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 sub-Saharan Africa. Lalibela, the unofficial eighth wonder of the world. I’ve been to the Scotland of India and the Venice of China, so I’ve learned to temper my expectations when I hear superlatives like this. But on a continent in which tangible evidence of the past is often scarce, I was eager to see something old.
While I did find history In northern Ethiopia, I also rediscovered that old feeling of slipping onto a well-worn tourist trail; after all, I was visiting the most famous places in the land, guidebook in hand. This feeling permeated my journey in the north at least as much as the historical grandeur. In a way, it’s the sensation that your movements have been both anticipated and orchestrated by the local tourist industry. These are people whose livelihoods depend on aggressively catering to your needs. This sounds like such an obvious point as to not warrant mention. Yet I’ve been continuously struck by a feeling that I’m being draped in a sticky web of tour operators and fellow travelers. In a country of 110 million people, I encountered the same Ethiopians–and fellow backpackers–over and over again. My own little coccoon, born of my tourist credentials and loyalty to the beaten path.
At the risk of belaboring the point, here’s an example. I was sitting in the garden of my guesthouse in Bahir Dar, chatting with a German guy named Robert. He was bearded, one long dreadlock running down his back, a true shoestringer of the type I hadn’t encountered since India: He had spent six months sleeping in African couchsurfer crashpads, five to a room, eschewing expense wherever possible. As we were talking, a new guest walked through the front gate: Aurora, a smiley college grad on vacation from her post with the Italian civil service in Sudan. Later that day, as my minibus was pulling out of Bahir Dar’s makeshift bus station, an Ethiopian tour guide named Mensour rapped on my window and slid his business card through the crack at the top. I pocketed it with the intention of throwing it away later.
The next day in Gondar, I wandered into a restaurant down the block from my hostel, where I was greeted with an eager cry by Mensour. He evidently had hitched a ride on the next minibus from Bahir Dar after mine. I ate dinner with him while he tried to sell me a tour to the Simien Mountains. Two of his friends, Mesi and Addis, sat with us and looked on silently. I fully intended to go the mountains, but Mensour’s gentlemanly aggression–he was a persistent salesman–turned me off. I booked through a different operator.
Two days and one further encounter with Mensour later, I hopped into my minibus to the Simiens to find that two of the other five hikers were Aurora from Bahir Dar and Mensour’s friend Mesi. That night, as we were sitting around the dinner table at our campsite, Mesi’s phone rang. He ended the conversation with a brusque “Alles gute,” and I intuited from Mesi’s description that the caller on the other end was the slightly hapless Robert, who was stuck in Bahir Dar and had cancelled his reservation at Mesi’s couchsurfing pad for the fourth time in four days.
My point here is that I was now among a small world of backpackers and tour guides, inevitably insulated from 99 percent of the local population. This was the backdrop against which the next dozen days of my trip took place.
In a word, Bahir Dar was placid. That’s not a descriptor I’ve come to associate with Ethiopian cities: I had started that very day at 4 am in Addis Ababa, quick-stepping the route to Meskel Square alongside a bearded Brit from my guesthouse, each of us clutching a rock in case one of the dogs barking along the fringes of our vision decided to show us its bite. When I stepped off the bus nine hours later, I was amid palm trees, juice bars and cafes. Only one tout followed me to my guesthouse.
Lake Tana is Ethiopia’s largest body of water and Bahir Dar’s dominant feature. It looms large in the city’s sightseeing literature: The lake is dotted with islands and monasteries, most of which date from the 19th century. I strolled the lakeshore with a German couple named Sebastian and Britta. Lovers lounged on benches. Wispy papyrus plants occupied the shallows, a fact of great excitement for Sebastian and his camera; he explained that he had been unable to find papyrus in Egypt, where the pollution has all but eradicated it.
We wandered along to the harbor, where we paid a very small amount of money for seats in a rickety boat with peeling blue paint and a sputtering motor. We circled the tiny harbor for half an hour, the skipper eager for more passengers, before we set a course for the nearest monastery amid a cloud of gasoline fumes. I spent the ride alternately ignoring and mugging for the selfies the Ethiopian man next to me was snapping. He positioned the camera so that I shared at least half the frame with him each time. I sometimes wonder how many Facebook photo albums I exist in as a reluctant and anonymous participant. I couldn’t be too annoyed, though; being abroad has ignited the urge to photograph exotic people in me, too. On our way back to the harbor, we spotted two brown humps breaking near the distant shore, periodically blowing spray into the air: The closest I’ve been to a hippo thus far.
I’ll remember Bahir Dar for two things, but neither of them is the lake. The first was the spectacle that greeted Sebastian, Britta and me when we stepped into a local entertainment venue later that night. I swear no hyperbole when I say that it was the most bizarrely entrancing musical performance I’ve ever seen. The show’s backbone was the band, two keyboardists and a bass player who sat at the back of the stage, stoically laying the beat that fuelled the frantic motion happening in front of them. Eight dancers–four young men and four young women with cascades of bouncing ringlets–hopped and thrashed in synchrony. Among them pranced a phenomenally skinny youth, maybe 20 years old, decked out in purple shorts and shirt, his head swaddled in a white woolen scarf. He belted into his microphone, veins in his forehead popping, sweating, filling up the entire stage despite his telephone pole frame. The dancers bobbed and jerked; the vocalist was at one end of the stage and then suddenly the other, throwing his head back, a religious-like fervor in him. The dancers dispersed into the audience, where they pulled people out of their seats so that they faced each other, wighling and bobbing, mirrors of one another. I was singled out twice; each time felt like losing a dance-off against an incredibly skilled opponent. A glance around the crowd of 150 or so revealed that we were the only foreigners. I watched as the Ethiopians bobbed and beamed, the motions ingrained in the fluidity of their waists and shoulders. All the while, the purple-clad singer paced furiously round the stage, practically bellowing, often the same lines over and over again in a chant, the band pounding behind him. A short man in a black baseball cap wandered past our seats, warbling along, tears running down his cheeks. The dancers rejoined the singer on stage, were they leaped and thrashed ecstatically. People detached themselves from the crowd to pass 100 birr bills towards the dancers, who accepted them by bowing and pressing the notes onto their foreheads. The music continued, incessant. Half an hour of ceaseless motion, the same bass line, and still the dancing continued.
I felt privileged to have witnessed this performance that night. It was a window into a culture that was proud, deeply routed, unique, and indifferent to my presence. And it was the clearest demonstration I’d seen yet of the stubborn distinctiveness of Ethiopia’s people.
My second lasting impression of Bahir Dar hit me in the gut hours later, when I awoke with my stomach gurgling in an unmistakable way. I thought back to dinner, when I had eaten spaghetti with Sebastian and Britta in a pleasant garden restaurant. As we were sitting down at our table, two men lumbered past us, an unconscious woman draped between them. Not a good sign, looking back on it.
Burgers, pizza, and spaghetti–the three pillars of western cuisine eaten across the world–are readily available on menus in Ethiopia. I’ve resisted the first two so far, but spaghetti feels like an acceptable deviation from Ethiopian cooking, considering the Italians’ cultural influence here. Also, I really like pasta, and that’s justification enough. As is common for dishes cooked outside their natural environment, the spaghetti from this fateful night exhibited features of the local cuisine: The tomato sauce was oily, salty, slightly spicy, very much like the ubiquitous Ethiopian shiro. Little lumps of meat floated in it; I suspect it was these morsels specifically that left me supine for the next 36 hours.
While I was incapacitated, entangled in my mosquito net on my bed, my fellow guesthouse residents departed for two nights of camping at Blue Nile Falls. That’s the source of the tributary that runs 900 miles north into the White Nile, where their joint power rushes all the way to the Mediterranean. I wasn’t particularly sorry to miss the falls; during the dry season, a large hydroelectric dam periodically switches on and reduces their flow to a bare trickle. But I liked the group of four backpackers, including Sebastian and Britta, and I was disappointed to lose the company.
Once I felt well enough to roam beyond my room, I also felt ready to leave Bahir Dar. In the past two days I hadn’t explored beyond the nearest juice bar, but I was ready to begin the northern historical circuit in earnest. I sat in the guesthouse garden for the afternoon, meeting the new crop of arrivals, including Aurora and Robert. Then I caught my minibus to Gondar