As I recovered from my first bout with Malaria, Ethiopia beckoned. Once healed, I therefore shouldered my backpack and hitch-hiked north from Nairobi towards Moyale, a little border post between Kenya and Ethiopia. Hitch hiking was slow, but workable. That evening, after 3 rides, I bought a cheap, uncomfortable, bug-infested bed in a village called Marsabit, at the center of Marsabit game reserve. I found myself marooned there for the whole following day. In the morning, standing beside the road going north out of town, thumbing the very few vehicles that passed, the local children gathered around me. I chatted with the nice kids, and soon grew bored, so I picked up one of the funny little 6" diameter dry "weed" gourds growing alongside the road. My audience was very interested in this, because the locals didn’t eat them, or use them for anything. I cut a big plug out of the top around the stem, scraped out all of the dried seeds inside, and proceeded to cut a jack-o-lantern face with my pocketknife. I gave the carved gourd to the kid who spoke the best English, and WOW, what a response! This was obviously a COMPLETELY NEW idea! All of the children got really excited, and each had to have his or her own little jack-o-lantern!
After I carved about 5 gourds, each with its own individualized face, and kids had run off home with their prizes, the elders came around to see what weird things I was doing while standing there looking for a ride. Some of them took out their knives, and soon it seemed that half the village population was busy cutting strange faces into the sides of the trash gourds, and displaying them proudly. I state without fear of contradiction, that the faces I personally carved were the best, but then, I had a 24-year-head-start on the Kenyans in Halloween-pumpkin-carving.
The following morning I found adults and kids already carving gourds near my spot beside the road. I finally got a lift with a jeep full of government youth service employees, and threw myself into the back. Dozens of people waved good-bye to me briefly, and then turned immediately back to their carving. As Marsabit disappeared in the road dust, I wondered whether perhaps my popular little jack-o-lanterns would become part of an obscure local tradition. Someday I will have to go back and find out.
I had been collecting gen on Ethiopia, via exchange of information with other vagabonds, for months. Ethiopia had a reputation for being a relatively dangerous place for overland tourists. It seemed that in each section of Ethiopia there was a different reason to encounter a violent death.
A popular uprising was in full bloom in the extreme North of the country. In 1952, Hallie Selasie, the emperor of Ethiopia, had been allowed to annex Italy’s ex-Red-sea-colony of Eritrea, but the Eritreans had never been enthusiastic with this idea, and in 1975 were in open rebellion against the "occupying" Ethiopian troops. Therefore the whole northern part of the country was closed to travel, and the main road to Asmara, the capital, was usually closed due to rebel military activity. (Eritrea finally won its independence in 1993.)
In the Eastern regions of Ethiopia, the Moslem Somali tribes were restive, and there was sporadic small scale fighting with generally Christian government forces. As expected, these simmering tensions finally broke into full scale anti-government warfare, supported by military forces from Somalia, several years later in the 70s. The tribes were brutally suppressed, using Soviet supplied tanks, and the Ogaden area is still part of Ethiopia.
In the central mountainous regions, bands of "Shifta" occasionally ambushed travellers. The shifta were armed groups of either local patriots or bandits, depending upon whom you asked. It seemed to me that they robbed everyone indiscriminately, so I would lean towards the "bandits" camp. I heard a second-hand story of a Dutch vagabond who had awakened in his roadside camp with a big lump on his head, badly beaten, wearing only his skivvies and socks, with all of his belongings missing and his traveling companion dead beside him. Shifta had attacked with clubs as they slept, and neither ever knew what hit him. Normally I would have taken such second-hand stories with a big dose of salt, but this one was gravely reported to me by the officials at the Ethiopian government tourist office in the capital city of Addis Ababa!
The story of the source of danger in the southwest regions, around lake Rudolph, was the most colorful. There are two large tribal groups living in that area, the Omo and another whose name I have forgotten. According to the stories, both have an identical tradition for becoming engaged. When an Omo young man decides to get married, tradition dictates that he must present to his intended the severed penis of a man whom he has personally killed! She, in turn, suspends the gift by a string so that as she grinds grain, it bumps against her forehead with each stroke, thus assuring, in some mysterious fashion, her future fertility. Now this story I found SO outlandish that I mentally discarded it as a fabrication.
A few days later, once I was settled into Addis, I found a dozen nice Ethiopian technical students staying temporarily at the same cheap hotel. In chatting with them, I found out that all of them were of the Omo tribe, and came from the Lake Rudolph region, and that their school had let out and closed the dorms for the holidays six days previously. When I asked why they were hanging around Addis instead of going home they informed me that in a few more days another bigger technical school would let out, and they were waiting for those guys so they could all go home together in a big self-protective group of about 40. They confirmed every detail of the "penis as betrothal present" story, and said that a white penis would be perfectly acceptable. They traveled to and from school in perpetual fear of becoming such a gift for one of their matrimonially-minded neighbors! Yowee!
When I finally reached Moyale three days out of Nairobi, I ran into a substantial hassle. I had originally gotten my Ethiopian visa in Khartoum, intending to enter Ethiopia through Metema, and later had gotten the Ethiopian embassy in Nairobi to amend my visa, crossing out the "Metema only" notation and initialing and stamping the change. At the Moyale border post, however, the guy in charge told me that was no good, and I had either to go back to the Sudan and enter through Metema, or go back to Nairobi and get a completely new visa. Bad scene. Several hours later I was still sitting politely in his office , not quite willing to admit defeat, and not willing to try a bribe. For the twentieth time he waved my passport at me disdainfully, and finally looked closely at the initials on the visa amendment.
"AH! Did you speak with Mr. Habibi? Yes, this is his writing! Mr. Habibi is an old and close friend of mine!" And in short order my passport got the necessary stamps to allow me to enter Ethiopia. Unexpected good luck.
On the far side of the border, where folks drive on the right side of the road again, just like in the US, I bought a ride to Addis Ababa on an Ethiopian bus. This proved to be a mistake, because the busses in that country invariably play horrible screeching-nasally-whining local music through speakers scattered throughout the bus, at extremely high decibel levels. After only 20 minutes of this I had a headache, and the bus ride was nearly three days! In addition, the Ethiopians all chain smoke horrible cheap cigarettes, which made the atmosphere inside the busses perfectly foul. After this learning experience I always tried to buy rides on top of trucks instead of in busses. The prices were similar, and though it was sometimes awfully cold up in the luggage box on top of the cab of a truck, it was a much better ride.
I made some English speaking friends on this bus, by shouting little messages to one another above the caterwauling cacophony. Mr. Georgi, a Christian Ethiopian, and Bennet, a young Watusi Kenyan, were both also going to Addis.
We stopped well after dark at a dusty town called Yabelo where I rented a bed in a tiny single room under the stairs. I was asked by the clerk to choose a woman from a sample of three ladies lounging in the "lobby" area, two of whom were young and reasonably attractive. Smiling knowingly, Mr. Georgi translated for me, and I quickly memorized how to say, in Amharic, "I’m really tired". Then we re-negotiated, the bed price dropped by two dollars, and I spent the night peacefully. Apparently, however, the girls all had passkeys, and I was awakened the next morning by the prettiest long-legged ebony woman climbing naked into bed with me! She reckoned since I had rested, I wouldn’t be tired anymore! Then I really had to talk fast, and I know she thought I was some sort of sexual misfit because I rejected her. Ethiopia also has a reputation for various exotic varieties of endemic incurable sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, my firm belief is that sex and money should never both be included in the same interaction.
I subsequently learned that ladies of the evening have reasonably high status in Ethiopia. Prostitution is considered a perfectly honorable profession. This is said to derive from the ancient Queens of Sheba, who used their sexual favors as a tool in ancient diplomacy. In Ethiopia I actually found it difficult to get only a bed with no hooker included, and the pattern of being awakened by a naked girl repeated itself once farther north.
At a rest stop the next day, only a few hours south of Addis, In a dirt-floored, rough-plank-tabled shop, I bought a round of tea for my friends on the bus. After a busy discussion with the woman who ran the place, Mr. Georgi announced that he would treat me to some of the local home-brewed-liqueur, which had a long, musical name in Amharic. She brought out a small shot glass half full of clear distilled fluid, which smelled just a whiff like methanol. We shared it around the table, and when I wet my lips with it, the drink did seem to be very powerful. Mr Georgi poured a little drop of it out onto the wooden table. It glistened there, held together by surface tension, as he lighted it with his cigarette lighter. As I watched amazed, the drop burned with an almost invisible blue flame only 1/16th of an inch high, until it was COMPLETELY consumed, leaving no residue! I asked what the name meant in English, and Mr. Georgi, after some thought, translated from Amharic.
"It means", he said, "Kill Me Quickly".Addis Ababa, Blue Nile Gorge, and the Fly Capital of the World