In Addis Ababa again
It was well into the night by the time I had cleared customs and was the holder of a 30-day tourist visa for unrestrained access to Ethiopia. I took a look at a map and felt overcome by distress. The three weeks that lay ahead of me seemed an eternity: the time to reach and visit the deep south surely wouldn't need to be that long? I conceded that that little ribbon of a road seemed flattened in time, distance and altitude, and that my mind was still anchored to European schedules. Things would look quite different once I was floating in the fuzzy undetermination of African time.
The noise resounding in the vast airport hall had already subsided by the time I emerged from arrivals. Sleeping bodies were lying on the floor or on rows of flimsily padded chairs. They were airport workers off their shift, local travellers in wait for an early morning flight, and even foreigners who had just arrived or were waiting for their departure. I too didn't go out in the middle of the night in search of a hotel I had failed to reserve. I lay down and fell into a slumber. It was only at 6 when the airport was waking up to a new busy day that I moved to the still calm first floor to spend the last couple of hours of sweet sleep.
We had barely driven a dozen kilometres and the countryside had returned to the archetypal rural landscape, Addis Ababa long forgotten after its last concrete buildings. My eyes were mesmerised by the changing scenery and were greedy to see it unfolf behind the window panes, but my neighbour started to talk. He meant to be friendly and broached general topics of conversation; when he had got more familiar, he asked me personal questions about religion. I was pretty sure he was Muslim, given that his name was Hussayn, so had a guess with the certainty of hitting the mark, but he smiled and said he used to be one. He had converted to Orthodox Christianity after marrying his wife, a choice that had resulted in family tensions. He was nevertheless a convinced believer and was engaged in a personal project of translating the Bible into his native Silté language.
From Butajira to the south it's the Silté's land. I took a van going to Kibet, the first of their towns, with the intention of reaching the weird crater lake called Are Shetan. On the minibus everybody knew where the white man was going, and in spite of me making arrangements with the conductor from the start, they all seemed to have taken my case to heart and to be willing to give a helping hand. The man next to me shouted to the driver I should be dropped at the turning; on my other side a young fellow was trying to tell a long story in incomprehensible gestures that I took to be his personal sign language. He nearly made me feel pity for his handicap until he also shouted something to the driver. As we approached the junction all expressed words of encouragement as if my enterprise was going to be a perilous one.
As seen from the perspective of an outsider, Melka Awash can hardly be defined a town. Compared to other villages it has more houses and shops clustered along the high street, but the low buildings, mainly made of a skeleton of eucalyptus timber daubed with adobe, naturally merge with the landscape of tilled fields. In the afternoon the road that crosses through it sees the sporadic passage of vehicles, letting town life flow at an undisturbed pace. Just outside, a bridge over the Awash river spans the gorge. Built by the Italians, who in the late 1930's had the vast country criss-crossed by a network of nearly 5000 km of national roads, it was recently remade by a Chinese company according to the original design.
If from Ziway you head to the south, the landscape is dominated by the Rift Valley flat bottom. In February it is rather dry, but the heat is bearable, probably mitigated by the presence of the big lakes. Shashemene is the transport hub of south Ethiopia, standing right at the intersection between the two thoroughfares that dissect the country from North to South and from East to West. For this reason it sees a considerable passage of travellers and has earned a terrible reputation for being the den of crooks, pickpockets and swindlers from the whole country. All the people I met there however were kind and helpful, but not wanting to push my luck any further, I spent the night out of town.