I have consulted with the travel expert at the resort, and
he believes I don’t have enough time to cover my insane plan of visiting Gondar , Lalibela, and Aksum before coming into Mek’ele tomorrow
afternoon. So, he suggested going to Lalibela, covering 200 km of paved road
and an additional 60 km of dirt road, spending the night at one of the Lalibela
hotels, spending tomorrow visiting Lalibela, and finally driving to Mek’ele
(another insane plan as future developments would show, but a pan nonetheless).
But of course I had to throw in a monkey wrench, because I wanted to see the
high mountains north of Bahir Dar and thought I could spend a few morning hours
doing that by following the road to Gondar .
It is a truly magnificent landscape, with the ubiquitous
eucalyptus being joined by native pine trees and some magnificent old patriarch
Warka trees that look like enormous umbrellas (fabulous story-telling trees if
you ask me). Warka trees are some type of fig, and are indigenous to Ethiopia .
Besides seeing a greater diversity of trees, the most
striking landscape features are spines of basalts that rise a few hundred feet
up into the air, sticking out as a lonely thumb. Since the viscosity of basalt
is too low to rise as a spine, I conclude that these are the plugs of cinder
cones that have since long eroded. Then it hit me. I was climbing up the slopes
of a giant shield volcano, where the lava was fed to the surface through
fissure eruptions that later focused into a single cylindrical vent, just as
has been witnessed by the eruption of Puu’oo in Kilauea .
Pretty neat structures, and I have never heard of a rock climber who can boast
they bagged one of these spines.
I turned around at about noon, thinking 4 hours should be
enough to reach the beginning of the dirt road to Lalibela. Foolish me, on two
counts. First, driving here is slow work, because when you cross towns you have
to slow down to the pace of the snail. The second is the lack of gasoline!
Plenty of diesel and gasoil to go around, but no gasoline! (In retrospect, I
wonder if the region is being starved of gasoline because over the last year
there has been social unrest, and gasoline if the first thing mobs turn to when
building Molotov cocktails). At some point I was so concerned about running out
of fuel that I filled the tank with low octane gasoil, which is what the
tug-tugs run on. I have now ascertained that cars can run in gasoil, perhaps at
the expense of some loss of power.
So I went back to Wereta, and from there took the road
through Debre Tabor, and finally Gashena, which is where the road to Laibela
takes off from. It was 6:30 pm, so I only had one more hour of light, and had only
half a tank left. Would I have time and gas to reach Lalibela and, even more
important to get back to Gashena and then drive an additional 100 km to
Woldiya, where I might find gasoline? What can I say? I chickened out and with
great regret decided that I will visit Lalibela in a future trip, when I have a
jerry-can of additional fuel with me. Incidentally, Lalibela is a World
Heritage site, where in antiquity all sorts of Christian Coptic churches and
chapels were carved out of the stone (similar to Petra, in Jordan, but in that
case the so called churches were nothing else than elaborate tombs).
Let ma backtrack a little and tell you that the road from
Debre Tabor to Gashena is one of the most unnerving roads I have ever driven,
partly because I got caught under a pretty heavy downpour. The road snakes
along the narrow ridge that separates two steep tributary watersheds of the Blue Nile . It was like walking a narrow slippery plank
with steep drops of at least a 1,000 m on either side. Fabulous to behold, but
I can assure you I drove it very, very carefully. Why have such steep
watersheds been carved? I think it is because under the hard plateau basalts
there is a thick sequence of deeply weathered basaltic pyroclastics (air-fall
tuffs and lahars). I bet it is this same sequence where the buildings of
Lalibela were carved from.
OK, so I had 100 km to go to Woldiya with less than an hour
of light, so chop chop. Alas, as the light diminished the number of potholes
seemed to increase, and when I turned on the headlights they barely made a
difference. Oh, no, the headlights had the same illumination value as a
candlestick L
So I had to drop my speed and crawl for more than 50 km, praying that neither
man nor beast would suddenly pop in front of the car.
Note: The animals in Ethiopia are really stupid. Whereas
goats, sheep, cows, and horses in Mongolia would shy when the car
approached, their stupid cousins here cross the paths of incoming cars without
blinking an eye; donkeys will actually try to meet the car head on!
I was dead tired when I got to Woldiya (on the main road
between Addis Ababa
and Mek’ele), late at night, fearing that I might end having to sleep in the
car. But no. I did find a restaurant where loud music was playing while the
patrons were watching the Mexico-New Zealand soccer match, which also doubled
as a hotel. A very modest hotel, mind you, but the owner welcomed me with a
smile, gave me a “western room” with bath, and coaxed one last meal out of the
kitchen before it closed. I have said it before, and I will say it again over
and over: Ethiopians are amongst the friendliest people on Earth!
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