Today has been a long day, but a deeply satisfying one. We woke early at 5 am to have an early breakfast (at 5:30 am) in order to leave the hotel at 6 am to catch our 7:30 am flight to Bahar Dar, a one hour flight (to avoid a rough 8 hour drive) north-west of Addis Ababa.
We almost didn’t make it. When we tried to check-in, we were told that we didn’t have a confirmed booking (even though the e-ticket receipt clearly said ‘confirmed’). We sorted that out, and then they said only Andrew had a booking and I did not. We sorted that out, and then they said we were checking in so late we would miss the flight (it was 6:50 am, although we had started the process at 6:30 am!). That seemed absurd, until it was pointed out that the flight has been rescheduled to depart at 7:10 am and boarding had already begun at 6:25 am - quite a generous amount of time to board a 50-seat Fokker F-50, I think. Anyway, in the end , they accepted our luggage and told us to hurry, which we did, being ushered through the security check ahead of the line of other passengers, onto the bus and out to the plane. There was no allocated seating, so we took the last two seats available, and sat for 10 minutes until the plane powered up to depart. Remarkably, and impressively given the rush, our luggage arrived at Bahar Dar with us 55 minutes later - maybe that was the reason for the ten minute wait on the tarmac???
Bahar Dar is situated at an elevation of 1800 metres, which is high, but nonetheless lower than Addis Ababa which is at 2400 metres altitude. That - plus the fact that Bahar Dar is only 11 degrees north of the equator - accounted for the considerably warmer weather we experienced today after the unexpectedly cold weather in Addis Ababa. Today’s weather was sunny in the morning with clouds building up in the afternoon, but we managed to miss the isolated showers we saw off in the distance in various directions.
Bahar Dar is a beautiful town of 170,00 people with wide, shady streets. The name ‘Bahar Dar’ means beside the sea, a reference to its location beside Lake Tana, a stunningly beautiful 3500 square kilometre expanse of water in a collapsed volcanic caldera that is also the source of the Blue Nile River. There are 37 islands in the lake, 20 of which have Christian monasteries dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries.
Our first stop was the Hotel Tana to drop off our bags. The hotel had a beautiful location overlooking the lake, but its rooms were much more basic than they first appeared, having minimal lighting, no hot water, highly suspect plumbing to the toilet, crackling and sparking power points and, much less surprisingly, no internet.
After leaving our bags at the hotel, our first destination was one of the monasteries on the lake. The one selected was the Ura Kidane Meret Monastery on Zege Peninsula, and to get there, a boat trip of an hour or so was required. As is often the case, getting there was half the fun, as the boat puttered its way across the smooth waters of the lake, past papyrus boats with fishermen and between low-flying flocks of pelicans.
Once we reached Zege Peninsula, a 20 minute hike was needed through the monkey and ant-infested forest, and past a village to reach the monastery itself. But it was certainly worth it. Like most of the lake’s monasteries, the Ura Kidane Meret was round in shape (representing the world), and divided into three concentric circles (representing the trinity). In the centre was the Holy of Holies, which was not accessible to anyone but the priests. The outer ring was a shady area for praying and meditation, while the inner ring was where services are held. The priests officiate on the western side, the men gather on the northern side, the women gather on the southern side, and the eastern side is used for the overflow of men and women (who remain separate nonetheless).
The high walls separating the inner ring from the monastery’s central Holy of Holies are collectively known as its ‘maqdas’. At the Ura Kidane Meret. hundreds of bright frescoes have been painted on the maqdas to illustrate various biblical scenes and stories, together with some events which relate to early Ethiopian martyrs and some uniquely apocryphal events (see top photo). The paintings are very beautiful and fresh, as some of the lower ones that had become worn were repainted in the 19th century. The main reason that the monasteries have these wonderful paintings is for use as a teaching device during pre-literate times. With its high roofs, the building was cool and contemplative, the silence broken only by the periodic overhead roar of Ethiopian Air Force MiG-23 fighter jets which were doing practice runs over the lake.
We returned to Bahar Dar the same way that we came, via a one hour boat trip. It was lunch time, so we went to a small local restaurant to enjoy Ethiopia’s national dish, “injera”. Injera tastes better than it looks. The basis of injera is a large, flat, mid-to-dark grey pancake made from Ethiopia’s staple cereal crop, tef. The injera has a slightly bitter, sour taste, and thus goes very well with spicy food that is placed in an assortment on top of the injera. It is eaten with the fingers by tearing off pieces of the injera and wrapping up small pieces of the meat or vegetables that have been served on top of it. Injera looks like a cross between a sheet of dirty latex rubber and a dirty discarded kitchen wash cloth, but Andy and I really enjoyed the one that we shared between us.
After lunch we set off for a very bumpy 45 minute (32 kilometre) minibus drive to Tis Isat, otherwise known as the Blue Nile Falls. The countryside we drove through was quintessential Ethiopia, with savanna vegetation, herds of cattle being tended by young boys, lines of people wrapped in blankets and carrying walking sticks walking single file along the side of the road (always the men leading and the women following), and small villages with a mix of traditional conical wooden huts and more modern rectangular huts, interestingly usually built with quick-growing, cultivated Australian eucalypt trees. The countryside was green and prosperous, and certainly portrayed very little of the depressing stereotypes we often read in articles about Africa.
Right beside the Falls is a large hydro-electric power plant that now takes 80% of the flow of the Nile River. As our visit coincided with the end of the dry season, the volume of water passing over the waterfall was a thus small fraction of what it once had been, but it was a very impressive sight nonetheless. The falls were once 400 metres wide; I think they were about 4 metres wide today. At least the height (37 metres) hadn’t changed!
To get to the falls, we got out of the minibus a couple of kilometres of the falls and hiked. First we descended down a steep track and crossed a beautiful stone bridge built in the 17th century by the Portuguese. A climb up the hill on the other side took us through a pretty little village where there was a buzz of building and other activity, before we trekked up and over a hill to the falls themselves. The water in the Blue Nile was anything but blue - it was a bright reddish brown that told a sad story of severe soil erosion somewhere upstream following recent rainfall. With the wet season about to hit Ethiopia, it signalled a serious problem that ought to be addressed as a matter of some urgency.
As the dark grey afternoon clouds built up, signifying the hoped-for imminent arrival of the rains, we returned to Bahar Dar by minibus. We made one last stop for the day, this being Bezawit Hill, the summit of which accommodates the palace of the former emperor Haile Selassie.
Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, and he had at one time wanted to make Bahar Dar the country’s capital. Today the palace is closed to visitors, and even local people speculate about what is inside. The nearby hill gave a grand view over Lake Tana, the Nile River, and the surrounding countryside, including an interesting, well-ordered, large zone of government- built housing for dispossessed employees.
We returned to the hotel in time to see a beautiful sunset across the lake before enjoying a pleasant dinner in the evening breeze of the hotel’s dining room. Since dinner, Andy and I have been reviewing our photos of the day, writing our diaries, and trying to eliminate swarms of mosquitoes from our room - quite an impressive job of multi-tasking :-)
