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. Treating Addis Ababa as the hub of this Ethiopian wheel, nearly all of the country’s main sights are spread along a ring with a radius of eight to twelve hours from the center. That means that any overland move out of Addis likely entails quite a long bus ride. Moreover, the nature of the road network dictates that you will likely pass through the capital several times on your journey as you move between quadrants. That’s bad news if you don’t like Addis much (like most of the travelers I’ve met), or if you enjoy constructing aesthetically pleasing itineraries that don’t pass through the same point more than once (like me).
For my first move, I decided to jab out east into the Islamic city of Harar. It sounded intriguing, steeped in culture, much smaller and more manageable than the capital. It’s a rarity in sub-Saharan Africa: A city that counts its age in centuries instead of decades.
I navigated the bus ticket counters around Meskel Square with a newfound Ethiopian friend named Asay, who I had first met when he offered to help me change money at a favorable black market rate. American dollars were so desirable that you could get 35 birr for one, as opposed to 31 or 32 at a bank. Even with Asay’s help, I couldn’t get a ticket east for the next day: they were supposedly sold out, possibly due to the upcoming holiday.
No big deal, though: Staying in national capitals longer than I want to is something of a tradition of mine (looking at you, Delhi, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires). What’s more, I finally fulfilled my ambition of seeing Rise of Skywalker, in a nearly deserted theater. That’s a topic for another ranting post entirely.
Early in the morning of the second day, I boarded my bus at Meskel Square, bound for Dire Dawa, a major city most of the way to Harar. Virtually all Ethiopian long-haul buses leave before sunrise; if you want a post-5:30 am departure, you’re probably out of luck. Indeed, at this early hour Meskel Square was stacked with a few dozen buses, and all of the vendors, touts and hangers-on that naturally appear at transport hubs.
On board the bus, the digital clock above the windshield read 22:42. This brings me to the point that Ethiopia exists on a parallel temporal plane. The Ethiopian clock is set backward six hours, so that sunrise happens around 0:00 instead of 6:00, noon at 6:00, and so on. It actually makes sense to start the day at sunrise instead of the dead middle of the night. The calendar here is different also: According to my ticket, at that moment we were in the fourth month of 2012. Ethiopian Christmas was nearly upon us, on our January 7. This can all be confusing, and potentially problematic if you mistake Ethiopian time for western time or vice versa.
The bus was nearly empty–I had the whole back half to myself–which I found strange considering the dearth of tickets for the previous day. As we drove through the sunrise, it became clear that this was going to be a beautiful drive. We passed through long stretches of savannah, punctuated by buttes and irregularly shaped hills. We climbed along cliffs and steep gorges. It was all so green; it’s said that one of the great misconceptions about Ethiopia is that it’s a dry, barren country. Even now, comfortably outside of the wet season, the landscape I saw was lush, full of archetypically East African trees (low to the ground, flat on top), crop fields, wild meadows.
The landscape itself was wonderful, but the thing that made the journey superlative were the snatches of human life we caught as we roared past. We never went long without seeing a settlement or village: A collection of thatch huts, or low-to-the-ground mud hovels. The villagers’ clothing stood out brightly in contrast to their surroundings. As we moved east, the settlements became larger. There were towns of mud-brick houses with corrugated tin roofs, busy markets and children tugging on donkeys’ reins or else swatting their hind quarters with leather whips. Some dwellings appeared to be in a state of partial construction: Just verical timber beams with a roof and a door, with no mud to fill in the gaps. In some of these houses, every beam leaned at a 30-degree angle, looking on the brink of collapse. These resembled the unlikely angles that a surrealist painter might indulge in, but were presumably the result of either poor craftsmanship or punishment from the natural elements. I was exhausted from the morning’s early wake-up call, but my nose was glued to the window almost the entire time, taking in this spectacle.
We stopped for lunch in a town called Hirna, where I met the only other westerner on my bus: A 60-year-old Italian man named Mario, large of nose and scarce of hair, who spoke much less English than most Ethiopians I had met. He flicked through the photos on his phone, showing me shots of him next to tribespeople in southern Ethiopia and in Eritrea’s Italianesque capital Asmara. Although he couldn’t string more than two English words together, I gathered that he was on a major trip through Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean. I liked his gruff manner, and we approximated a conversation, me shooting strings of Spanish and English at him, him responding in labored English with ample hand gestures, always referring to himself in the third person: “Mario tonight Dire Dawa. Tomorrow, Harar, sleep Dire Dawa. You, hotel Mario. Tonight, sleep Dire Dawa. You”–pointing to me–“Mario”–pointing to himself.
I got his gist and agreed to share a room with him in Dire Dawa. I had intended to catch a minibus straight on to Harar, but I wasn’t in a rush and didn’t mind the company. The landscape became drier as we neared our destination, the vegetation more scrub-like. The bus stopped several times for the passengers to pee, and for women and children to come aboard selling snacks and a selection of reed-like plants I couldn’t identify.
Dire Dawa is Ethiopia’s second city, even newer than Addis in its prominence and certainly less eventful. Mario and I jammed into a tuuk-tuuk and clattered along the tree-lined streets, in search of a hotel. Mario wanted to shop around for an optimal room–“Vediamo…” He walked out of the first one scrunching his nose in disgust. We clambered back into the tuuk-tuuk and arrived at the Selam Hotel, a mid-range place that passed his muster for cleanliness and mine for price, given that we were splitting it.
We ate a meal together in the hotel restaurant, drinking Habesha beer and swatting flies. In a stain on both of our judgments, we each ordered fish. My fish goulash tasted like a seafood-phobe’s worst nightmare. A lump wiggled under the cloth of the next table over, and a skinny orange cat popped out. Mario was generous with his fish cutlet, but I was stingier with my goulash, mostly because I was afraid the spicy sauce would give the cat diarrhea. It sat on the floor beside me, flicking its tail and leaving little doubt in its gaze that it hated me.
Mario handed me his business card, which revealed him to a broker of agricultural products such as olive oil. He generously offered me a place to stay in Rome. Our communication was limited beyond that, and he was surprised when I objected to his rhetorical “Trump good?” with a vigorous negative. “Economy good!” he said. I reflected that sometimes it’s nice to sit in silence with someone, without the expected burden of conversation.
I stayed in the hotel lobby, milking the WiFi, working to spin up this blog. I went cross-eyed waiting multiple minutes for a webpage to load. I’m not such a luddite that I can stay calm in the face of miserably slow connection speeds when I’m attempting to complete a task. Five hours later, exhausted but successful, I walked upstairs to our room. Mario was sprawled facedown on his bed, wearing nothing but a t-shirt. His snores lent an irregular bassline to the drone emanating from the mosque across the street.
The next morning, Mario and I squeezed into a minibus with 20 Ethiopians and drove 90 minutes to Harar, where I bade him farewell and started my day in one of east Africa’s most iconic cities.