7am, October 20th, Something or Other Hotel, Bahir Dar:

This Ethiopia tour has become remarkably easy, and yet exhausting in its monotony. On the shores of Lake T’ana, the headwaters of the Blue Nile, in the city of Bahir Dar. Yet I’m not really excited about anything except counting down my last malaria pills and stepping onto that KLM jet Tuesday night. Should it matter that Bahir Dar is supposed to be the most beautiful city in Ethiopia? Or that we’re only a stone’s throw from the fabled island monasteries which have been floating in rocky isolation in the lake’s center for hundreds of years? No, it doesn’t matter at all. When you feel like this, the tourist crap seems horribly trite and ridiculous.
I was thinking about going back to tell you the stories about the “Revitalized Water Man” and “Mimi’s Run in with the Afars” … but these will just have to be wrung out of me at a dinner party. I’m not going back in time again. So here we are. The present. We’re traveling with Shimeles’ 28-year-old ‘girl friend’ Hewit, and her friend Ruth (pronounced Root) who I like a good bit better. They’ve been decent company: Root speaks excellent English, and they’re young and somewhat lively and have given our trip a bit of youthful vigor that perhaps it was lacking before, both with Protestant Teddy in the Afar, and with just Shimo and Me down in the south. Yet I can’t help being a bit exasperated: They’re young, and pretty, and Root is talkative and a little goofy, but I’m not actually interested in them at all: they lack imagination, philosophy, drive, or… character. Which brought me to consider that I have yet to meet someone in this country who I would pursue as a friend back home. A little depressing to think about. The past two nights, we went out ‘partying’… huge dinner, beer, walking around, buying street food, finding a little liquor house that serves the local moonshine (Arake), and watching Ethiopia TV while sipping determinedly on several shots of roast corn distillate with a rather stomach turning taste, and a habit of burning like DrainO as it goes down. Last night, a bar with several Bedele Beers (Shim’s favorite, but honestly, nothing great folks… we’re spoiled with our Montana Microbreweries) and an aborted attempt to dance before deciding that Bahir Dar really doesn’t have any sort of a worthwhile nightclub. I share a room with Root, and Shimeles raises an eyebrow, hinting… But it’s all so worthless! I don’t want to hang out with Root. I want Halle, and Hans and Clark and Sean and Kendra and Walker, and Kahl and Keinitz and the myriad other friends back home who I adore, who really offer me something, who are worth hanging out with, who understand me, who know how to live, and who I miss so very terribly.
Should I stop bitching and look on the bright side, just for the last four days? Or should I mention how desperate I’ve become: outlining in my notebook all the ‘classic trips’ I want to do as soon as humanly possible upon my return… daydreaming, constantly. These aren’t even creative, but God how I miss them!
I wonder how home will live up to my inflated expectations. I’ve built it up so much in my head… Ah, of course it will! Funny that of all the things this trip has denied me for five weeks: American food, music, friends, orderliness and sanity, a shared language, movies, a familiar culture, family, cultural entertainment, school, the freedom to make my own schedule… I have missed my wilderness the most, almost to the point of insanity. It wears on me every day, and rarely an hour goes by this past week when I don’t find myself drifting off into some sort of fancy about places I’ve been, or will go, or will return to… solitude, freedom, joy. Can you hear my head exploding? Aaaarghhhh!
Ok, I KNOW, this is not what you want to read about. You’re all still thinking, ‘Damnit Lewis, we don’t CARE about what you miss at home… tell us more about Africa!’
It’s not as easy as that, though, anymore. My impressions have become scattered, my stories too many and all blending together, my experiences tainted by boredom and fatigue and loneliness. Would you rather hear that I watched ‘Capote’ at Shimeles’ house and loved it? …No, I’d imagine not, but it’s so easy to explain to my American readers, so easy for them to comprehend…
Why am I shying away from delving into this place? From writing like I did when I first arrived in Addis, when everything was frightening and new and incredible? Is it because I’m afraid that my final analysis of Ethiopia, once I put it all together, just doesn’t add up to what I had hoped to find here, and I think I can avoid forcing myself to that conclusion if I just keep mum? Well, I just made that up on the spot, but it may be correct.
I must try, I must try: The high plateau north and northwest of Addis is really quite beautiful: rolling hills and valleys and rounded mountains and eucalyptus forests, and everything so green green green! At 9000+ feet, the air is thin, and the population much sparser than the south. Here and there at regular intervals, those same grass huts sprout and bulge up from the ground… There’s something wholly organic about them: they don’t look as if they’ve been built, but rather that they swelled and popped up out of the dark soil in the night, like mushrooms… it is easy to forget that they were created by human hands, yet when considered, something about their design seems so right and so healthy. The rounded walls, the conical roof, the way a fire can be built right in the middle of the hut and the smoke just seeps and slips out of the roof-thatch like fog slipping up off the top of a mountain. These little rural scenes are my favorite: small cherub-faced boys and girls in green shawls and green shorts and green caps, like little Robin-Hoods, wander about pastures casually herding a few sheep along in front of them with flicks of a eucalyptus branch. Everywhere, everywhere in this country, people are with their animals. Always. It’s a sort of union that I think has been largely forgotten in developed countries: people and their domesticated animals, always together, dependent on one another, living every day side-by-side and in constant contact… until one day the human co-part decides to slaughter his friend for a dinner of mutton, and move on to new company. Yet there’s something in it that makes you consider the duality of the counter-dependency. That’s an all-too-fancy way of saying what I mean, which is that you understand that the people are wholly dependent here on the well-being of their livestock, which in a strange way subordinates them to their domesticated animals. It’s an odd concept, but somewhat pleasant as well, in an old-times pastoralist sentimental sort of way. I like watching men plowing their fields by hand, walking behind two oxen yolked to the plow, itself a handmade affair of twisted wood and rough-pounded iron… plodding through newly churned dirt with wrinkled black bare feet, peach-pink on the bottoms.
The small villages are the most pleasant: you know how it goes… in an agricultural society which has persisted unchanged for hundreds of generations, everyone has their place and their station and they fill it unquestioningly. Without the concept of money or riches, no one realizes they are poor, and thus no one really is poor… Happy faces greet you, children are playing, or people are working seriously but with that satisfied look of people who do not know to crave for more than they have. Also, the place looks quite appealing: the western notions of garbage, homelessness, and sheet metal have not yet been introduced, which is much more than can be said of the larger towns and cities where our glorious ideals of modernity and development have begun to take their first awkward and perverted steps toward the First World. Uck.
Well, Shimeles just came in with a bright and friendly good-morning (I love how he asks me, “Did you sleep well, dear?”) that cheered me right up, and I’d better go and get ready to drive back to Debre Markos to collect our LAST mobile station (yay!!)… But before I forget, I have to record my two favorite Shimeles-isms thus far:
“Lewis, you should maybe like to order a tasty caesarian salad…?”
And, “Yes, there were many Jews in San Paolo, in Brazil. I saw them many times and once even visited with them to one of their seen-o-googies… You know what is a Jewish seen-o-googie?”