The Good, the Bad and the Holy

I saw red. The man stood there, rock raised above his head in self-defense, face a little wet from where Lise Dog threw her bottle of water into it, shirt in tatters from where Lise Dog ripped it from his retreating body. I went for him - my express purpose to slam his head into the rock beside him. He dashed behind a tree and I followed. What ensued was like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon with Elma Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny round and round a tree. This was ridiculous – so I gave up and did the manly thing. I began to imitate his bad English in an annoying baby-voice.  More confused than anything else he disappeared down the cliff-face, the sound of my nasal imitation-voice screaming “I am an official guide! I am an official guide!” trailing behind him.

This is what the region of Tigray has done to us. Happy-go-lucky attitudes towards the locals have hardened to raw hatred. Turn-the-other-cheek has hardened to eye-for-an-eye. And it all happened surprisingly quickly. Our skins, supposedly thickened by four months on the road, were shredded to confetti in days. The children here swarm like a Biblical plague of locusts, consuming any white man in sight. But, unlike locusts, evolution has bestowed upon them opposable thumbs and rotator-cuff muscles and which they then make use of to pelt you with stones. Their mothers – crucifixes tattooed on their foreheads – watch on and laugh. Perhaps their concentration waned over certain parts of their Biblical education. Like the New Testament section. The men happily give up their menial work of tilling fields for their families’ food to follow you for hours then forcefully demand a ‘tip’ for the privilege of having them stare at your bottom for the whole ascent. And then there are the priests – their right hands bearing a wooden crucifix like a burning sword of self-righteousness, their left nursing the entrance key to the church. All the better to blackmail you with, my dear.

 And probably the most frustrating thing is that what they are ruining in this area is truly special. Dozens of churches literally chiselled into the sides of sheer cliff-faces over a thousand years ago, perfectly preserved by their obscurity over the ages. Most predate their big brother Lalibela and – in my opinion – for their rawness and imperfection, are more affecting. In these churches its difficult to imagine a world where religious miracles are not an everyday occurrence. Where angels and humans boogie together, where demons are smite down, where visions result in the creation of the worlds most improbable places of worship, where the impossible is somehow possible.

So the fact that these churches sit in an area literally dripping with greed among every other deadly sin and are tended by hypocrites who piss on the Ten Commandments and tourists in equal measure, is even harder to stomach. Far from a sense of ethereal peace this place will bring out the very worst in you. Just ask Lise Dog. She still has a piece of the vagabonds shirt.

These churches deserve so much better.

Devolution

Ignorance was bliss. We have now seen ourselves through the eyes of others. And what have seen is not pretty. Four months on the road with only each other as behaviour-moderators has left myself and Tough Guy in a pitiful state. This has only become apparent with the arrival of family and – gulp – spouses. The look on their faces when laying eyes on us was not joy or relief. It was fear. We have become feral.

Our personal appearances have been the hardest hit. Tough Guy’s moustache looks like a cross between Hitler and Ron Weasley. My beard is less Kingsley Holgate and more Mr Twit. It looks like pubic hair has been stuck haphazardly on my pale cheeks by a three-year-old with a bad sense of humour. Then there is the state of our clothes – months in crusty buses and seedy accommodation has left them not only with a collection of stains that can only vaguely be accounted for but with an ensemble of odours whose collective pong is so strong it has formed its own personality and joined our travel group as a third member: Malcolm. Our underwear is washed so infrequently that swarms of flies have been seen to leave their orgy on rubbish heaps to make a bee-line for our respective groins.

We talk freely about the people sitting right beside us – usually safe in the knowledge that their grasp of English is insufficient to understand our derogatory critique. This served us well through West Africa. It didn’t serve us well in Ghana. In fact, it almost got us killed. Having passed through so many lands with so many different religious hardliners likewise has posed some interesting problems. Being of somewhat loose religious affiliation has been both a blessing and a curse. Tough Guy may yet face a lynching for stating ‘Alhamdoulilahi!’ in front the wrong audience. I have let slip ‘inshallah’ in front of more Christian priests than I can count. And this always seems to signal the end of our engagement. A particular problem when we are camping at their mission. Few things are reverent enough not to have humorous pictures taken in them. Not even Emperor Haile Selassies bath – the setting for a particularly bad-taste photo-shoot.

 

Finally there are our eating habits. Cutlery is not big in Africa so we have become used to shovelling vast handfuls of food down our gullets. Locals have practised this for years and do it with a semblance of panache. We are new to it and do it with a semblance of stroke-victim. It looks like a mother penguin feeding her ravenous chick.

Hopefully, with the arrival of outside, moderating influences, this devolution of ours will be curbed. I can only wish upon a star. Because as fond as we have become of Malcolm (he loves a good practical joke and does a great Rosie O’Donnell impersonation) I fear he may make it difficult to make new friends. And as you can see from this article, even our senses of humour have begun to decay.

I fear the worst for the next five months.

Wonders of a Medieval World

Prince Lalibela’s chalice was poisoned by his brother, jealous that his hold on the thrown may be usurped. In a state of half-death he was lifted up to heaven by some benevolent angels and shown a kingdom of churches cut into solid rock. ‘Replicate these’, he was told ‘or else you’re in the kak’.

Angels seem to be everywhere in Ethiopia. When they’re not trawling for gargantuan fish in Lake Tana they’re helping to chisel out great churches from solid granite. And witnessing the thirteen churches excavated from slabs of solid rock its easy to see how supernatural forces could be the only explanation for this seemingly insurmountable task. Even the ever blame-able free-masons have been thrown in the conspiratorial mix. Personally I’m more inclined to attribute it to the good old natural force of slavery because, as the Egyptians discovered over four thousand years ago, slavery did – unfortunately – get shit done. Nonetheless it’s difficult not to be moved to Biblical revelation when standing under an eleven meter roof supported by thirty six pillars, all carved from the top down into one of Gods less pliable substances. Throw in the fact that it was all done deep in the dramatic Rift Valley scar of the Ethiopian highlands, with endless rows of mountains fading to the horizon in all directions, and its enough to make you take Dr Albans lead and sing ‘Hallelujah!’.

 

These highland mountains likewise feel like they belong in some bizarre, folklorish world. Or at least another century. Like the twelfth. Massive fields of grain are tilled with cattle-ploughs, serfs scurry around in rags pleading for rain to stave off starvation, lepers hobble around begging for alms. I haven’t heard of a case of leprosy since the New Testament. Electricity is a distant rumour, iron tools an essential, bad dentition a given. Then there is the power of the clergy – apparently dwarfing that of the state in these parts. Allegedly employment or even social acceptance relies largely on keeping the local religious big-wigs in a ready supply of garish clothing. Or at least some revered bling. Cross them and Sodom and Gomorra will look like a light smattering of confetti at Brad and Angelinas wedding. And these tithes are not reserved exclusively for their feudal population. Tourists too now have to pay extortionate fees for the privilege of setting foot in any religious building – all of which goes straight into the slimey priest’s leathery money purse.

As Lalibela completed the final chip out of the final church, the angels descended for a moving rendition of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. So it was that he cemented his place in heaven, the history books and every tourist’s vocabulary. And in doing so did more to further Christianity in the area than any other ruler before or since. So it seems a real pity that these amazing churches – still sites of cross-continental religious pilgrimage and literally shaking with spiritual power – are now largely in the hands of this serpentine clergy who seem keener on catching the Sunderland vs. Man City game on their 42 inch televisions than showcasing one of the world’s great Wonders. Maybe some more angelic revelations are in order. Or at least a few more poisoned chalices.

Of Angels and Fish

An angel smiting a monastery-terrorising fish. Not the first image that comes to mind when you think of Biblical iconography.  Nor is that of explorer James Bruce smoking a dope pipe with the local queen.But there doesn’t seem to be much in Ethiopia that conforms to what it is supposed to be. Monasteries are either chiselled out of solid granite or erected on isolated little islands in the middle of giant lakes. The people speak a language that is completely unique and totally illegible. It sounds like the alien creatures from District 9 speaking to each other in a Dutch accent. Their looks are totally polarising: faces either stunningly gorgeous or like giant brown lightbulbs. Even their food is bizarre – they insist on using a miniature grain called ‘tef’ that needs to be fermented before being made into the sour pancake ‘injera’. And, unfortunately for long bus journeys, this fermentation process seems to continue in the colon as well.

You see Ethiopia has a long history of doing things its own way. It had a well-established Jewish community around three thousand years ago allegedly as a result of a romantic tryst between the mighty Queen of Sheba and the head honcho of Jerusalem King Solomon. These Biblical children then withstood Animist aggression in the South, Axumite Christians in the north, Islamic converts in the East and maniacal carp on their doorstep before they were all assimilated into one mighty empire in the late 19^th century. This occurred just in time to ward off the colonial aspirations of the Italians who are better known for their tangy meatballs than battlefield prowess. Thus Ethiopia remains the only African country to have dodged the colonial bullet and held on to its idiosyncratic customs in their bizarre, undiluted form.

And thank the emperor that they have done their own thing for millennia because without their strange desire to pick funny red berries, pit them, roast the seeds and drink the result, Starbucks would be nothing more than an over-priced vendor of expensive foam. So there is a lot to be said for countries clinging obsessively to their quirks of folklore and custom. So what if some of their ancient rulers have their mummified remains in monastic storerooms in between boxes of Nile Fruit Juice? And is it really important whether or not Moses’ Ark of the Covenant currently resides in northern Ethiopia under the guard of a single, lonely priest? What really makes this country unique is that it seems to have doggedly stuck to its own ways in the face of external pressures for as long as it has been around. Lets be honest – Biblical imagery of the virgin Mary is omnipresent throughout the modern world. But how many churches boast of ethereal assistance in assassinating a war-mongering leviathan of a carp? Personally I want to know more about that fish.