On the morning of our third day, we accomplished a long
descent, from the top of the plateau, in the area of Shimbrety, all the way
down to the valley floor. I have never done so much ledge walking in my life—we
spent about an hour and a half zig-zagging and traversing downward, from one
ledge level to the one below. This definitely puts the shorter ledge walks on
Escalante backpacks to shame. Although, despite the length of the ascents and
descents via ledge in Tigrai—a thousand feet or more each time—the ledges
themselves are not as narrow and scary as those in the canyon lands of the American southwest.
Another two and a half hour walk to the head of the valley,
and up to the base of yet another sheer sandstone wall brought us to our third
community guesthouse. This site is much lower, about 2,300 meters, and is
nestled against the rock wall rising behind it and sheltered in a sparse grove
of eucalyptus. The view is over the terraced hillside down to the cultivated
valley floor and the area known as Ghogot.
A funeral was underway as we neared our guesthouse and
hundreds of people had streamed to the central meeting place from all over the
valley. Funerals here are observed by the entire far-flung community; a death
is announced by numerous callers shouting the news from the mountaintops
(literally) and virtually everyone drops what they are doing to pay their
respects to the family and join in the blessing of the body by the local
priests.
Days four and five continued the theme of ascending and
descending what appear from a distance to be sheer cliffs, only to find—under
the guidance of our guide and our donkey man du jour—that there are precarious yet passable pathways all up and
down these massifs (speaking of donkey men, our guy on day four became known to
us as the ‘dancing donkey man.’ The guy was hilarious, singing all day at the
top of his lungs, and often stopping to do some original dance step that
resembled a combination of highland jig and a very elderly Michael Jackson; he
had us laughing all day long!)
The landscape is among the most rugged we have ever seen yet
the scaling of cliffs by adults, children and pack animals is just a mundane,
every day experience for those who live here. The daily commute to work,
market, school or mere travel from one valley to another requires thousands of
feet of elevation gain and loss on foot—and this at more than 10,000 feet
elevation! It is no wonder the Ethiopians always win the long distance running
events. At the top of one cliff, as we lay gasping beneath a lone juniper tree
on a plateau known as the ‘resting place of the Saints,’ we met a brother and
sister—maybe 8 and 10 years old—who had scaled the same 1500-foot cliff and
caught up to us at the top. These two kids go up and down that precipitous route
five days a week to attend school in the valley—if your kids ever whine about walking to the bus stop, I hope you
think about giving them a swift kick in the butt. Just sayin’.
That brings me to a somewhat related topic. I am utterly
impressed with what I have seen of the region of Tigrai—not just with the
magnificent, vast and rugged landscape—but also with the people and their hard
work and ingenuity. This area of the country has seen centuries of war—it has
been the region through which the invading and destructive armies of Egypt,
Turkey, Sudan, Somalia and Britain have swept
again and again; even now, the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea (a mere 35
km from where we are lodging in Adigrat) remains closed and heavily guarded
because of ongoing hostilities. Yet this region seems to be thriving.
Mulat educated us well during the trek: nearly every
hillside—regardless of how steep, rocky or non-arable—has been terraced, by
hand, with rocks. There must be hundreds of thousands of miles of terracing in
this region, with the effect of virtually halting erosion and helping to retain
water in the ground. Every single community has dug systems of pits throughout
the open pasture land and around their tilled fields; these pits catch water
when is rains and allows it to soak slowly into the ground. As a result, the
topsoil is not blowing away here, as it is in so many other regions; areas that
a mere thirty years ago were completely desiccated and deforested are blooming
again and the small farm plots are thriving.
Native juniper is returning to the
higher slopes and eucalyptus thrives on the lower slopes and in the valleys
(eucalyptus is NOT native and is a water suck, but people love them because
they are so useful for construction…) Nearly every community has hand dug wells
equipped with a hand pump, and women line up daily to fill empty vegetable oil
and olive oil containers with their daily water supply. The effort these people
have made to restore the environment and help insure the security of their agrarian
economy and their own survival is remarkable.
Well, this trek has been a tremendous experience. It is definitely not for weenies (the last day we walked 22 km through uninhabited and incredibly rugged territory) or for the faint of heart when it comes to scaling cliffs and traversing cat walks. We have met some delightful villagers along the way, visited two ancient churches hewn into the solid rock of the cliffs (the second church we visited predates Christianity—it was thought to have been used as a meeting place of some sort, and then was re-purposed as a church in the 9th century. Amazing!) and absorbed some of the most inhospitable, remote yet magnificent landscape in the world.
One last thing—our last night, spent in the newest
guesthouse in the Tesfa sustainable tourism system at Chehut—we were treated to
a party. It was the birthday of a young woman who is training to become a guide
with Tesfa Tours (in all the spare time she has while attending medical
school….) She and four of her friends plus four of Mulat’s friends walked up
from Adigrat, complete with a case of beer, gin and vodka. The party was,
actually, pretty sedate—since all 8 of them had to leave at the crack of dawn
to hike back down to work and school—but the best part was the dancing. They
built a small bonfire in the courtyard and one guy played the krat, the traditional highland 5-string
instrument. The ‘youngsters’ danced around the fire, then—in a gesture that cut
across socio-economic and generational divides that are so evident here—invited
the two older, tradtionally dressed, poverty-stricken cooks to join in. Those
women were so honored! They and the young students danced together with great
affection. There was, of course, a call for the ferengis to do a dance, too—our rendition of the Bunny Hop was
pretty pathetic, but it brought a lot
of good-humored laughs.
What a trip! From Addis to the SCOPE project tour to the mountains of Tigrai.
Wish you all could have been with us
throughout and I hope to see you next time!
And now, about those lentils …. I am hereby on a strict
lentil strike from now until the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reading, and until next time: Ciao!
Photos: Sunset from Enaf; guesthouse at Ghogot; monk at St. Giorgys monastery; boy and proud dad, on the trail; cliff walking and clowning around with the dancing donkey man; me and the dancing donkey man at the resting place of the saints; Tigraen stair climber: pumping water into the irrigation canal; Tigrai green; St. Giorgys church, former non-church, pre-Christianity; plowing and threshing; with the dancing donkey man; Teodros, our most contemplative donkey.
:)
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