Historic journey to the Afro-Alps (and my blog becomes a travel blog)

The Simien mountains are a relatively unknown mountain range; I for one didn't even know Ethiopia had great mountains when I put forth my Watson proposal (then again, I didn't know a lot of things.).

Conveniently, visiting the Simien mountains usually means you transit through some of Ethiopia's greatest historical treasures along the way, at least if you go by land. And why wouldn't you go by land, what with the new Chinese-built road that runs out of Addis. I felt confident going onto these roads, knowing that a path had been blazed by my Chinese compatriots. On the other hand, my flatmate in Addis warned me about the roads, saying that they broke the axle of the 4x4 Land Cruiser she rented, and she had just been there a few months earlier.
"Take a plane," she said. I did consider booking a plane, only to find out they were ridiculously expensive -- over $100 USD for a 40 minute flight in a propeller plane. So I went by bus. At any rate, it would be a great way to see the roads that the Chinese were building all across Ethiopia.

The bus ride from Addis Ababa to Bahir Dar took about 13 hours to cover some 350 miles; granted, about 5 of those hours were spent on the side of the road continuously changing the left rear tire.

The journey was fantastic. Along the way, the road ran right through the middle of little villages, and we'd often have to brake for some cattle or goats to cross the road. Burned out Russian tanks littered the side of the road, relics from Ethiopia's flirtation with communism during the 1970s. I also began to realize that nearly every village had an "Obama restaurant" or an "Obama hotel," in homage to the current U.S. president. We even ate an Obama restaurant in Bahir Dar, which was actually quite good. When we'd stop in villages to fix the bus, people would run up and ask, "China or Japan?" I hated this question, because I was neither, and the fact that people couldn't believe that I was actually born and raised in America. Kids would also pose the question, "Manchester or Arsenal?" "Liverpool," I said.

On the road near Bahir Dar, we even saw some Chinese lanterns lit up on the side of the road. The road must have been nearly complete. Unfortunately, it was late and dark and there would be no potty breaks by the Chinese construction compound.


At any rate, I began travelling with two students from Germany, Klaus and Franziska; Klaus had worked with GTZ in Addis, a German aid organization. I met Klaus in Addis and it turned out we wanted to go to similar places at the same time. Klaus was very resourceful when we got to the Simien mountains, and since both of us were trying to save money, we organized the trek ourselves ("Let's self-organize," Klaus agreed. I imagine the German translation would sound hilarious). and forewent the recommended guide and cook. We went along the normal historical circuit, which included the lakeside town of Bahir Dar, and the ancient Abyssinian capital of Gonder.

Bahir Dar was pleasant enough; the city is the jumping off point for the island monasteries on Lake Tana, which stretch back to the 13th century (I think). Ethiopia has its own form of Orthodox Christianity, one of the many things that sets Ethiopia apart from the rest of Africa. Perhaps more importantly, Ethiopia is the only country in Africa to have never been colonized by Europeans (although it was briefly occupied by Mussolini), a fact that is the source of enormous pride among Ethiopians.

On that note, Ethiopia also has its own way of telling time and years. 6 am (sunrise) is 12:00 and 6 pm (sunset) is also 12:00. Apparently we're in year 2002 or 2003; I can't remember. At any rate, the Ethiopian millenium was in our year 2007. Yeah, it's confusing.

Bahir Dar's monasteries were enormously disappointing. Apparently restoration means rebuilding the monasteries with concrete slabs and tin roofs. And the best preserved monastery is off limits to women.
"Don't tempt me." The only cool island monastery is off-limits to women.

When visiting the British Museum in London, I learned that showing both eyes in Ethiopian art was a sign of good, whereas only showing one eye was a sign of evil. In the depiction of a battle between Ethiopians and Italians (in which the Ethiopians triumphed), guess who had two eyes. Oh yeah, these are the twelve apostles.

Lake Tana. I took this photo at about 11 pm, when the sun had long set, but the moon was nearly full.

This photo is so stereotypically "African," so I don't really like it, but I'm posting it anyway. Naked African boy paddles down up the mouth of the Blue Nile on Lake Tana. This is why I am posting this photo, so people don't think Africa is all backwards and full of people without clothes.


Ethiopian food: This is beyainatu, a little bit of everything. This was one of my favorite dishes -- an assortment of various vegetarian stuff and ground chick peas. My other favorite, kitfo -- raw meat, I only had it good once. They sometimes do it as either ground goat meat (kind of like a French tartare), and sometimes with raw beef cubes.

This is a close-up of injera, the spongy, pancake-like thing that is the staple of Ethiopian food. It's made from tef, a highly-nutritious cereal that is endemic in the Ethiopian highlands, and apparently only grows there.

Gonder palace. Cool stuff.

Now we begin the trek in the Simien mountains.



Gelada baboon. Apparently they can get violent and throw you off cliffs.

We tried to the trip as cheaply as possibly, foregoing the recommended guide but taking the mandatory armed scout. I felt a bit bad for him, since he didn't speak a word of English and was stuck with us until nighttime when we got to camp, and he got to talk with the other scouts and guides.

Another somewhat inappropriate photo. I was slightly disappointed that our scout only had a rifle, and not one of the submachine guns or automatic assault rifles that I saw some of the other guides had. On the other hand, this rifle was probably more useful in the Simien mountain terrain, as he could pick off any incoming enemies (provided the gun actually worked and was loaded).

Me, Franziska, and Klaus at the first camp.

And now that I realize this blog post is becoming a travel blog post, I present you with some overprocessed images. Unfortunately, for reasons too complicated and boring to explain here, the colors are actually off from how I saved them (for nerds, I save them in aRGB and not sRGB).



The landscapes we saw were enormously varied -- some dense treelines, some dusty desert areas, and some landscapes like these. These trees were endemic in maybe only about 5 sq kilometers, pretty cool.


Sunset at the second camp.

Guides, scouts, and porters play soccer at the second camp. It was very exposed, above the tree line, with high winds, and at about 3,500m. What a terrible place for a camp, but we weren't allowed to camp anywhere else.

Klaus, the ever resourceful German, made a stove out of a quick-cooking oats tin. We didn't want to pay for a cook and didn't want to buy a gas stove. It's called the hobo stove, and you just feed little pieces of firewood in the top. Klaus was pretty great -- and was always after making things more "efficient." He said things like "She's sleeping very efficiently" (i.e., sleeping soundly in the backseat of a bumpy bus on a dirt path), "You are reading inefficiently" (holding the book in such a way as to only allow one person to read at a time), and "We must make this fire burn more efficiently!" No, he wasn't a caricature of a German, and we got along well.
Goodbye, Simien mountains! Goodbye Ethiopia!

From Addis to Sydney

I didn't say I was in Australia. I'm in Australia, have been here for a couple days now, hence the posting on the blog thing. Internet was abominable in Ethiopia; it took me six minutes to load my Gmail inbox in basic HTML mode, and that was when internet was actually working. Blogspot was blocked there, and incidentally, the government also blocked Skype, which they apparently see as a threat to their monopoly on telecommunications (this isn't unique to Ethiopia; I met two journalists from Abu Dhabi in the UAE who said Blogspot and Skype were also blocked there... only they had fast internet connections).

The Ethiopians wouldn't let me go without one final waltz at the airport. We had a power cut at Addis Ababa airport, which I suppose is entirely normal given the frequent power cuts, but you'd think they would at least have a decent generator for the airport. The security guy at the gate took my wallet, rifling through my bills to see how much money I had, and then declaring that I was taking too much Ethiopian money (about $12 USD) out of the country. Capital flight is a very scary thing for an impoverished country, and he asked why I hadn't changed my money at the bank. I told him I would gladly change my money, if there were a bank, but for whatever reason there was no bank at the departure gates.

Actually, I could have changed my money with the sketchy waiter at the airport cafe who offered to give me bad black market exchange rates. Ethiopia overvalues its own currency at about 11.20 birr to the US dollar, whereas a "free" rate of exchange might be closer to about 15 birr. Obviously, this spells black market doom and gloom, but thanks to the large Ethiopian military state, they've shut down most black market operations. The problem is when you try to change your birr back into dollars (or other foreign currency). Reportedly, the maximum you can change is about $100 USD; the government is extremely piggish with its foreign currency, and it also realizes that if if they honor their 11.20 birr/dollar rate, they're getting screwed. In the end, I ended up donating my $12 USD in Ethiopian birr to UNICEF on the plane to Australia.

Oh, but the waltz didn't end there: the little shuttle bus that brought us to our plane took us to the wrong plane at first. So when we were allowed onto a plane, I was seriously worried that I was getting onto the wrong plane, or perhaps my bags were getting on the wrong plane. Alas, all turned out well, and I found my bags and myself in Australia.

I was expecting to come to a land filled with criminals in Australia, and contemplated extending my contract with my hired gunman in Ethiopia (more on this later). I was of course worried that his aging rifle would be no use in the lawless streets of Sydney, and would have preferred a submachine gun or an AK-47 like the other gunmen had. Surprisingly, Australia is not in fact overrun by convicts, and I found the streets surprisingly safe. Sydney actually seems like a very American city, sprawling suburbs, front lawns, big cars. I suppose the one thing that sets it apart, other than the funny accents and the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road, is that the Aussies have somehow worked out a functioning public transportation system to navigate all the suburbs surrounding Sydney, and the city rail is fast, efficient, clean, and relatively cheap.

Some photos from Brazil I like

Riocinha favela, Rio de Janeiro. November, 2008.


Sometimes I am boggled by what is considered "good" photography. I often don't understand a lot of the commentary on what I consider bad photography, where it seems to me what a critic or the photographer says is given equal value to the photographs themselves.
I used to consider most portraits dull and uninspired, and could never understand why great portrait photographers were considered great. But maybe this is changing; over the course of this year, I've begun to take more portraits, because I find so much can be said in the way people compose themselves, either deliberately or candidly. And although I haven't become completely comfortable with taking portraits, I've realized that my main interests in photography lies in photographing people (this was partially realized when, after telling a Chinese construction worker in Ethiopia I was a photographer, he asked me "do you photograph scenes or people?" "People," I answered.).

I guess what I am interested in is how people interact with their environments. I tend not to take "isolated" portraits of people in front of a monochrome background, but to somehow convey a relationship between people and the spaces around them. My favorite photos -- my own and those of others -- are almost always of people and their environment. That all sounds pretty general and squishy, which is probably why I have avoided talking about photography on this blog in the first place.

Here are some of my photos I took in Middletown, Connecticut, during my junior (third) year at Wesleyan University in the autumn of 2006. Incidentally, this was the last time I shot entirely on film. I actually miss using film, something I hope to change once I get back to the States. The smell of toxic chemicals in the darkroom, the magical appearance of images on the paper, and satisfying click and subsequent winding my camera after each exposure -- these are things I miss.

Sometimes I feel my job is pretty hard (well, not the actual fellowship job), because I don't get to photograph things that are obviously beautiful. People sometimes ask why am I photographing this and that, like dorms in a construction site, which might seem mundane. But photographing something like a construction site to me is far more interesting than something like Iguazu falls, where one can find enough pretty pictures on Google images.

Sao Paulo, November, 2008
Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo
Curitiba, Brazil. October 2008

China in Ethiopia

If you ask Ethiopians what the Chinese are doing in Ethiopia, they will most likely answer that they build roads and buildings. Huge housing projects are being put up around the capital, Addis Ababa, with many contracts given to Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOE's). One major corporation, China Road and Bridge Construction (CRBC), has come under fire from the World Bank after some shady dealings in the Philippines.

One CRBC employee told me that he hated the corruption of Ethiopia -- and Ethiopia is supposed to be better than many other African countries in this regard. Nonetheless, collusion with the local government is often considered necessary to get things done.









"I respect the Chinese because they are willing to do things that other foreigners aren't willing to do." Whereas many Western organizations and corporations in Ethiopia are not willing to get their hands a little dirty, the Chinese seem willing to work alongside the Ethiopians, in poor working conditions, often living in temporary tin shacks put up next to construction sites.

The Chinese have been put in charge of constructing the new African Union building, perhaps a symbolic move of China's growing influence in Africa.

Chinese workers are paid two to three times the amount they would normally make in China. Many Chinese workers have worked in other African countries, such as Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, and Algeria.




Unlike in most other countries, many of the Chinese in Ethiopia were young, educated, single men. In a way, we had a lot in common -- we'd just graduated university, had a thirst for some adventure abroad, and were open-minded to new places.

Perhaps in testament to the excellence of Ethiopian food, many Chinese people remarked that they'd rather eat Ethiopian food, than try to eat Chinese food all the time.

13 Months of Sunshine in Ethiopia

This is the official slogan of the Ethiopian tourism board. Aside from the chaotic and somewhat anarchic streets of Addis Ababa, the climate of the capital is quite good. Addis is set at about 2,000m, making it a cool and sunny place where reggae, Nigerian high life, and Amharic riffs float through the streets until the wee hours in the morning.

Unfortunately, it appears as if the government has blocked Blogspot, so I'm going to forward my posts and have them posted by Annalisa.

The Chinese people here mostly work through state-run corporations, such as the China Road and Bridge Corporation which, you guessed it, builds roads and bridges. They've also opened vocational schools to train engineers, electricians, mechanics, and other kinds of technicians. Just ran into two guys working for a bottling company, who are soon off to Rwanda. They had just come back from Djibouti and Somalia. The technician's hand was broken by an angry official at the Djibouti airport when the technician refused to give a bribe. Apparently the bottling industry is big in Somalia -- they were paid $800,000 USD to build a factory. I asked, "isn't... Somalia... dangerous?" "SO DANGEROUS! There were UN tanks and soldiers everywhere, and guys with rocket launchers and machine guns." I think I'll leave Somalia off my Watson fellowship, thanks.

Ethiopia is a really beautiful country, and I haven't even gotten to the "beautiful parts." It's a relatively safe country compared to its neighbors (Somalia and Sudan come to mind), but unfortunately has seen its fair share of political violence and famines in the recent past.

Barack Obama is a hit here. Today I saw a cafe called "Obama coffee cafe" with images of Obama on its sign. The monitor backgrounds to the internet cafe's computers are all images of Barack Obama. One Ethiopian employee at the China Road and Bridge Corporation offered to show me around, on the condition that I voted for Obama.

If you guys could just listen to me for a second --

Blogspot appears to be down in Ethiopia; Cedric has added me as a contributor to his blog, so I can post the things he emails me. So far this amounts to one post, which I'll put up in a second; it was emailed a couple of days ago, but I've been out of touch in backwoods Laos. Now I'm in relatively cosmopolitan Phnom Penh, where there are such things as "computers" with "the internets." Cheers.