The Agrinautica - Bahir Dar

Continuing "the book." Any and all feedback to be yes plz.
 
(Previously)

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BAHIR DAR

Wednesday, April 25th [2012], Day 19, 6:30am – I realize at once my mistake. The severe-looking woman manning the airport baggage x-ray machine has just pulled from my bag a flat six-inch-long by inch-and-a-half-wide piece of stainless steel, bent ninety degrees at one end and sharpened at the other.
   “What is this?” she asks coldly.
   I sigh and make a dismissive gesture “Sorry I meant to put that in my checked luggage, you can take it I guess.”
   “What is it?” she repeats.
   “Oh, it’s a hive tool – for opening beehives.”
   “Are you a beekeeper?” she asks, while examining it, testing the sharp edge on her finger.
   “Yes, I am.”
   “Okay.” she says, and, much to my surprise, hands it back to me.

   I haven’t moved that hive tool since Nigeria, I think to myself, which means the Nigerian airport security completely missed it even though they found and confiscated my nail clippers! Remembering the confiscation of the nail clippers leaves me irritated all over again, how can you possibly hurt someone with nail clippers? Clearly Ethiopian airport security is both more thorough and more thoughtful about what they do or do not confiscate.



   The small Fokker 50 turboprop aircraft buzzes through the morning air over Ethiopia. Far down below brown land divided up by rocky ridges and rugged gullies glides by. Occasional patchwork clusters of small squares of different shades of green denote fields around villages. After about forty minutes the land becomes flatter and more covered in fields, laid out in concentric circles around low hills topped with thick groves of trees. As we bank around on final approach to the airport I see blue water stretching off to the horizon – Lake Tana.
   The outskirts of the airport sweep past as the ground comes up to meet us and was that the distinct shape of a Soviet Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship sitting defanged and impotent without its rotors, in the corner of the field like a discarded shoe?
   A gentle bump and we decelerate down the runway, with bright red airport firetrucks immediately rushing out to meet us. I’m a bit alarmed, is there something wrong with our aircraft? But no one else seems concerned, and the firetrucks merely come to a stop surrounding where the aircraft comes to a stop. Just a standard precaution? I’m pleasantly surprised to find we aren’t about to die, but is this… often necessary here?



   Outside the small terminal there is a small crowd waiting for the passengers, but I once again look in vain for my name on a sign. The gaggle of other passengers quickly disappear into the cars that have come for them and disappear, until there only remains myself and two men who were waiting for someone. One is short and kind of shifty, wearing an ill fitted suit, while the other is taller, looking comfortable and unconcerned in his slacks and collared shirt. In fact the taller one looks just like an Ethiopian twin of the actor Jean Reno. Around us, beyond the round-about at the terminal curb, I only see bushland of low shrubs. The airport seems to be in the middle of nowhere.
   After everyone has left, the shorter man approaches me and asks hesitantly, “are you Kris Fricke?”
   “Yes I am”
   “Oh…. we expected someone older.”
   He introduces himself as Terefe with OCAV-ODCA, and the other man as Beide, the driver. We get in a white landcruiser and proceed into town. After just a few hundred yards the shrubbery around us gives way to a broad savanna of cultivated fields – evidently a no trespassing security zone exists around the airport, which allows the extensive shrubbery growth there.
   Its a very short drive and after just a few minutes a big red billboard declares “WELCOME TO COCA COLA Bahir Dar” and the fields give way to buildings of town.
These buildings look very modern – hotels and office buildings standing four or five floors high on either side of a broad palm-tree-lined road with very little traffic. Other vehicles on the road seem to mostly be little three-wheeled blue and white auto-rickshaws and the occasional donkey cart.
   We pull in to the drive of one of the buildings – “HOMLAND HOTEL” is emblazoned on the sign. I’m shaking my head at the egregious mistake by the sign maker as I enter the lobby and see that “Homland” is in fact the name.

   “What do you mean we’re not doing field visits?” I ask of Terefe after, in discussing the planned training, he’s informed me I’m just going to be lecturing.
   “It’s not in the budget!” he says defensively, avoiding eye contact.
   “Well we need to find a way to make it happen! We can’t do beekeeping training without field visits!”
   “I’ll, um. Look into it. In the mean time, you can rest, we start tomorrow”
   v“Oh… it’s not even 9am, we can’t do something today?”
   “I’ve got other work to do” Terefe responds a bit peevishly.
   “I can show you around” Beide volunteers.
   “Great, I’ll put my bags in my room and be right back down!”



   After dropping off Terefe at his office, Beide and I proceed to a wooden dock that extends from between two buildings not far from my hotel out onto the lake. For about fifteen dollars we were able to hire a motor boat and driver to take us out to one of the monasteries located on islands in the lake.
“There’s actually eight island monasteries on the lake, we’ll go to the closest one, it’s not far” Beide suggests. As we motor through the flat blue-green waters I see a few fishermen paddling along on kayak shaped boats made from bundles of papyrus.
   “These are called ‘tankwas,’ they are the traditional boats used by local fishermen. They can easily make them themselves.”
Beide speaks decent English. He teaches automotive engineering at Bahir Dar University (gosh he’s overqualified to be my driver!), for which he gets paid a decent-by-Ethiopian-standards wage of $50 a month. He also gives driving lessons, and as in the current case works as a driver for hire for organizations. I’m interested to learn that all education from high school and beyond in Ethiopia is conducted in English. I find this a bit puzzling since Ethiopia was never a British colony (nor anyone else’s) and was a Soviet ally during the Derg regime in the 80s. There are numerous regional languages in use throughout Ethiopia but the official national language is Amharic, the language of this the Amhara region.
We are cutting across a bay in the southern end of Lake Tana. To our left the lake stretches out of sight, and to our right buildings of Bahir Dar line the shore line, each set back amid the palm trees of its own little piece of the lakeshore.
   “Bahir Dar” means “Sea Shore” in Amharic” Beide informs me.
   “But this is just a lake”
   “Yes but we don’t have a sea shore” he laughs.
   Across the bay we follow parallel to shoreline reed forests for about another kilometer and enter a channel between an island and the shore. The boat pilot points out another channel leading into the reeds to our right and says something to Beide in Amharic.
   “That’s the beginning of the Nile river there.”
   “Just right there?” I ask amazed.
   “Yes the Blue Nile, which joins the White Nile in Sudan, but most of the water, 85% I think, comes from this side. Look there’s hippos,” he points.
   Sure enough the little ears of several hippos can be seen, fidgeting like birds on their barely visible bodies just breaking the surface near the reeds. A few fishermen paddle tankwas along the channels, giving the notoriously dangerous hippos a wide berth.
   Shortly we pull up to a short dock on the island across from the beginning of the Nile. We walk past three tankwas that have been pulled ashore beside the dock and about a hundred meters along a smooth dirt path through tropical trees, past a few rough-stone outbuildings and through a gateway to arrive at the monastery grounds. The dominating building, like all Ethiopian churches, is a large cylindrical building. The conical metal roof of this building is a rusty mint green.
   One of the monks, in white robes and a white turban greets us in Amharic and seems happy to give us a tour. “The monastery was founded here in the 14th century” Beide translates.
   He ushers us up the steps of the church. There is an outer walkway around the building, and through a heavy door we’re led to another inner walkway around the inside. There’s another heavy door leading into the very interior but I’m told only the monks and priests are allowed in the inner sanctum. Along the walls of this inner walkway there are some ornate old tapestries and some other interesting objects, such as a large brass bell for calling the monks to prayer and a very large drum that Beide pretends to play.
   The monk shows us to another building beside the church, which is set up as a little museum with various things behind glass on shelves. Books he says are 900 years old and about ten ornate metal crowns with little plaques identifying them as having belonged to Ethiopian Emperors from as early as the 1500s.
   He opens one of the books to show me the perfect lines of hand written script written in the angular ge’ez alphabet.
   “Ge’ez is a language only used by the Ethiopian church now, but it’s an ancestor of Amharic like Latin is to Italian” Beide explains.
I look at the smooth only-slightly-yellowed paper, I don’t believe it’s actually 900 years old, but I’m not sure what to think of these crowns behind the glass. They’re not exactly solid gold or jewel encrusted but they’re more intricately bedizened with delicate metal work than anyone would be likely to make just to fool with tourists. If these really are the crowns of nearly a dozen past emperors of Ethiopia this little shed is an incredibly unprepossessing place to find them. [seriously though check these things out. Real historical crowns or someone has a serious crown making hobby what do you think??]



   We return to town, Biede’s wife runs a restaurant off a side street in the center of town. The buildings in this part of town have an elegant old world style, with vines climbing plaster building facades and balconies fronted with metal latticework. The medians of the main roads are planted with trees and works of art.
   The restaurant has a nice little outdoor foreyard under a mango tree where we sit and they serve me a earthenware bowl full of delicious chunks of cooked beef –derek tibs-- accompanied by two pieces of the crepe-like injera rolled into scrolls. As I’ve seen locals do, I tear off bits of the injera and use it to pick up the pieces of meat in lieu of using a fork. Meanwhile one of their employees, a young woman, roasts some green coffee beans by holding the pan over a fire, then grinds them in a home made pestle and mortar of which the pestle appears to be part of a drive shaft. Beide works in automotive engineering after all.
   I’m having a great time already and it’s only lunch time. Would I like to go see the large waterfall on the Nile that appears on the 1 birr note? Yes absolutely.
After lunch we drive 30 kilometers south through rural countryside of small fields and clusters of mud-daub houses, big rounded haystacks sit amongst the houses and at one point we get caught in a traffic jam of donkey carts loaded high with hay. We park by a “Welcome to Blue Nile Falls” sign and as we’re walking to the river a young man matches pace with us. He speaks english and has a laminated “official guide” badge. He only wants a few dollars to be our guide so I tell him he’s hired.
   We board a small wooden boat that’s just pulled up to the shore to disgorge a few Ethiopians, and the standing boatman takes us across the river using a pole like a Venetian gondolier.
   Our guide points to a series of triangular hills a short distance off and points out that they look like pyramids, and further points out that there has always been a cultural continuum up and down the Nile and there’s more pyramids in neighboring Sudan than further down the river in Egypt. Be this as it may, I’m not sure these hills have anything to do with pyramids.
   “Right now we’re actually crossing the artificial ‘headrace canal’ for the Tis Abay hydroelectric dam.” the tour guide tells us, continuing proudly “Ethiopia produces so much electricity from hydroelectric that we export it to countries such as Sudan.”
   On the other bank we disembark the boat and walk a few hundred meters until we arrive at the top of the waterfalls. The waters of the Nile roar over a 400 meter broad waterfall to fall 140 feet. Plumes of spray billow up from the crashing waters.
   “Tis Abay’ means ‘Great Smoke’” the guide informs us as he leads us down a trail into the broad gully below the falls “because of the clouds of mist.” From a vantage point below the falls we can see them just as they are pictured on the currency note.
   “You are actually very lucky” the guide says “when the hydroelectric turbines are running the waterfall is just a trickle because all the water is being diverted, but today they’re off, so the waterfall is turned on.” It strikes me as a bit of a shame that something like this, a national emblem, can be “turned off” to make electricity. The sacrifices and tradeoffs a country must make to modernize.
   We are able to pick our way up the increasingly slippery rocks until we’re close to the waterfall and can feel the spray. It had been a warm day but down here under the constant spray it’s actually a bit chilly. The guide offers to take some pictures with my phone and Beide and I clownishly pose with thumbs up.
Following a trail up the ridge just opposite of the waterfall we find a girl of maybe twelve seated patiently with a set of coffee cups on a small box, the traditional coffee making set up. Would I like coffee, yes of course. She immediately begins the familiar process of roasting green coffee beans, which I surmise we grown within a kilometer of here, and grinding them in a mortar and pestel before brewing them into coffee in a traditional clay coffee pitcher – a “jebena.” An older woman (her mother?) is nursing a baby just a few meters away and framed between them from where I sit I can see the Tis Abay Falls. Could there be a more Ethiopian image than this?

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   I'm a bit worried my habit of putting facts and exposition into the mouth of whomever happens to be at hand is making it sound like everyone around me is getting possessed by the same tour guide djinn.

   Original entry describes this day in 368 words, here expanded to 2483 (:

   But yes plz to be giving me your feedback.