GOODBYE TO OVERLANDING

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 fabric of the surrounding country. They’re extra-national places. You could spend three days inside an airport, and few people will grant that you’ve actually visited the country it’s attached to.

The overlanding orthodoxy is particularly strong in Africa: The continent is crowded with backpackers heading to Cairo from Cape Town, or vice versa. There’s no more iconic journey in the world: African travel retains a romance and feeling of remoteness that is vanishing from much of the rest of the world, and the route’s alliteration probably doesn’t hurt either. More to the point, the promise of this journey–seeing a continental cross-section ranging from urbane South Africa to wildlife-rich East Africa to sandy historic Egypt–is an obvious drawcard. Dark Star Safari is Paul Theroux’s account of his own take on that journey; he suffered through a selection of horrifically uncomfortable land transport, but talks about air travel the way others might describe a colonoscopy.

Cairo to the Cape aside, a much smaller number of people attempt a journey down Africa’s lesser-known western coast, through many countries devoid of famous sights and reasonable guarantees of security. And a still smaller number see both coasts by tracing a large U, transiting through Zambia or a more southern country into recently open Angola. My favorite exemplar of such an itinerary is Dan Grec, a Canadian engineer who spent 999 days in an ultra-customized Jeep Wrangler, driving from Morocco to Egypt the long way.

Carrying the notion of overlanding to its logical conclusion, a Dane named Thor Pedersen is seven years and 95% of the way through his attempt to visit every nation on earth without boarding a plane. As I write this, he’s rounding out his nineteenth day on a container ship en route from Micronesia to another remote Pacific outpost. Many decades have passed since the last the last sizeable stretches of equatorial jungle were visited, so travelers in pursuit of real adventure often apply a contrivance of some sort to their journey. In Asia I remember hearing stories of a man who, if I recall correctly, was walking from western Europe to Vietnam (he was currently somewhere in the Middle East). Someday I’m sure someone will attempt the same journey walking backwards.

I’ve long since learned that you’ll always meet someone whose trip is longer than yours, more ambitious than yours, more newsworthy than yours. Travel to Ethiopia feels quite adventurous, but it doesn’t take long to meet someone who has just returned from Mali or the Central African Republic, albeit from the relative safety of the barricades in the capital cities. Inevitably, this person will have stories of another traveler who has snuck past the UN checkpoints to venture into the outback, a few coin flips away from a kidnapping headline.

It goes without saying that I overthink things, so musings like these were on my mind as I looked out my small ovular window. I was on a flight from Lalibela to Addis Ababa, a 50-minute jaunt that miraculously cancelled out a two-day ordeal by public bus. To me, this is as close as we’ll ever come to time travel.

One thing that an overland trip guarantees is a sense of direction, and perhaps by extension a sense of purpose. Reflecting on my weeks in Ethiopia, I’ve been frustrated by the sensation of driving in circles, over long distances on bumpy roads, with no clear trajectory or end goal in sight. Riding on a rattletrap bus for ten hours thigh-to-thigh with your seatmates is bearable if you’re completing a leg in a linear journey. You’re innoculated from misery by the satisfaction of pushing in a certain direction, stepping towards a goal. But I find these rides demoralizing when they’re carrying me on a loop to a city I’ve already visited twice.

And this is the crux of the reason I found myself on that flight from Lalibela, $60 down, travel purity diminished, and thoroughly relieved. When I first conceived of a trip to Africa, I had vague notions of tracing an overland route, maybe braving the notorious road from Ethiopia into northern Kenya, then to Tanzania, hopping aboard every bus that came my way. But here I was, three weeks into my trip and way up in the sky, already perusing Google for flights from Addis Ababa to a new country.

And who’s to say that there’s no perspective to be gained by flying? I’d seen northern Ethiopia from the ground for two weeks. Gazing out the window, I felt rather omniscient. The landscape was instantly familiar, but the zoomed-out view put me in mind of completing a video game, seeing the map fully revealed after hours of play. The gorges I’d bounced along by bus were actually huge gashes in the earth, like cracks created by a giant pair of prying hands. The dusty panorama was much vaster than I could have imagined from the ground, a tan canvas that stretched to every vanishing point even from 30,000 feet. The huts with corregated tin roofs, shabby from the ground, appeared as pin-bright winks in the sunlight.

Less than an hour later, I was in the Addis Ababa airport. Standing at the baggage carousel among my fellow post-Timkat evacuees. Staring at my phone. To connect to the WiFi, you had to vote in a survey naming Addis the world’s best airport. But our baggage was nowhere in sight, even though the terminal was tiny and empty. I waffled on selling out, and then cast my vote.

I spent the next three days staying at the suburban Addis home of a family friend, a wonderfully hospitable man named Getachew, recently retired from the UN. At night we sat on the couch in Getachew’s living room, watching the impeachment drama on CNN and eating homemade injera. I had a truly hot shower for the first time in weeks.

I was leaving a lot of Ethiopia on the table. I was foresaking Axum, the third pillar of Ethiopia’s historical triangle. I was also turning down the Danakil Depression, a unique volcanic region abutting Eritrea whose bright foamy rocks would be an instant hit on Instagram. As much as the Danakil’s unique geology, I wanted to see the local Afar people, who shave their teeth into points. I hadn’t even touched the south of Ethiopia.

I get a little jolt of excitement each time I arrive in a new place. I felt that in Lalibela and Gonder. But arriving in a new country delivers a doubly strong zap of dopamine. So that’s why I said farewell to Ethiopia, goodbye to overlanding and flew on to Uganda.