I’m sitting in my hotel in Addis Ababa as I write this concluding summary to my travels in Northern Ethiopia. Tonight I return to England…
I flew back into Addis yesterday afternoon after a week in Lalibela where I split my time between photography and swishing away flies and the wanting Ethiopians (both of which were endemic). Lalibela is one of the must see attractions of Africa, not just Ethiopia, but as Agra is to the Taj Mahal, the town and the people make the visit far less pleasurable than it could be.
This morning I visited Merkato, the largest market in East Africa. I arrived early with the idea of shooting some interesting photographs but only ended up taking a few, none of which were notable. The market was not open-air as I had thought, and therefore not particularly photogenic, and I encountered my first and only experience of dangerous crime during my stay in Ethiopia. The market area is known to be a hot spot of petty theft and pick-pocketing and sure enough I found myself targeted by two men. Fortunately I was aware of what was happening and they were scared away (you should see the scowl I’ve learnt to give over here). I decided that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to continue walking around with an expensive camera in hand so I put it away and the both of us (myself and the pick-pockets) left empty-handed.
I use the comparison of Agra to Lalibela above and India generally is the best comparison I can come up with when trying to describe Ethiopia to someone who hasn’t travelled here. It’s more rural and not as intense and densely populated as parts of India but there are a few similarities. To give you some idea, both myself and other travellers I’ve spoken to here who have been to both countries consider the begging and hassling by children and locals worse here than in India, which is saying something. There was a time when I thought “Hello-pen” and “Hello-givememoney” were traditional Ethiopian greetings!! But not everyone I’ve met has wanted something from me, a few people have been very kind, unfortunately for me it’s been the vast majority, but then this is a country of very poor people and not always for fault of their own.
To sum my feelings up about Ethiopia I’d like to conclude with an incident that happened one evening last week whilst I was walking back to my hotel in Lalibela. I’d been photographing in the amazing rock-hewn Church of St. George. I’d waited patiently for all the other tourists to leave as well as an Australian film crew that were in town, and shot a few frames of a deserted church and of the Priest locking up the door and walking down the front steps. I was pleased with the results and walked contentedly back to my hotel along the gently sloping road that crosses the River Jordan (lots of Biblical references there) and leads you up a small hillside overlooking the plains to the west of Lalibela.
As I climbed the road and neared the top of the hill I noticed how the air was cooler and pleasant and for the first time became aware of the devotional music that was being blared out of a treetop tannoy adjacent to a nearby church. The setting sun over the plains was hidden behind thick clouds but it’s rays were shining down brightly in a heavenly fashion. I stopped for a moment and thought just how lucky I was to be here witnessing this moment, which was the most ’spiritual’ I’d experienced here in Ethiopia.
To the side of the road was a graveyard. One of several that hug the road and line the banks of the river. I stepped off the road and entered. As I did I noticed an old man promptly stand up from behind a gravestone. As I walked a few more steps I noticed another man, younger, but doing the same thing as the other older man was, pulling up his trousers. Not wanting to appear as though staring I averted my eyes down to the ground. It was there that I saw what I had in fact walked into, an open latrine. The ground of the graveyard, and down the hillside too, was covered in small pieces of screwed up and soiled note paper and shit.
So the graveyards of Lalibela are used, like thousands of others the world over, for the accumulation of human waste. The difference here however, as I discovered immediately after my ’spiritual moment’, is that although some of it is buried six-feet under, most of it is not and deposited with far less ceremony…
