Being - like Lucy

Having been lucky to spend 3 weeks in the birthplace of human beings (Lucy being the oldest skull, named after the ‘in the Sky with Diamonds’ soundtrack of the archaeologists), the idea of ‘being’ has been hard to ignore – for better (in the moment, no treadmill, no stress) or worse (after all my years in this continent, Africa Time will always frustrate!). I know I will sound like a mid-life-crisis drifter but Ethiopia has been a useful reminder how much we / I’ve become fixated on ‘doing’. “How are you doing?”, “Doing the right thing”, “the kids are doing well at school”. Of course, ‘being’ isn’t great for progress, economic growth or even the sense of self-achievement we all need BUT we could probably all benefit from 'being' human a bit more often.

That said, I’ve managed to ‘do’ a few hours a day of work from my bush office almost 6,000 miles from my client and 10,000 feet asl. It gives promise to my vision of a Write to Roam career. 

The church in the cave
On my last day in Lalibela, I took a 5am tuktuk in the dark to a church in a cave. As the sun rose, the chanting, incense and drum beats did too. It was sombre in some ways but also very prosaically cheerful in others – toddlers climbing on prostrating mums and pulling off their shawls then being passed to daddy for some face painting with the holy cross powder (I’m impressed how equal parenting is here – and in fact women are relatively very empowered overall from my reading). Babies were of course terrified of me, the only Farenji in the church. I’m sure some will have had nightmares of the freckled ghost!

Don't mess

Sooooo many gorgeous textiles, soooo little backpack space

This was the shop owner who I bought far too many pretty things from!

Saturday market complete with donkey carpark!

Bishoftu. Twinned with Beijing.

No joke but goats on the Lalibela runway delayed the plane heading south (at least it's more creative than leaves on the line). From Addis it was an hour on a suspiciously smooth and orderly motorway - in fact, with rolling fields of wheat on either side (I thought I glimpsed Theresa May leaping through one), it could have been the home counties...until a rogue donkey trotted into the fast lane, soon followed by a shepherd boy no older than 9 🙈. 

My suspicions of Chinese hands behind this Highway of Perfection were confirmed when exiting the motorway at Bishoftu, a Chinese steel town. It all added up - the strategically situated hub, connecting Ethiopia - and its natural resources - by road and rail directly to the Arabian Sea through Djibouti. Africa pillage aside, it was good to enter the rift valley and more familiar landscapes of acacias, jacarandas and arsenal t-shirts. This is the Africa I know!

My treehouse room and my neighbour (and his pad)

A message to Ethiopia Ministry of Tourism
With my MA responsible tourism hat on, I wrote some recommendations to the Ethiopia Ministry of Tourism along the lines of: I feel both excited and depressed by Ethiopia's tentative steps into mass tourism. It has SO much to offer (I won't blog on this as it will sound too cliche) and genuine eco/community tourism efforts are being made. However, the lack of long-term insight means environmental and social problems are already clear to see.

In the Simien mountains, all 3 campsites I stayed at lacked sanitation so the stream became the toilet (often with farming villages just 100 yards downstream) and litter was everywhere. In towns like Lalibela, multi-hundred room concrete resort monstrosities are springing up on steep eroded mountainsides. Regardless of the sheer environmental stupidity, moving away from tukul-style lodges and established gardens is investor suicide - the market is, and should be, the discerning tourist.

Currently, most tourists to Ethiopia are on luxury tours. This might seem good in terms of Forex, but as with most pre-booked tours, the majority of cash stays in Europe or the US, with just a fraction going to a few chain lodges. When it comes to souvenir shopping and other 'giving', the clueless over-generosity can be detrimental to long-term entrepreneurial spirit and kids' incentives to stay in school. I heard some tourists coming from Aksum were hit by stones when they refused to give children pens. 

Injera injustice
I can’t say my goodbyes to Ethiopia without an anecdote on my Mastermind topic - food. When confessing to a guide that I wasn’t a huge fan of Injera (most mealtimes in the north had turned into Mr Bean steak tartare scenarios), he recounted how a Japanese tourist thought the rolled Injera was a napkin and tucked it into his collar before eating his Wat with a spoon. 

As Ethiopians laughingly admit, with the non-existent roads in the north, the tuktuk offers the perfect 'African massage'.