ethiopia laka tana northwards!

As I’m writing this, I’m staring over lush green mountains where thatched villages nestle beneath the trees and wisp of smoke curls towards the setting sun. This is Ethiopia.
After finally getting our Nissan Xterra out of it’s shipping container at Djibouti customs we headed over the border to greener pastures..literally. Ethiopia on first glance seems nothing like the news pictures of drought ridden cracked earth and starving children. The countryside we encountered almost as soon as we were over the border post went from sparse scrubland to undulating hills, patchwork quilt subsistence farms, sheep, cows, donkeys, goats, and loads of villagers! It seems that contraceptives haven’t quite made the impact here than in other parts of Africa. In short, Ethiopia is stunning.
Our first port of call on the way to Addis was the 2nd largest city, Dire Dawa. It’s a quaint well organized little town with bustling markets (where we were almost pickpocketed twice!) the occasional church or castle and plenty of the two Ethiopian forms of transportation- donkeys wagons or the African version of a ‘tuk tuk.’ Martin and I hopped into one of the latter and headed into town armed with the jvc and canon cameras (which we clutched onto pretty tightly- wary of thieves).
After securing the usual tourist memorabilia we trundled back to the xterra and headed up to the ancient walled city of Harar.
Harar is over 1000 years old and was built (our guide Wilson told us) to protect the ladies while the men where away fighting religious battles in the 16th century.
Inside the small walled city you can see the traditional Harar way of live, check out the sewing and tailoring muslim market and the food selling Christian market. Ethiopia is mainly Christian orthodox with over 30 000 churches but their mosques, although not as common are equally stunning. One of the annoyances of Harar is the children. Hundreds of them follow sightseers round the streets shouting ‘Firenji (white man) give me money!’ the sad thing is that somne f the children begging are genuinely in need but because foreign tourists are associated with money parents of healthy well fed children send them out onto the streets to beg as well, instead of going to school. So the general rule, as Wilson told us- is don’t give any of them money. There are food coupons tousirst can buy from organisations around Ethiopia that you can distribute t kids instead of cash which is far more beneficial and at least they get a decent meal if they need it.
That evening-we waiting outside the eastern wal of harar for the famous Hyena men. For over 300 years a select few ethiopians have kept the tradition alive of feeding Hyenas by hand…and by mouth! The men know every animal by name and they sit patiently and wait for the Hyena men so string a piece of raw meat to a stick and either hold it by hand or place the stic in their mouths and the animal gingerly takes the meat. For a small fee Farenjis can feed them as well. We did. I was too scared to fed them by mouth so chose the hand stick option, but martin was braver and knelt down and placed the stick and meat in his mouth. (Check out the latest webisode on arabiatoafrica.blogspot.com to see the footage we got from the canon and senheiser). Feeling elated by the experience we headed towards Addis Ababa to explore the capital city of Ethiopia!
Addis Ababa means ‘New Flower’ and although we weren’t convinced by the name it’s a busy bustling metropolis with markets where you can find anything from guns to camels! We stopped into the National Museum view the remains of Lucy- one of our first ancestors found in the rift valley of Ethiopia in 1974. She’s 3.2 million years old and a mere 3 feet tall! After having a very welcome shower and nights rest at the stunning Sheraton hotel we headed up north, past Lake Tana to see ‘Africa’s Camelot,’ Gonder- a series of castles built by the kings of Ethiopia over a period of 300 years. Amazingly the castles are strikingly similar to those in Europe!
Then onwards to the rock hewn churches of Lalibella. The rumour goes that these incredible chruches- carved entirely out of the rock (much like Petra except the ones in Ethiopia are free standing) were built by King Lalibella himself, assisted at night by angels, to speed up the process,- thus the collection of 11 churches only took 23 years to build!
The only bad experience we’ve had in Ethiopia to date is a small boy on the side of the road threw a stone as we drove past and shattered our rear windshield. Expensive and annoying. So we’re on our way back to Addis to try and get it repaired before we head South towards Kenya. TIA. This Is Africa.