Back to Basics - Sam

Matt and I are reluctantly back to the bus circuit as we recently sold our bikes in Dinsho last week. It was not an easy decision to sell them there as we had much more of Ethiopia to visit, but we met a guy in town who said he had someone who was willing to give us a fair price for the bikes. As it is not legal to sell our Kenyan purchased bikes in Ethiopia we thought it was a smart move to go ahead and take the offer given, which was about $540, a little under half of what we paid. We thought this was a good price considering there was no way to register the bikes in the country legally.

We sat down for coffee with our friend, who was working to be a guide in the Bale mountains, and he told us about his friend who was interested in the Boxer 150's which seem to be a very sought after bike in Ethiopia. As we were speaking of what a fair price would be and while Matt and I discussed whether we wanted to sell them at all, the man who wanted to purchase them showed up. He didn't speak English so our friend translated between us as we negotiated. We agreed on a price and the man immediately went to his home and got the cash. He showed back up and handed each of us large stacks of cash...in front of everyone around. White people are enough of a spectacle as it is, especially in southern Ethiopia, and this didn't help deter interest. We were paid 23,000 Birr a very large sum of cash for Ethiopia. We were told you could have a house built for 40,000. On top of this the guy hadn't even seen the bikes. We were obviously surprised as in America you would never give someone cash before seeing and inspecting a vehicle. Little did he know I had a bent engine guard and another bent rack on the back of the bike, but let's not talk about that.

Next came the interesting process of registering the vehicles. Part of the price the man offered us he felt was fair after he calculated how much he would have to bribe officials to get the bikes registered. We were told by our friend that this man had friends that could help him make the bikes appear legal in the country. To make the bikes "legal" money had to be slipped to someone in an office, which we never saw happen, and we had to give copies of our passports to an official and sign a document that stated we gave the man the bikes as "gifts." Everything seemed to be going smoothly until we reached one major setback. The power was out in the town so the official couldn't print the proper documents. The buyer of the bikes, who was running everywhere trying to make the deal happen, knew what needed to be done. He had the official hand write what needed to be included in the document and he then ran to find a generator that he would use to power a computer and printer in which he typed up the documents and printed them off. We were back in business. We now had the documents signed, dated and ready to be officially stamped. Once the documents where stamped the deal was done. Government corruption is great, when it benefits you of course.

Our bikes sold, we then set off by bus to Addis Ababa the next day. We didn't want to stick around too long knowing so many people in town knew the two white boys had so much cash on them. That made us feel less than safe and I certainly had my knife by my bed and found comfort in the fact that Matt had the bear mace by his. All went well though and off we went to Addis Ababa.

Buses in Ethiopia can be a tremendous hassle we were soon to find out. Our friend who helped us sell our bikes also helped us buy tickets for a bus to Addis the following day. We met him in the morning and he helped us find our bus. One problem. When we gave our tickets to the ticket man on the bus he wouldn't let us on. Our guide and a friend of his who was also boarding the bus started going back and forth angrily until finally the man gave in and let us on the bus. As it turns out it was the wrong bus. The one in which we needed was ahead of this one and had already gone. We were reluctantly allowed to sit in the front of the bus on the compartment that housed the engine for about 120km until three other passengers who getting off and we would get seats.

In Addis we yet again began the process of going to the embassy and trying to apply for our Sudanese visa. We are currently still waiting on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Khartoum to run our documents and approve our visa applications. They will then send our information to Addis where it will be as little as 24 hours to get our visas. That is assuming everything goes according to plan, but as we know, nothing in Africa ever does. If our information is in Addis by Monday and we can get our visa by Tuesday off we go to Sudan. Otherwise we are calling it and flying to Cairo as we are getting quite short of time. We have less than 4 weeks before we fly back.

I found Addis to be a nice change from the week prior. We had been in rural Kenya and Ethiopia for over a week since we left Nairobi and it was nice to have the comforts of big city again. Addis is full of cafes as coffee and espresso are important parts of Ethiopian culture. We even found a small place that roasts their own beans. As Matt mentioned, food in Ethiopia is very good as well, a much needed change from all the ugali in Kenya. In all honestly the food all through southern Africa and East Africa didn't change much. You could always find ugali, rice, beans, meat and maybe some vegetables. Other than that, there was little variety and it was spiced similarly plain everywhere we have been. Ethiopian food is spiced much differently, and although there seems to be little variety within traditional Ethiopian cuisine, it is still a nice change from the rest of Africa.With every dish, you also get the standard serving of spicy green chiles, one of my favorite additions.

Ethiopians view eating food and drinking coffee as a social activity, things to be shared. Of course it is a necessity to eat, but Ethiopians show that it is also meant to be enjoyed. The food is served on a large silver tray roughly 25in. in diameter. Injera (the large sourdough crepe) is then laid out covering the entire tray. Food is then placed on the injera. If you order two servings of food you don't get a second platter, more food is just piled on. You then tear a piece of injera with your hands and use it to scoop up the different vegetables, lentils and meat. Silverware is just not needed.

As nice as it can sometimes be to have the comforts of a metropolis at your disposal, it can be equally rewarding to leave. One can only take so much pollution, large crowds, noise, and general overstimulation, so we set off to Lalibela by bus in hopes that upon our return to Addis our Sudanese visa would be ready to process. We arrived at the bus station at about 4:45am ready to find our bus, tickets in hand. We walk around the station full of buses showing people who look like they work there our tickets and having them point us in the direction of the bus we need. After wondering around trying to find the number of the bus that matched our ticket we were asked to sit and wait on the bus to arrive. There were a couple other people waiting as well, a young guy and an old man. After a while the kid tells us to follow him. We get up and head back to the yard full of buses. Every person you ask about which bus to get points you in a different direction. We zig-zag across the yard many times more and then wait a little longer. Finally someone tells us our bus isn't coming.

We are assigned a new bus and get a new ticket written up. Matt waits outside with our things and I get on the bus to grab a couple seats. There isn't a seat in sight and the bus is already packed. I get off, tell the guy who gave us a new ticket and he gives me back my old ticket and again points us in direction that likely doesn't result in anything conclusive. We walk into an office where a man again tells us our bus is not going to come, tells us to get a refund and sends us into yet another building to get our money back. At this point Matt and I are frustrated to say the least, given we have been at the station over an hour and only utter chaos has consumed our time. We get our money back and decide to hop on a bus that is going to a city along the way. I was just happy to have a spot on a bus. The ride6 to Lalibela takes two days anyway and the city we were headed towards was the city our bus was supposed to stop in, so we made the right decision. The decision that should have been easy to make in the first place, but no one in Ethiopia speaks much English, so simple questions receive impossible answers.

Lalibella, the self proclaimed holiest city in Ethiopia, sits atop a tall hill in Ethiopian highlands and is home to the famous Coptic churches that are carved out of rock into the ground. They are quite magnificent feats of architecture and have been around for ------- years. They are also popular tourist attractions at this point. You buy a ticket that allows you access in two different compounds of churches and one more that stands alone. It's by far the most white people Matt and I have seen in quite some time as there really are none in southern Ethiopia or rural Kenya.

In the first church we entered, a holy lookin' dude was standing in a most holy and picturesque manner. Standing tall with his robe and staff with a solemn and serious look on his face, a group of older Europeans stood staring, listening to their guide and snapping pictures. Matt and I walked around for a couple of minutes looking at mosaics and holy junk when the holy dude said something in an aggravated voice to me in Amharic and gestured to my feat. He then said aggravated, "Out, out!" and gestured for us to leave immediately. This is how we found out you were supposed to take of your shoes to enter the churches. This is also the first church I have ever been kicked out of, a fact that I can't help but be a little proud of. Needless to say we took our shoes off for the remaining holy places.

As I pass holy people they often say things in Amharic. I often reply with the most holy thing I can think of in English, a phrase from Saint Garth and Saint Wayne, a saying that embodies American culture as best as I know to do, "Party on." The men, and they are never women, nod in agreement and it is clear we have a mutual understanding of one another. "Yes...party on my child."

After Lalibella, we reluctantly get back on a bus and head for Gondar one of the oldest cities in Ethiopia, the original capital before Addis Ababa. Gondar is home to a castle that dates back to the 17th century, in which we explored the following day of our arrival. We began the day with a mouthful of khat (chat), a local plant that is popular in Ethiopia and is chewed to get a relaxing high from. It is considered a narcotic and Matt and I thought it only appropriate to experience the culture of Ethiopia more fully and try some for ourselves. As we discovered khat takes a lot of effort to get high from and the high you get is hardly recognizable. You must chew the plant and then keep in in your cheek sucking on the juice and swallowing. This must be done this for many hours and only after a couple hours, you feel slightly relaxed and almost feel somewhat of a buzz. It's hard to tell how much of a buzz you really have as you are hoping and waiting for one for so long, it seems as though your mind might be playing tricks on you. We kept adding more and more khat to our mouths trying as best as we knew to get something out of the plant. Not much came.

Disappointed from our attempts to experience a different cultures narcotic of choice, we thought it wise to each take a hydrocodone to help mitigate the lack of effects from khat and all of the effort we had put into trying to catch a buzz. Afterwards we headed out of the hotel to go grab a beer. Within less than a minute, as if by some divine coincidence of events, we were approached by a man who asked us if we like "rasta cigarettes". I said, "well yes I do enjoy a rasta cigarette from time to time". He then advised us to go sit and grab a machiato and he would run and grab said rasta cigarettes. We sat sipping our coffee and the man showed back up within a few minutes. We then ran back to the hotel and enjoyed the holy rasta medicine and went back out to go grab a beer. Now, finally, we were able to catch a buzz and a buzz we got. With a cocktail of caffeine, alcohol, khat, THC, Codeine and nicotine, we were able to enjoy the cultural tradition of chewing khat. Ahhh yes...khat. Yes...khat is good. Culture...yes...culture is good.

On to the northern half of the world - Matt

It's been a week and a half of big days for Sam and I. When you last tuned in we were waiting in Nairobi for our visas to Sudan due to a clerical error within the Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The day after writing, we found out that the visa wouldn't arrive for another two to three days (which could mean as much as a week in Africa time) and then it would take two or three days to get the visa to us for some reason (we'd had friends who just gone through the process). Being that it was Tuesday that meant we weren't going to leave with a Sudanese visa till maybe 7 to 10 days hence, so leave without a visa we did. We decided that to gamble and try to get a transit visa in Addis Ababa and to use the week seeing literally anything other than Nairobi sounded better than sitting around eating pizza, watching movies and drinking in cosmopolitan Nairobi.

Five days of doing nothing but riding and finding a place to sleep and eat brought us into inner Ethiopia and up into the highlands of the Bale Mountains. The first day we circumnavigated Mt. Kenya through rain and traffic and left the southern hemisphere in our dust (felt like a long time coming), ending up in a nice little hovel on the edge of Isiolo.

Sam on the equator

The next day we drove what we thought was the long and empty up to Marsibit. The landscape was much like what I've come to expect from the south western US. Long expanses of dry and fly broken up by towering plateaus and pillars of sandstone breaking up an otherwise empty horizon. Along the road side is mostly acacia trees, the occasional camel train and the local Kenyans decked out in about five lbs of colorful beads and decorative trinkets and a single pound of clothing.

We'd heard of a decent campsite outside of Marsibit called Camp Henry, run by a Scandinavian fellow, from some other overlanders. Marsibit is really nothing more than a way station on the top of a small plateau in the middle of the great plain that stretches north from Mt Kenya, allowing travelers to break up the long roadway migration from the rest of Kenya to Ethiopia or vice versa. We woke in the morning to mist you could cut with a knife. Soaking wet, we plowed our way out of the town down to lower and dryer climates. If we'd thought we'd seen empty the day before nothing had prepared us for the Martian landscape that lay before us. Small clusters of huts that would have fit right in next to tusken raider villages on Tatooine were scattered about but other than that we didn't see plant nor camel for miles for before our border crossing at Moyale.

132 km to Moyale

These two days of riding through barren rocky waste represents, for me, some of the greatest time I've spent in Africa. The riding is smooth and easy as the roads are some of the best we've experienced, I attribute this to the fact that relatively little exists in the area to ruin the road. No rain. No traffic. No erosion. The area is remote and devoid of the stresses that seem to accompany most long distance travel within the rest of Africa. But most of all, this is the area we have been told is most dangerous. It is the area we've heard that people fly over or bus through to avoid any potential dangers as hundreds of miles separate any semblances of civilization and water, nor fuel, is not to be found anywhere in between. It is the area of Kenya that has offered me the most beauty as well as the idea of accessing the inaccessible. Richard Burton, African explorer and incorrigible polyglot, described it better than I ever could 150 years ago; "around like drifted sand-heaps, upon which each puff of wind leaves it trace in solid waves, flayed rocks, the very skeletons of mountains and hard unbroken plains, over which he who rides is spurred by the idea that the bursting of a water-skin or the pricking of a camel's hoof, would be the certain death of torture - a haggared land infested with wild beasts and wilder men - a region whos very fountains murmer the warning 'Drink and away!'... Man's heart bounds in his breast at the thought of measuring his puny force with natures might and emerging triumphant from the trial. This explains the Arab's proverb 'Voyaging is Victory.'"

The crossing at Moyale brought it's own set of challenges. After arriving shortly after noon we decided to neglect declaring our motorcycles at the border since we had heard from other travelers that it wasn't really a big deal, we'd avoid a small fee, and would speed our crossing. Everything went as we were told and we crossed the border without issue by 2pm. We hoped to push on another 100km into Ethiopia and get out of the dust ridden border town. First we needed to get petrol for the bikes. Five gas stations in town and non of them seem to have any gas. Finally one of the attendants whose sitting there monitoring the empty pumps tells us 'you must go and buy at the black market.' I had to forcibly stop myself from asking him where this 'black market' could be found. One of those 'oh' moments. So we found some men on the side of the road with large plastic jugs and some smaller 2 liter water bottles full liquids of varying shades of yellow. These guys are everywhere in Moyale and the rest of Ethiopia. As soon as you know what to look for gas is at your finger tips for about 6.30USD per gallon.

With gas acquired we get about 10km down the dirt road out of town when we reach a customs check point asking for customs documents regarding our bikes. Apparently it is a big deal. We tried to talk our way through but the lady cop (they're always the honest/not lazy ones) wasn't having any of it. So we turned around and headed back into town. After bouncing back and forth from Ethiopian to the Kenyan side of the border three or four times we ended up leaving our registration at the Kenyan border office but had a paper stating that we could take our bikes into Kenya. This will make them a bit harder to sell, or at least we won't get as much, AND we're stuck in Moyale.

Next morning packed, with papers in hand we charge out of town bright and early, ready to shove our documents in the faces of whomever is manning the customs gate this morning. When we get there the gate is empty. No ones there. I guess it wasn't a big deal after all.

Ethiopia is different and it is marvelous. The charms of Sub-Saharan Africa were beginning to run stale with Sam and I and Ethiopia is a great departure. The food is rich and flavorful. Injera, sour-dough crepe more or less, about 20 inches wide is served on a large plate with the ordered lentils, cabbage, spaghetti or meat poured in the middle. The coffee is strong and made with care (sometimes they add salt instead of milk or sugar, jury's still out on that one). And since being in the country we had our meals bought for us four times by three separate strangers even when trying to avoid it. Food is relatively cheap but this is the first time in our trip that anyone has even offered to take on our financial burden.

The drive north from the border gave us excellent an display of the acacias, grass huts and 5 - 20ft tall ant hills that make up the southern Ethiopian landscape. The end of our first day's ride found us with sore butts from the terrible roads and scrambling to find a room in Dilla to get out of the rain. We scored a cheap place, 8 bucks for both of us to have a room each, but you get what you pay for. My room was had nothing but dirt in the corners and a bed. Not even a lock and key, just a dead bolt on the inside. As a sat reading, around nine or ten, and watching locals having a good time at the hotel bar, I realized that I'd seen multiple groups of three or four men and one women go to a room and have a quick discussion at the door. After which, all but one man and one women would leave and the couple would go into the room only to reemerge 15 or 20 minutes later. I didn't even consider getting under the blanket on my bed. In fact, I tried as hard as I could to isolate myself from contact with anything in my room. Even though I got us a great deal on a room, Sam still won't let me choose the places we stay.

The next day we climbed up into the Ethiopian highlands to the town of Dinsho and the Bale Mountains National Park. Smooth roads up steep winding mountain passes, a fun beautiful and challenge for our 150cc motorbikes, brought us to the gates of the national park. Talking with park rangers revealed that we were only allowed to hike the park with a guide and the route that we wanted to take up to the Sanetti Plateau and the high elevations took three to four days to climb to over 4200 meters (nearly 14,000 ft.) and traverse the high plateau. It may have been an ill conceived notion but Sam and I were short and time and immediately convinced we could do it in two. We managed to convince a guide that we were capable and agreed to meet in the morning. Now we hadn't been hiking since South Africa and hadn't even put our backpacks on in the last month and a half. Not to mention that Sam had never even been as high as we were going and I only a time or two prior.

It was painful and left us sore but we covered the 50km in the two days we allotted ourselves and climb the majority of the elevation from Dinsho on the first day. The days were cold and the nights were colder. We were both inadequately prepared since, you know, we're traveling Africa. The Sanetti is a barren and inhospitable roof of the world. The horizon always seems close with clouds at always eye level beyond it. During lunch on the second day we were watching clouds roll in over the highest peak on the plateau when our guide came to us and said we had to move now to avoid weather socking us in and trapping us in the fog, at which point we would be unable to navigate. The instant after he said the thunder rolled down from the mountain which was quickly being swallowed in the clouds. The rest of the kms were covered quickly as thunder rolled around us. We camped near to what our guide said was the highest highway in Africa, though I've found nothing to support this. It was essentially a dirt road that saw a car going either way about ever 15 minutes.

In the morning, after about 45 minutes hitched a ride down to a more civilized elevation in the back of what is essentially a dump truck without the dumping mechanism. We shared the large space with with a four or five blue poly tarps, a few spent truck tires, a couple empty jugs of engine oil and a blanket entirely covering what I was sure was a corpse for the man like shape didn't move for the first 20 minutes of our journey. Only at the exit of the park was the cadaver required to reveal itself to make sure it was not actually contraband being smuggle out of the park. A dirt covered man in even dirtier clothes appeared before us and made brief conversation with our guide before retreating back to his bed of tarp and blanket. How he slept through the ride I'll never know. Our driver seemed very confident in his abilities, as well as his vehicle, for we took corners and bounced over pot holes while descending the steep dirt road at a remarkable speed which got us to the town of Goba, and eventually back to our motorbikes in Dinsho, very quickly.

Our guide, Armaye, in the back of the 'dump truck'