held a hooked blade about a foot in length. This was pulled through the tef cutting the clumps which were then left behind them in piles to be gathered up later.

I found that the few minutes I stayed on my haunches to watch the harvest had exhausted and cramped my legs. I couldn’t imagine staying in that position all day long as these men did. The effort required to propel my bike was nothing by comparison.

A Military Secret

Since leaving Addis I’d come across only one intersection. This was north of Bahir Dar where the main road which I was on met up with the road leading to Debre Tabor and Weldiya. It was such a noteworthy event that I leaned my bike against the road sign and took a picture. Now, 15 kilometers from Gondar after a long and grinding uphill climb I came across my second intersection. There was a sign here as well. So many kilometers to Bahir Dar, so many kilometres to Addis Adaba, 3 kilometres to the airport in this direction and to the left a certain number of kilometers to Gorgora, a small town on the northern shore of Lake Tana.

I parked my bike in front of this sign and got out my camera to take a picture. Before I even managed to take the lens cap off a busybody came rushing up and started shouting at me. “Impossible. Impossible,” he shouted. “No camera, no camera!” I asked him why and he said it was a military secret. I wasn’t too bothered, since the world has enough pictures of unusual roadsigns and I put my camera away.

Then he asked me, “Where are you go?”

“Listen,” I told him, “if that sign there is a military secret then my destination is also a secret and I won’t tell you.”

“Thank you very much,” he said and he walked away.

Heading Into Gondar

Gondar is one of the historical cities of northern Ethiopia and many people go there to explore the Royal Enclosure with castles at least one of which dates back to the year 1640. I’ll break the suspense right now and say that I never did go look at the castles. I saw them from the outside and from nearby hills, but I never did go inside the Enclosure itself. I probably should have but the endless people on the street urging me to go and forcing themselves on me as guides made me stubborn as a mule. I hate being told what to do and with so many people telling me to visit the castles I just never got around to it.

Gondar was instead for me the place where I was reunited with my B.O.B. trailer and camping gear, where I met Jules and Simon, my companions for the epic trek into the Simien Mountains, and of course the site of yet another conflict in my ongoing series of battles with bathrooms.

I first saw Gondar from across a deep valley and it looked a pleasant enough place, spread out and covered in trees. The road as far as I could tell went down into the valley, across a river and then climbed back up to the city itself. Once in the valley, however, I lost site of the buildings and after some time thought I had missed a turning and was not heading towards Gondar. But then a pickup truck came up beside me and slowed down. The bed of the pickup was filled with men and one of them leaned over the side towards me and screamed “fuck you” before the pickup raced away. It wasn’t directions but as good as. The rise in profanity was a sure sign I was heading towards an Ethiopian city.

At the top of a steep and leg-breaking climb I arrived at the newer part of Gondar to the north of the Royal Enclosure. There I met two young British English teachers who recommended the Ethiopia Hotel, the local backpacker hotel. They said it had served them well on a number of occasions when late at night they were locked out of the homes where they were living. I had to smile at that. My experience had been that there was nothing an Ethiopian loved more than a locked door. They locked up everything. They locked you in, locked you out and locked the doors inbetween. I imagined the two English teachers lost in a maze of locked doors, getting through one set only to find the next also locked and then turning around to find the doors they’d just come through already locked and barred behind them.

I cycled through Gondar’s Piazza (pulling castle guides in my wake like a speed boat towing water skiers) keeping my eyes open for my ideal courtyard hotel but didn’t find it. The road went up a hill on the edges of the Royal Enclosure and then down the other side into what was clearly the meat and potatoes end of Gondar. Here were all the markets and the truck repair yards and the noise and chaos. And not a wannabe castle guide in sight.

I followed the road as it curved around the end of Gondar and came back again and there kitty corner to the bus station was the Axum Hotel. It was exactly the kind of place where I didn’t want to stay but not finding my courtyard hotel I popped inside to take a look. It had a coffee shop and bar at the front, which was sort of in its favor (though I would have preferred an old-fashioned kitchen with fresh injera on the way). The room they showed me, room 7, was pretty basic – bed, chair, table, window, light bulb. There was some kind of common toilet and shower on the same flor and on an impulse which I knew even then I would end up regretting I said I would take it and paid for two nights.

My instincts told me that I should, no matter how difficult it was, carry my bike up to the second floor and put it inside my room. The manager of the hotel, however, wouldn’t hear of it. The way he reacted you’d think I’d insulted his hotel. It would be fine down here in the stairwell, he said. No one will touch it. It will be safe. So I left it there and all night I could hear my bell ringing away as all the people who I was guaranteed wouldn’t touch the bike touched it.

The first challenge with my new room came with just trying to get in. The key was a giant skeleton key and the lock itself not so much a slot as a big open space in the door. It took the skill of a locksmith and the touch of a burglar to position the key in the lock just right so that you could slam the bolt over. It was almost impossible to do.

The bathroom was even worse and I never did figure out how to open it. All I could do was stick the key into the gaping space that was the lock and wave it around hoping to hit the tumblers that flipped the bolt open and closed. I tried for the longest time, ending up down on my knees, and was getting a bit peeved when the cleaning lady came over and using her key whipped it open. She didn’t turn her key so much as flick it with a deft little movement of the wrist. I tried again with mine but it was no go.

I decided to take a shower and I filled my dromedary bag with ten litres of water. Then I got all my gear together and after an agonizing process of locking the door to my room returned to the bathroom. But I was too late. The bathroom was locked up tight once again. My shoulders slumped in defeat. “Why do they do that?” I thought to myself for the hundredth time. Luckily the cleaning lady was nearby and she came to my rescue and let me in.

I went into the bathroom, put down my load of cleaning gear and then on the inside I saw there was no latch, no way to lock the door from the inside other than using that key again. So I closed the door and I stuck my key into the hole and started waving it around hoping to get lucky and hit the tumblers. I wasn’t getting anywhere when suddenly the cleaning lady stuck in her key from the outside and locked the door. The footprint toilet hole was a raised one like a throne and I perched up there with my white butt waving in the air only to see an eye at the keyhole. The cleaning lady was waiting for me to finish so she could unlock the door and let me out.

Showering was an art form of course. These bathrooms were always so strange. The concept of a hook had not arrived in Ethiopia yet. Of course I don’t think anyone takes a shower the way we foreigners do. We walk in there with our towel, face cloth, shampoo, shaver, tooth brush, tooth paste and all these things. We need a place to put them. So it took me about ten minutes to figure out how I was going to hang my dromedary bag high enough that I’d get a shower flow of water and another ten to figure out where to hang my towel and toiletries bag and this and that and the other thing. I needed to be able to see my face in the small mirror to shave and I didn’t want anything to get wet that shouldn’t get wet. I wanted nothing to fall into the toilet or touch the floor in any way because it was covered in piss and shit and mould and fungus and dirt and dust. In trying to find a place to hang stuff I thought of putting something on the door knob, but I soon learned it was off limits. If I jiggled it even slightly the cleaning lady thought I wanted to get out and she leaped into action with her key to find me in various stages of undress and suds. I heard her outside the door explaining to different people why she was watching the bathroom so carefully.

They didn’t serve food at the Axum, which was unfortunate and I asked the manager of the hotel if he could point out a place nearby where I could get something to eat. He said yes, there was a very good place called the National Restaurant just fifteen yards away. He took me outside and pointed to it. There was a curtain in the doorway. That place, he said.

I went to the National hoping for a tasty spread of injera, but no matter how I phrased my question all they offered me was fish cutlet. I think they assumed that since I was a foreigner I didn’t eat Ethiopian food and the only other thing available was fish cutlet. Finally I gave in and I ordered the cutlet and I got a very disgusting plate of food. It wasn’t a fish cutlet so much as a fish that had been put into a vice, pressed flat and then covered in batter and deep fried. It was like a giant fish potato chip with some kind of horrific sauce. I finished about half of it, all I could manage.

I walked around the neighborhood for a bit afterwards but I found it so uncomfortable that I didn’t get very far. I wasn’t in the mood for all the shouts of “you you” and “ferenji, ferenji, where are you go?” And it was all said in a very aggressive tone. I felt on display, threatened, and returned to the Axum.

By that point I was so tired I couldn’t even think straight and as was my wont I collapsed onto the bed. It took a while to get comfortable. The bed was not really a bed at all but a steel spring cot. It was so old and worn that there was a tremendous sag in the middle and trying to sleep on my stomach as I like to do I was bent into a U and it felt like my backbone was going to snap in half. On top of that there was a steel headboard and a steel footboard. The footboard prevented the sheet from being tucked under the mattress and my feet popped out the far end and rested against the cold steel. I got out to make the bed properly and found that at least the footboard could be pulled out. It made the bed that much more wobbly, but it was a bit more comfortable. At least my toes weren’t jammed up against cold steel anymore.

It wasn’t comfortable enough though and I fidgeted and tossed and turned unable to get to sleep despite my fatigue. It was also incredibly noisy. There was music coming from the bars outside and louder music coming from the bar in the hotel. And from the hallway came the sound of family life. Odd as it seemed the hallway was filled with clusters of tables, chairs and couches like miniature living room sets and in each set lived a family. Right outside my door was the cleaning lady, her husband and children. Their couch was pushed almost against my door and I had to squeeze past them to get in and out. As far as I could figure out they lived in those couches and chairs. They certainly spent the night there and added to my difficulty in sleeping.

The entire hotel I reflected must have been designed by a prison warden. It was all concrete and steel with no sound absorbing qualities whatsoever. Sound just ripped from one end of the building to the other and it echoed in that institutional way. The doors were solid steel and the hinges hadn’t seen a drop of oil in their lifetime so the whole place had the air of a prison crossed with a cheap haunted house. There were actually quite a number of guests and all evening and night I heard long drawn out screechings and wailings as the doors were pulled open. Then the reverse would happen ending in a heart-stopping crash as metal met metal. It was a nightmare of a place really.

It was still dark when I threw open my window the next morning. I sat there for a while listening to Gondar waking up. All night I’d heard the dogs howling, but now they were silent. Instead I heard moaning and groaning and grunting. It was so dim that I couldn’t quite see, but I could just make out bundles all over the streets and sidewalks. There were dozens of them all around the Axum Hotel and around the bus station area. At first glance I thought they were piles of garbage, but they were too neat and defined for that. Then I thought they must be farmer’s produce being brought to market or waiting for the morning’s bus to be shipped back to a village. But that made no sense either because they wouldn’t have been left there unguarded. Then I realized that many of the bundles were moving and that they were the source of the moans and groans I heard. I realized then that each bundle was a person wrapped up in their shammas and sleeping on the concrete. Now they were shifting and moving, waiting for the sun to come up before they emerged.

I threaded my way through all the families living and sleeping on the hallway couches and made my way down the stairs to where my bike was locked up. I inspected it closely and found that all the wires and cables had been pulled askew and the gear shifts twisted out of position. I kicked myself again for giving in to the manager’s assurances that the bike would be safe. I told myself that I have to stop trusting people like that and pay more attention to my own instincts, which generally prove correct.

All the bundles had woken up and were walking around by the time I started cycling through the streets. “Hey you,” “ferenji, ferenji,” “where are you go,” “give me money,” “give me pen,” “give me one birr,” and “give me bicycle” all the bundles shouted.

Tags: bike, Ethiopia, Ethiopia Bike Trip, Lake Tana, Royal Enclosure