A Walk on the Wild Side
I’m so grateful to those fleas. I would otherwise never have witnessed the blood-orange moon in the witching hour.
It was day one of a three-day mini-trek into the Amhara region in Ethiopia. I had six guests with me, and we had set off in the morning in a minivan from the sacred town of Lalibela — famous for its rock-cut subterranean churches dating from the 12th century, decorated with pious muslin-clad pilgrims. The van soon deviated from the main road and onto a bumpy track to a clearing where three beaming local guides and their equally cheerful donkeys were waiting for us. A beautiful young woman wearing a mauve headscarf had prepared a simple Bayenetu lunch for us: injera - the local bread made with the tef grain, rolled out with dollops of shiro (pureed lentils), fossolia (green beans, onions and garlic), yellow peas, potatoes and carrots placed on top. Sitting in a circle around the platter we broke off pieces of injera to dip into the stews and eat. As is the custom, hand-roasted coffee was freshly brewed and accompanied by a basket of popcorn as we washed our fingers in a bowl of warm water. The guides saddled up the cheerful donkeys with our overnight kit and we set off, beating a path up a hill through an evergreen forest. Each guide wore a gabi – a simple handmade cotton cloth that is slung around the upper body and thrown over the shoulders. Each walked with a dula – a staff, or rather the staff walked with them; it rarely met the ground as it was laid horizontally behind the head on the back of the neck. Both hands hang down over the front ends of the staff to keep it in place - as if you were in the stocks. It’s an ideal way to walk and keeps your back straight, and before long I’d found my dula to do the same.
Walking into these highlands in this part of the country is a humbling experience. Communities farm the land as they always have done with hand tools and ox-drawn ploughs. Life is hard but people always smile. They stop work to wave and shout out and some join us to walk. The trek is more a steady amble, through meadows and farming land dotted with tukuls — simple mud huts with thatched roofs. On an invite, we ducked into one and sat on a long thin bench whilst a woman made coffee, fanning the smoking beans in the pan around the blackened walls and roof of the hut. The hut was alive with man and beast; a hive of humming bees in one corner competed with a pen of goats underneath a raised platform on which children peered down at us. The beauty of this little walk is the focus on community tourism, and the simple of act of us being here supports local enterprise and goes directly into local hands, benefiting the women who cook for us, the guides who walk with us, and the people who manage and maintain the campsites we overnight at.
We picked our way through rock-strewn earth towards an escarpment patrolled by Gelada baboons. Their impressive manes shone gold in the late afternoon sun as they squabbled and nit-picked amongst themselves, barely raising an eyebrow at the passing faranji’s. Merquat Mariam is our campsite for the night. It’s an astonishing location perched high on a promontory of a plateau with sweeping views down into the escarpment below. There’s a sheltered rock ledge to lie back against and watch the buzzards and kites soar beneath us as the sun sets over Mount Guna.
That night in my tukul, I dreamt of a dog on its side in the shade of a tree. It raised its head to snap at the bugs that landed on snout and skin, or to lick at a raw pink patch on its belly. Snap, bite, scratch, lick, snap, bite, scratch... Before lying back down on the dusty earth.
I awoke, my skin vibrating and on inspection found a three-deep row of bright pink dots that circumnavigated my waist stopping at the tight drawstring of my pyjama bottoms. The curse of the feasting flea! Casting off my sleeping bag I found my boots and stumbled to the door of the tukul, pushing it open into the ink blue night. I guessed it was the witching hour, when the realms of physical and spiritual collide. The dark silhouette of a tukul obscured my view of the valley but as I walked around it a faint glow appeared. It was the moon. A moon that hung heavy and low in the sky like a ripe blood-orange. I sat on a rock transfixed and thought of Dervla Murphy in Ethiopia with her mule Jock, plodding through these mountains on a thousand-mile trail in the 1960s. She’d often slept in the open, preferring the threat of hyenas to the scour of vermin-infested tukuls and wrote of the pleasure of one such night:
‘In this superbly beautiful night on the bare mountain – where the air feels like cool velvet and cicadas are serenading me from the valley and the still majesty of the mountains looms all around’…
I watched the moon until it dropped out of sight and the air grew softly pink…
‘…And soon this had deepened to a red-gold glow which seemed briefly to hold all the splendour of all the dawns that ever were. To lie beneath such a sky…Brings an almost intolerably intense awareness of the duality of our nature.’
Ethiopia gets under your skin – quite literally. And it’s worth every bite.
Extracts are taken from Dervla Murphy’s ‘In Ethiopia with a Mule’, available to buy from Eland Books.
Dawn, Merquat Mariam, Amhara region, Ethiopia by Amelia