Ethiopia seemed to take perverse satisfaction in keeping out of step with the rest of the world. They still adhered to long-defunct Byzantine calculations on the birth of Christ, so while the rest of the world believed it was 1975, in Ethiopia it was only 1967. The Ethiopian year has 13 months, with our September 11th as their new year's day. And Ethiopian time is six hours ahead of world standard, so 10 am everywhere else is 4 o'clock in Ethiopia.
I found Addis Ababa, the capital city of the country, to be strange in several ways. Since there was so much tension in the country, soldiers abounded, and everyone was searched by the military before being allowed into any major building. The architecture was really hit and miss. By far most of Addis was just tumble-down slums, but right in the center of town, big glass and steel 10 story hotels sat beside garbage covered empty lots where herds of goats grazed. Enormous numbers of beggars were everywhere, quite heart-rending to look at, and extremely persistent, a supplicating pack of them following me wherever I went in the city.
I searched out the country's only tourist office in Addis. It was well stocked with glossy pamphlets, and there really were lots of quite amazing things to see in the country. But the tourist officials concentrated on talking me OUT of traveling overland in Ethiopia, and they were quite determined. They told me about the Shiftas, and the danger in the northern areas of the country, and showed me a list of the names, nationalities, and death dates of exactly 12 overland travelers whom they knew had been killed there in the past year! And those were only the ones they knew about! A dozen a year isn't many to lose, until one realizes that at any given moment there were probably only 20 western vagabonds in the whole country, and then it becomes a substantial proportion. By my calcs, between one in 10 and one in 20 of all vagabonds through Ethiopia in 1974 / 1975 found their grave there.
The Shoa hotel, in the middle of the red light district in Addis, was the city's traditional "freak" lodging. It was a ramshackle two-story wooden building around a courtyard with a few tired shrubs, and my bed was comfortable and not too filthy. There were half a dozen "Farangi" (white foreigners) living there when I arrived, and some of them had been settled in for quite some time. I find myself uncomfortable relating it, but the Shoa was a pedophile's paradise. Starched-collared uniformed schoolgirls stopped by the Shoa every afternoon on their way home from school to make a little pocket money selling themselves to the hotel guests for less than a dollar. The older professional ladies based in the Shoa were very jealous of the competition, and tried unsuccessfully to keep the schoolgirls out.
On July 3rd it occurred to me that there might be some sort of an Independence Day celebration at the local American consulate, so I went there to ask. Yep, there was a bash planned, but only for bigshots. Random US citizens were definitely not invited. Or maybe it was just longhaired, travelworn US citizens who were unwelcome.
So instead, on the morning of the Fourth of July, I boarded a truck to Barhar Dar, three days north through the mountains. The first day's travel was nice, sightseeing from the luggage box on top of the cab, through fertile fields and hills. In the afternoon we pulled up to the edge of Blue Nile Gorge, and looked down. My heart leapt up into my throat! WOW! What an amazing natural wonder! It is a mile deep (as deep as the Grand Canyon), only one mile wide, and blindingly green! We went down switchbacks for several hours, arriving at the well-guarded little bridge at the bottom 45 minutes too late to be allowed across. Because of rebel-cum-bandit depredations, all travel between 6pm and 6am was forbidden throughout most of the country. Well, that sucked, because there was nothing there at the bottom of the gorge except a guard building on one side. The truck crew were sleeping in the cab, so I tried to sleep on the truck load, but when a really long, hard rain started falling, I moved to the asphalt underneath the truck. The pavement was still hot, it was extremely humid, and CLOUDS of mosquitoes had also hidden under the truck from the rain. They casually ignored the gobs of repellent I used, so I spent a supremely uncomfortable night.
All of the following day it rained intermittently, and people got on and off the truck, using it as a local bus. I conned the driver into letting me lie on the boards behind the seats in the cab, and partially caught up on my sleep that way. At one point I opened my eyes to see the profiles of two beautiful Ethiopian women sitting in the passenger seat of the cab. One of them turned and spotted me. When I winked at her, she SCREAMED and jumped towards the door, pointing and spouting a torrent of loud terrified Amharic! The driver said something to her in that language which calmed her down, and soon she came back to play with my long straight hair. I could tell from his tone that the driver had said, "Yeah, yeah, I KNOW there's a Farangi behind the seat, now relax."
Barhar Dar turned out to be a nasty little town in a really beautiful place. It sits on the southeastern shore of Lake Tana, Ethiopia's largest lake. There are more than 30 little islands in the lake, and many of those have old churches or monasteries on them. Simple boats made out of bundles of a papyrus-like reed plied the clear, still water.
Barhar Dar was also, at the time, the fly capital of the world. When I climbed down from the truck a cloud of flies immediately enveloped me. The local people didn't even notice them anymore, and I found it very disturbing to watch flies walking all over and around small children's eyes without causing any response. I sat at a small table in front of a cafe at the open area which served Barhar Dar for a transport hub. Having ordered a soda, it was nearly impossible to drink any without also ingesting a fly or two as they swarmed around the open bottle and my mouth. The table itself had a fly at least every 1" in any dimension. Just sweeping my hand over the table I could catch a dozen at once as they flew upwards. I found the omnipresence of Barhar Dar's flies rather horrible.
I tried to find transport going to Blue Nile Falls, said to be one of the most amazing natural sites in all of Africa. But since the Shifta had been blowing up the occasional bridge, petrol was very short in Barhar Dar, and the bus that went that direction wasn't running. For a few hours I made good use of my Frisbee, and again it was a novelty. I had several dozen youngsters playing with it in the open area, and nobody had ever seen one before. They learned to throw it, under my tutelage, very quickly, and crowds of people and flies competed for it whenever it landed.
The following day I did find a van operating as a share taxi which was headed that direction, but since I was a tourist, I was required to pay $25 for a 20 mile ride, when I knew that everybody else was paying 65 cents. Well, I wouldn't stand for that, so I just stayed there hunkered down on the floor of the van, waiting for the owners to agree, and accept my 65 cent payment. They out-waited me, and finally I took pity on the other folks who were waiting to depart, and debarked. The operators of the van proved that they would rather drive off without me than to miss the chance of really cheating me properly. I'm sure they thought that I would crack and pay outrageous sums on the following day. They were wrong, and I was very disappointed. As a result, I have never seen Blue Nile Falls, though I had come so far and gotten SO close. Perhaps it was all for the best, as I heard later that a band of Shifta were camped at Blue Nile Falls, and made a habit of robbing every Farangi which appeared.
Lake Tana's southeastern exit is the legendary source of the Blue Nile. I walked north from town and stood on the little bridge across the stream, only about 30 feet wide and one foot deep, and flowing gently. It was almost spiritual to realize that this water would not reach the ocean for another two thousand five hundred miles when it would finally exit the Nile Delta from Egypt into the Mediterranean. Standing above that little creek brought a geographical closure to my tracing of the Nile from the Med to the source of the White Nile at Lake Victoria, and the source of the Blue, there at Lake Tana.
The next morning I bid a none-too-fond farewell to Barhar Dar, and climbed into the luggage box of a truck headed for Gondar, to see the medieval style stone castles of that city.