The Nicest Room Ever, Arba Minch, 11:30pm, Oct. 11:
You know, this was going to be a very different journal entry had I written it yesterday or earlier today. But it’s now, so you’ll get an entry steeped in my current attitude toward the world, lucky readers! Let me start by admitting that I’m a little bit drunk, extremely tired, (baggy eyes and all) and that I just danced with my first prostitute. Well, she wasn’t for me. Shimeles invited her over to our table at the dance bar, because we (he) wasn’t having any luck attracting other, regular, pretty ladies to our table, and I don’t think I was his idea of an after-dinner dancing date. Hence, the prostitute at our table, who Shim then summarily refused to dance with. Rather rude, I thought, calling the poor girl over and buying her a beer, and then talking with me instead and rather ignoring her. She was obviously a little awkward, and the music was loud and hot and hip-hoppy, and by the way she was bopping around in her chair and looking hopefully at Shimeles, I could tell she wanted to dance just about as bad as I did, which made us the two most likely candidates in the place. A few reservations at first, but then I said, “Lewis, what do you really want to do right now?”
“Dance,” I replied.
“Alone?”
“Heck no! With a pretty girl would be preferable, but I’d even take those drunk fellows over at the next table if they’d groove with me,” I said.
“Well,” I returned, “how about asking this pretty lady to dance? She may be a prostitute, but she’s still a nice girl, and I know she’ll dance with you, and you don’t even have to worry about her getting the wrong idea, since she’s already sponsored by your cohort.”
So I did. And I was right. She was a good dancer.

You know what I was going to write about yesterday, if I’d written anything? I was going to write about how awfully homesick I was, and how sorry I was that I was writing about homesickness instead of delightful impressions of African villagers, but that all I cared about was getting back to where I belonged, and to hell with Ethiopia and its people and everything else. To some extent, those feelings are still there, only latent now, allowing me to purge myself of several pages of mental excrement before lapsing into the ol’ homesick blues tune.
You know the problem with traffic in this country? Yes you do, I already explained it in great detail. And I won’t go over it again. Let’s just say that Wednesday was a bit stressful. I didn’t get to see any scenery because it got dark in a damn hurry, and then to my horror I realized that we were on a highway with nothing but hundreds of the “Al Qaeda”… they all want to drive in the wrong lane, and they don’t turn on their damn headlights until it’s pitch black, and then there are thousands of donkey-driven carts plunking along in both lanes which are impossible to spot until you’re close enough to look right up the poor donkey’s yazoo, and the road is potholed and treacherous and after dusk is when all the little kids come out to play jacks in the middle of the dark highway. But the worst are the damn passenger-bus drivers. Those guys must have to get a special certification in jihadist suicide techniques, because nothing else could explain their incredible skill at putting so many lives in jeopardy with such great frequency and pluck. They don’t even try to be sly about it: they’ll throw themselves (80 passengers and all) into a throng of uniformed preschoolers, donkey carts, panicked sheep and semi-trailers in the middle of a dark village at 120 km/hour in the wrong lane, with the headlights off.
Needless to say, I started to develop heartburn. Again.
We met a ‘friend’ of Shimeles’ in Assawa around 8:30, who he didn’t make any attempt to disguise as other than a fuck-buddy, and to my great astonishment (well, maybe not so astonished anymore… This is Africa…) the girl could not have been older than 22. Woebieye. Who brought her friend Meskii, who I think was supposed to be for me?? Ha. So we all went out to dinner, and Shim got too drunk/tired to drive and I made sure to drive Meskii home before going back to our hotel rooms, where Woebieye had already set up camp.
It was a nice night, with a big mosquito net and the breeze blowing in the banana trees outside. At one or two points, I was woken by the sound of a great wild boar squealing just outside my room. That, or it was Woebieye, but I really hope it was a wild boar, for all our sakes.
Anyway, when we’d left Addis, I was feeling pretty low. Damn tired of the city, tired of Shimeles and the Ethiopians, tired of the people at my hotel and the smog and the laziness, and of being a farenj, and tired of being away from my family and Halle and my friends and social life and Montana, with the Rocky Mountaineers and the NRM Grotto and the fall colors and crisp autumn air. A long email from Dad that made me wish I was home, hiking with him, didn’t really help my condition either. But then we had lunch with Dr. Tigistu, who I greatly admire, and slogged out of town past Mohjo, and then we were heading south and the scenery was beautiful and the traffic was light and it was evening with green hills and big pastures and I started to cheer up.
Today (the 11th) I woke up with a recurrence of the gurgly stomach and the shits, but as we drove further south, my mood elevated exponentially. Beautiful green hills and lush vegetation and a winding road that continued to become more and more remote… Maybe that was it… I really missed remoteness, and no offense to the Ethiopian people, but they were everywhere and I was just so damn tired of people! So that curvy highway dropping into the rift lakes was really a special treat, that started to take my mind off how badly I missed home. Shimeles picked up a few hitchhikers … cute young girls, of course. And I suffered miserably with an overactive bladder, which seems to happen to me at the same time I get a bad stomach, though I’m not sure how the two are linked. Whether because of the bacteria in my guts or Shimeles’ white-knuckle driving, or both, my upper abdomen felt (and still feels) like it was being squeezed like a wet towel, and my stomach juice was correspondingly rising up my esophagus and giving me horrendous heartburn, which is an affliction I’ve never suffered from before this trip. It continued all day and made me feel a bit miserable and definitely killed my apatite, but I tried to keep it from putting a damper on everything else. It was a nice drive, relative to everything else I’d seen here, and even of its own right. People were friendly, and no one carried a gun, and I couldn’t get over how much I loved the sight of those big round mudbrick kivas with their beautiful grass-thatch roofs, and the little decorative cones on top. I loved them.
Farenji frenzy is a little ridiculous. I don’t really understand it… the kids go a little crazy when they see me. I mean, they just suddenly go apeshit, and jump up and down and flail their arms and scream at the top of their lungs and as fast as they can, farenjifarenjifarenjifarenjifarenjifarenjifarenjifarenji… on and on and on, until we’re out of earshot. I can’t really think of anything comparable back home, not even for the ice cream man, or the way girls always screamed when the recess bell would ring in grade school. I’ve started screaming it right back at them, maybe because it seems like one of those retarded things that you want to copycat, just to show how dumb it seems.
The two lakes by Arba Minch are really quite incredible. The big one to the north is probably at least several times the size of Flathead, and the water is all a red-earth muddy color, though I don’t understand how it gets that way. (Suspended ferrous something-ites, I think I read somewhere…) It’s separated by a tiny strip of land from the lake to the south, which is instead a glacial turquoise blue, and it’s pretty crazy to be on the strip of land between them, gazing down into both.
We really lucked out on our lodgings. Somehow, in this tourist-savvy place, we found a gorgeous new pension with the nicest, cleanest rooms yet for Ethiopia, and they’re only charging us 60 birr for Shim and 100 birr for me, for these huge, spotless, nice new rooms with attached bath. That’s an 11 dollar motel room, folks, and upscale. Although I broke the towel rack already.
We drove the long, hard road into Nech Sar National Park this afternoon, going after the already established NCSR point, that Becky put there 6 months ago. Well mom, you would have loved that first part, I think, driving along the most honest-to-goodness African-ish River, in a little mini-jungle with wonderful huge Sycamores and Acacias and who knows what other plants… Some strange ones that made me think of a spine-less cholla crossed with a creeping vine. Poaching, under the Derg Regime, and in the post-Derg confusion, has greatly depleted the wildlife in all the parks, but the botanical life, I imagine, has stayed pretty well intact, and phenomenal. Nice park!
We got horribly stuck in a mud-hole only about a kilometer from our final destination, and it got late and we got more and more stuck, and once we had high centered the car with a watery sludge-pool under each wheel, I was pretty sure that we were going to finally have to make use of our emergency bivouac kit. But, we proved that with a lot of willpower, you can get yourself out of damn near the worst situation, and somehow after hours of pushing and pulling and scooping and jamming wood under the tires, the car emerged from the mud, and I crawled out after it, looking like the first terrestrial life form wriggling out of the primordial ooze. We found the point not long after, and set it up and, although dark was falling and it was a REALLY bad road to descend in the dark, we drove just a bit farther to the Nech Sar savannah, and there were all kinds of orangutans and Zebras (Zebras!!) and we drove right into them, and then turned around and zoomed the hell out of there, and somehow got all the way back down after two hours of rock hopping, without managing to crack the axles. Ate mongoloid fish pulled fresh from the lakes (do they perhaps carry that horrible Guinea Worm parasite I’ve been warned about?) which were very tasty, and had beers and danced with a prostitute. I shouldn’t make that distinction. Danced with a nice girl, returned home, and for some strange reason was inspired to write about all of it for you people before I went to bed for some very well-deserved sleep. Jeeze, what is it with you folks, always demanding more, more, more??
By the way, Shimeles and I are getting along very well now. I don’t know what it took, but … I think we finally figured each other out, and I’m quite pleased with the change. He’s a good road-mate, and… dare I say it… I’m actually having fun today, especially after all the excitement and tribulations in the mud-pit. That did me good. Worked the muscles, felt adventurous, and it really helped take my mind off the fact that, no matter what, this place can’t hold a candle to home, to my land, my friends, my mom and dad and brother, my Halle. To dancing the jitterbug and not thinking twice about who’s watching and what they think. Three cheers for the Big Sky Country! Now, I just have to get some damn data and get out of here. Hope I don’t get burned out on this Geophysics stuff once back… it’s not all fun and travel and games, Lewis. Gotta work, too. *sigh* … What am I going to do with my life, in the end, anyway? Ah, John Graves, where are you to give me advice?

And oh, yeah… got bit by my first tse-tse flies today. Let’s see how long it takes me to come down with the African Sleeping Sickness.