The second of a few posts to fast-forward to the present...the final chapter of Ethiopia. There's an orthodoxy among travelers of a certain ilk about avoiding airplanes at all cost. To a certain degree, I buy into this: To hop on a plane is to fast-forward through a movie instead of watching all the way through. In all their sterility and sameness, airports are portals that exist outside of the...

The first of three or four posts to fast-forward this blog to the present moment The first few times I walked up the winding main street in Lalibela, passersby flicked their hands at me in an impatient gesture. I took it as a sign of unwelcome, until I realized that the motion was actually a swat aimed at the persistent armadas of flies that were as much a feature of Lalibela as the heat and...

As in Bahir Dar, the aspects of Gondar that will stick with me are not the ones on the tourist brochures. The city is significant primarily as the capital of Ethiopia in the 17th and 18th centuries, and as the home of European-esque castle ruins from that era (in the Portuguese style, according to my guidebook). On a hot midday I walked through the ruins' entrance gate, past a minibus...

The typical northern Ethiopian circuit begins in Bahir Dar, north-northwest of Addis on Lake Tana. While it's a significant stop in its own right, Bahir Dar is also a springboard for a trio of legendary historical sites, Ethiopia's own Golden Triangle. They have evocative names, with taglines to match: Gonder, the Camelot of Africa. Axum, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in...

12 Jan. 2020 In Harar, I hired a guide named Girma, who was loitering on the street outside my guesthouse. We walked through the main square and into Harar Jugol, the walled old city. As we reached the gate, Girma recited a few facts that I'd read in my guidebook: Harar Jugol contains 82 mosques (and two churches) within about one-fifth of a square mile. That's the highest concentration of...

9 Jan. 2020 I wanted to get out of Addis. The dust and noise were getting to me, and I'd started to notice little roach-like insects crawling across the floor by my bed. They were small, but still an order of magnitude larger than my insect comfort zone permitted. If you mentally chop off the barren Somali desert that juts out of the west like a beak, then Ethiopia becomes roughly circular....

4 Jan. 2020 One natural consequence of being a faranji is that my phone is now peppered with Ethiopian numbers, relics of people I've met on the street. To walk around Addis is to expose yourself to the attention of an assortment of characters who occupy a hazy spectrum of friendliness and fixation on your money. And all of them want your number. Scrolling through my contacts, I see Feyisa the...

4 Jan. 2020 On his Dark Star Safari trip 20 years ago, Paul Theroux noted that Ethiopians loved to fling the epithet faranji! at him. It just means 'foreigner' or 'white person,' a term that sweeps from Ethiopia across South Asia and into Thailand, where you still hear tourists called farangs.* I can happily say that in spite of the massive changes that have rocked Ethiopia in the past two...

1 Jan. 2020 I've never been to Africa before, and I'd be dishonest if I told you that I didn't experience pre-arrival nerves, the kind that precede the just-arrived rush. Stepping off the 13-hour plane from Chicago, shuffling through the haphazard lines to obtain a visa and an Ethiopian sim card, I walked out of the airport into bright Addis Ababa sunshine and a scuffle between two taxi drivers,...