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 dribbling out white tourists in sun hats. I strolled up the walkway, taking in the main structure and noting that it was smaller than I expected. I ascended a staircase, walked along a hallway, looked out a window, walked back down the staircase, strolled along a crumbled wall, brushed it with my fingertips to feel the cool stone, ambled into another structure, looked through one of its windows, walked into the sunlight again, paused to take in the whole scene, and within fifteen minutes was exiting the compound, accompanied by that anticlimactic feeling of “maybe I missed something interesting” that has dogged me at many of the ruins I’ve visited. As I left, I passed a knot of Ethiopian men lounging in the shade by the ticket office: Guides without clients. Even now, in the busiest week of the year (right before Timkat, during which two million people descend on Gondar and hotel rates quadruple), there weren’t enough tourists to occupy the local talent pool.
To me, Gondar was primarily a city of belching tuuk-tuuk exhaust, winding cobblestone streets, persistent touts, and guns. I’ve never seen so many guns in plain sight. Granted, I’ve also never visited much of the interior of my own country.
That first night, I met up with Claire and Titi, a friendly French couple from Reunion whom I’d met on the bus to Bahir Dar. We were in search of a restaurant called Four Sisters, by far the best-known eatery in Gondar. As we walked the darkening streets, we ran into three men, two of whom had AK-47s on their backs, who were reluctant to allow us to proceed along our chosen route. I suspect they wanted a bribe; one claimed to be an off-duty police officer. None of these men was particularly nefarious or aggressive, but we promptly backtracked and flagged down a tuuk-tuuk. After that, I saw AK-47s everywhere. There were soldiers and security forces stationed along the streets, sure, but many of these gun-toters looked like private citizens to me. I began avoiding walking central Gondar after dark.
All of this left me in the hands of the tuuk-tuuks, which had their own problems. Riding one back from dinner to my hostel one night, we hit a solid wall of vehicles: In front of us, a streetful of traffic had ground to a quivering halt. Tuuk-tuuks attempted to maneuver through the mess until they hit a dead end, filling the empty spaces between larger vehicles like mortar between bricks. The result was a solid mass of hot metal and fumes. My driver sighed and said this was “normal.” He swept our light craft around in a tight little arc and we sputtered off in the opposite direction. Almost immediately, we were stopped by an imperious army officer in brown camo. The officer frisked the driver, scowled at his ID card, lifted up the driver’s seat cushion and peered into the comparment underneath. Then he instructed me to step out of the back so that he could frisk me, too. I felt his muscular frame as he patted me down: He was by far the most well-built Ethiopian I had encountered so far. I had a sudden vivid vision of him doing pull-ups in the yard outside his barracks.
The officer cleared us to continue, and we turned right onto a cobblestone path guarded by two men in blue Adidas sweat pants, each cradling an AK-47. They nodded us through. We again turned right, onto a road parallel to the jammed one we had just fled. Almost immediately, we were waved to a stop by a policeman in a well-pressed uniform. He frisked the driver and checked his ID, then poked his head into the tuuk-tuuk. Seeing me, he raised his eyebrows and gave me a thumbs-up, an implicit “are-you-OK” gesture. I nodded. As we lurched on, we hit another solid wall of traffic, vehicles packed too closely together for us to sneak through. Exhaust poured from countless tailpipes in a gritty, sour haze. I began to suspect a connection between the gratuitous, laissez-faire inspections and this absurd gridlock.
When at last we reached my hostel, my driver balked and looked at my with doe eyes when I paid the fare we had agreed on. For once, I acquiesced and handed him an extra 50%. I felt that we had been through an ordeal together.
You’d be correct if you intuited that I didn’t like Gondar much. But my three days there paid off because they allowed me to spend a wonderful and mostly uneventful further three days in the Simien Mountains. The Simiens push north from Gonder towards the Sudanese and Eritrean borders, the most altitudinous chunk of an already lofty country. I joined a trek with five other solo travelers: Apart from the aforementioned Aurora and Mesi, the group comprised the Canadian Trent, Argentinean Lucia, who had recently sold her clothing shop in Buenos Aires, and an outgoing Bavarian builder named Sebastian (the second German Sebastian of my trip). The crew became progressively smaller, as Aurora and Mesi returned to Gonder after one night and Lucia was knocked out by food poisoning. Our guide, Worku, was a young and spry local who had grown up in one of the Simiens’ high-altitude villages. He could clearly have jogged the entire route while we puffed far behind him.
We were also joined by a grizzled armed scout, a requirement for hiking in the region. Ours wore the official Simien Mountains National Park green canvas uniform and sandals, a striking contrast with our North Face pants and gore-tex jackets. For the entire trek he plodded silently behind us, AK-47 resting on his shoulders, head bowed. Even when we made camp, he sat a little distance away, clutching his weapon, not speaking even to the other Ethiopians. His role ostensibly was to protect us from animals, although the omnipresent gelada monkeys weren’t at all aggressive, and the Ethiopian wolf is tragically rare (about 40 are thought to exist in the Simiens). I suspect that the scouts are as much a local job creation scheme as a necessary dose of security; each is granted only ten days’ employment a year because there are so many of them.
On the third day of our trek, Trent, Worku and I left our camp early in the morning for a scramble up to 14,500 feet, where we alighted on a ridge directly across from Ras Dejen, Ethiopia’s highest point. Canyons and imposingly vertical cliffs fell away from us in every direction, in a landscape resembling the American southwest in an alternate universe: The same reddish rocks and gorges, but covered in vegetation and tin-roofed villages, roamed by clans of babboons. Ripples of rock fanned out to the dusty horizon, punctuated by the odd peak that rose from the plateau like angry boils.
Almost as rewarding as the view was the fresh air: Lungfuls of it, devoid of tuuk-tuuk exhaust and sewage. The first pristine air I’d smelled in Ethiopia, and the last.