Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Libya Retrospective (December 2009)

Libya might not immediately spring to mind as a prime tourist destination, but it’s been on my mental radar for over a decade. In 1998, while travelling with Joanne through the Middle East and North Africa, we tried to get Libyan visas in Morocco and Tunisia and were turned down (“Why don’t you apply in your own country?”). We did get as far as reading the Libya section in the Lonely Planet North Africa guide, though, and it sounded wonderful: Roman ruins and spectacular deserts. In 2004, we talked about doing a Libya trip over Christmas, but I ended up resigning from my school in Cairo, and instead Joanne and I rendezvoused in Indonesia to go diving on Pulau Weh; this was unfortunate timing as we arrived just in time to be caught up, but not swept away, in the great Boxing Day tsunami that devastated the Indian Ocean.

Fast forwarding five years, Joanne and I both still wanted to see Libya, so when we decided to meet up in Italy at the end of my cycling blitz through the Balkans in December, 2009, we started arranging a Libya trip as part of our travels. Unfortunately, since our first attempt in 1998, all sorts of new rules have been introduced to force tourists to take a guided tour and to have a tour guide with them at all times, while the black market in foreign currency which once made Libya relatively cheap has disappeared with the end of economic sanctions. All this ended up making our trip pretty exorbitantly expensive, at least by my cheapskate standards, but we figured that the opportunity cost of not going now and trying to arrange to go another time would be even higher. We bought Air Malta tickets to take us Rome-Tripoli-Malta-Sicily, and found a travel agency that came well-recommended, then gritted our teeth and paid for the tour.

The process of getting a visa proved to be a ridiculous soap opera for me. Both of us had to get a stamp put in our passports translating the information page into Arabic. This in itself is ridiculous, as most Arabic-speaking countries, or the Chinese or Iranians or Armenians or Ethiopians for that matter, seem to be able to figure out Roman script just fine. I’ve heard that the reason is that Libyans have (or had in the past, perhaps) passports written entirely in Arabic, and that the EU made them translate the information pages into Roman script, and that Colonel Gaddafi wanted to have a tit-for-tat retaliation. Whatever the reason, the Libyans won’t help you out by telling you where such a translation stamp can be found, and to complicate matters, the stamp is supposed to be authorized/notarized/something-ized by your country’s foreign affairs ministry, or at least by your embassy. Some internet searching turned up a place in Ottawa for Joanne to get it done, but my attempts throughout the Balkans were less successful; many translation services didn’t have a rubber stamp to stamp things into the passport, and the Libyans wouldn’t accept a translation on a separate slip of paper. I struck out in Sofia and Tirana, and was getting really frustrated when Joanne found a place in Rome that would do the job. It was actually a bit hit or miss once we got to Rome, but it all worked out; the translation bureau was used to doing this sort of thing, had a rubber stamp and did the translation of my name and date of birth a couple of days before our flight.

The flight down to Tripoli on December 18th was a far cry from the days during the post-Lockerbie air embargo on Libya, when most travel to Libya involved flying to Tunis and then catching buses and taxis for the long overland drive to Tripoli. We had a long delay in Malta, spent listening to the increasingly improbable tall tales of an old British man, and it was after dark when we got through immigration and wandered out to find our tour guide, whom I will call Hisham to avoid getting him in trouble with his government. At least paying the big bucks got us a guide with perfect English; Hisham had grown up until age 14 in England, where his father was studying and working. By the time we made it out to the car, we’d learned that his family was Berber (the indigenous non-Arab population of much of North Africa) and that he had little patience for the pontifications of “the Colonel”, the man who for 40 years has ruled Libya with an iron fist. He complained of the repression of the Berbers by the Arabs, a complaint common to Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. We drove through the sprawling concrete suburbs of Tripoli in the dark, looking for a place to eat, and ended up in an open-air café close to the harbour, with sea breezes ruffling the palm trees and the old city with its monumental gate lit up by floodlights.

We stayed not in a hotel but rather a small apartment building owned by our tour company above their offices, where James, an immigrant from Ghana, worked hard to keep the rooms immaculate and our breakfast plates full. Across the street was a police building, and we were warned not to take any pictures in this direction, as the secret police would be watching and would not be amused. On the morning of the 19th, Hisham arrived and we set off to see the sights of Tripoli. It’s a city with an ancient past; its name harks back to the Tripolis, or Three Cities, that occupied this stretch of coast in classical times: Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (the ancient name for modern-day Tripoli). It was a major port in the Muslim period, ruled over by a Turkish governor nominally subservient to Istanbul, but with a fair amount of local autonomy. The old city has a number of old mosques and bazaar shops from the Ottoman period, while in the surrounding neighbourhoods Italian colonial architecture crops up here and there. Most of the cityscape, however, is dominated by generic concrete boxes in various states of disrepair. Tripoli certainly doesn’t exude an air of great prosperity, despite the large oil revenues that flow into the country. Hisham said that most Libyans believe that Gaddafi has become personally immensely wealthy along with his relatives and associates, while the country as a whole has languished economically.

Our first stop was at the National Museum, a storehouse of the historic and artistic wonders of the country. The two great attractions of Libya for tourists are the Sahara (which, short of time and money, we were going to have to skip this time around) and the great classical ruins along the coast. The best sculptures, mosaics, coins and other artefacts from the various ruins are all in the Tripoli museum, and we had a wonderful morning taking pictures of mosaics and marble torsos. The museum was almost deserted, except for a gaggle of art students from Tripoli university who were gathered in a room full of nude sculptures, practicing their life drawing. I guess in a Muslim society, you’d be unlikely to have nude models posing for your art class, so this seemed a clever compromise. There were a few interesting pieces of cave art, as well as the jeep that a young Gaddafi drove during the military coup that installed him in power in 1969. At the entrance to the museum there is an amusing poster showing Gaddafi and his new best friend Silvio Berlusconi ogling the marble statue of a nubile nude female: very appropriate on both counts!!

Hisham, Joanne and I then wandered around the old town of Tripoli, visiting a few mosques and old buildings, and letting Joanne magpie around the silversmiths’ shops. One of the few real vestiges of Roman Oea is the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, standing in a square in the old town. It was carved to mark the visit of the Roman Emperor to the city, and was subsequently buried in drifting sand, preserving its carving quite well. The arch now sits a couple of metres below the present street level. One of the nicest restaurants in Tripoli faces the Arch, and Joanne decided that we should have dinner there one night. It became a running joke between Joanne and Hisham as to whether our tour budget covered a meal in that café of stew cooked in a stone amphora which had to be smashed open to serve the food. Every day Joanne would ask whether tonight was the night, and every night Hisham would claim it was too expensive.

That afternoon Joanne took a nap, Hisham went off to work out at his gym, and I walked around the streets, trying to get a feel for the vibe of modern Libya. There was heavy traffic on most streets, although not of flashy new luxury cars. Most of the vehicles seemed to be second-hand cars a decade or more old, many still sporting the country stickers of where they had been imported from: the Netherlands, Germany and, most commonly, Switzerland. The irony is that Switzerland and Libya have been locked in a ridiculous diplomatic row for the past couple of years that started when Geneva police arrested (and subsequently released) one of Muammar’s sons and his wife for mistreating their Filipina maid while visiting Switzerland. The Libyan government has reacted with its usual impetuous nature and banned oil exports to Switzerland. It has also arrested two Swiss businessmen who were in Libya when the row erupted and kept them in prison for over a year. The Colonel has been handed extra ammunition in his campaign by the silly Swiss vote to ban the construction of minarets, allowing him to claim that Switzerland is the epicentre of an anti-Islamic crusade against Libya and calling for a jihad against the Swiss. Somehow the rest of the EU was drawn into the dispute, and for a couple of months after our visit, EU nationals were unable to get visas to Libya.

This sort of diplomatic flap is nothing new for Libya, nor unique to Switzerland. While we were planning our trip, Canada and Libya had a spat over the Colonel’s decision to visit Newfoundland on his way back from the UN General Assembly, and the Newfoundland Lieutenant-Governor’s refusal to turn over her official residence for Gaddafi to stay in; a subsequent request to allow the Colonel to erect his tent in the LG’s garden was also a non-starter. Subsequently the Libyan government, or at least part of it, declared that no Canadian tourists could come to Libya, a declaration that was denied by the Libyan embassy in Ottawa, but which was confirmed by travel agents who reported that Canadian tour groups were being forced to cancel their trips to Libya. Luckily we both have EU passports in addition to our Canadian ones, and the ban on EU visitors hadn’t yet come about, so we got in without a hitch.

The streets of Tripoli are full of pictures of the Great Man himself. There are two forms: either towering posters in which he always seems to be smiling (in an “I’ve got all the money and you don’t!” sort of way) and clasping his hands together or holding his Little Green Book, or small photos on display in businesses and for sale in shops which specialize in his image. The other popular subject for posters is the African Union, a brainchild of Gaddafi’s that was implemented on September 9, 1999 (9-9-99, as the posters point out) to increase African unity. Not many concrete steps taken so far, but a great forum for Gaddafi to strut his stuff on a friendly stage. I walked by the headquarters of the International Popular Committee for Gaddafi Human Rights Prize (really; I’m not making this stuff up!) and was amused to see that it was closed and seemed not to be in use. Maybe it’s not really so popular?

The next day was spent exploring our first big Roman ruin: Sabratha. We drove west for an hour, through heavy Tunis-bound traffic and scrubby, dusty countryside, to reach a sprawling site beside the Mediterranean. Both Joanne and I really liked the place, almost completely deserted and with lots of layered sandstone contrasting photogenically with the blue skies. Sabratha was first a Phoenician port, and one of the most striking structures is the Tomb of Bes, a rather over-reconstructed Phoenician tower tomb dating back to the 4th century BC, looming skywards like a missile, albeit one with cute carved lions at its base. The rest of the site dates from Roman times: a couple of forums, merchants’ districts, the ancient port which once exported wild animals, slaves, ivory and olive oil, the theatre district and the vast, beautiful theatre. The houses still had mosaic floors in place, while the baths and public latrines were easily discernible. A few columns and headless marble torsos balanced in place beside the sea, and the stones of the olive merchants’ warehouses were still stained with spilled oil. The theatre was magnificent, with its three-story backdrop of Corinthian columns looming high behind the stage, and the seats sweeping back above the passageways. I’ve seen a lot of Roman and Greek theatres, and the only other one I can remember that is this large and this intact is the striking black basalt theatre of Bosra, Syria.

We snapped lots of photos, followed the polished presentation of our endearing local archaeological guide Mufta (“My name means ‘key’ in Arabic; I am the key to unlock the secrets of Sabratha!”) and sat gazing out over the Mediterranean, the transportation highway of the classical world. Just beside the ruins, a series of wooden fishing vessels were pulled up on the beach. Mufta told us that these were some of the boats used to smuggle illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa into the EU via Europe’s soft underbelly: Malta and Sicily. Colonel Gaddafi encourages the trade as a way of annoying the EU. Libya itself is full of migrant workers from south of the Sahara; most menial labour is done by men from Niger, Mali, Ghana and Burkina Faso, willing to work for $10 or $20 a day, wages for which no Libyan would bother getting out of bed.

We were just on our way out of the site, back to the car, when we realized that we had skipped the museum. We argued with Hisham about whether it was covered in the tour price (for what we were paying, it certainly should have been) and then trooped back into the museum for 15 minutes before it shut for lunch. We were both glad that we did, as the museum was stuffed full of fantastic statues and some exquisitely detailed mosaics, my favourite form of Roman art. I don’t know whether I’ve ever seen such finely detailed mosaics as I saw in Libya on this trip; they seemed more paintings than arrangements of coloured tiles. Subjects ranged from abstract geometric designs to life-like depictions of animals, birds and fish to mythological scenes. My favourite in Sabratha was a huge floor from, I think, a Byzantine church featuring an immense and detailed peacock.

We returned to Tripoli through, of all things, a rainshower. My status as a rain god, able to bring precipitation to the driest places on earth (the Sahara, the Atacama, Central Australia, the Taklamakan) was reinforced. It was a break in the usual weather pattern that we experienced, in which sunny, pleasant mornings gave way to very strong afternoon winds blowing up clouds of dust and sand.

Early the next morning we set off on a long road trip. Hisham drove while Joanne busied herself with tunes; there was fundamental disagreement over what was great music, with Hisham a huge fan of dance music and techno and Joanne and I more dinosauresque in our tastes. Our route led us southwest, through increasingly dry countryside, towards the ancient caravan town of Ghadames, down near the point where Tunisia, Libya and Algeria meet at a point. We passed through a few dusty, featureless towns before turning off to see a couple of ancient Berber granaries, fortified enclosures of dozens of rooms, often several stories above ground level and accessible only by precarious pseudo-ladders of dried and cracking tree branches driven into the adobe walls. They looked like Escher engravings, their jumble of rooms and storeys seemingly optical illusions. Historically each room would have held the grain of a different family; the various families of a district would have united to build a fortified joint storehouse to guard against the ever-present threat of bandit attacks or raids by desert Arab Bedu.

The first granary was down in the dusty, featureless plain, but the second, Qasr Nalut, was up on an escarpment, nestled amidst the crumbling arches of an abandoned Berber village (the inhabitants had been built a new village of soulless concrete nearby in the 1970s). The views down to the plain, the wonderful jumble of arches and irregular walls and the general air of deserted desolation was a welcome relief after hours of dust and decrepit trucks. We stopped for lunch in a nearby town, and then our highway meandered up and down across a sandstone plateau before entering a long wadi that led eventually to Ghadmes, 600 km southwest of Tripoli. We arrived in the late afternoon, and I spent the remaining hour of daylight walking through the walled date plantations to the old town and having a quick sneak preview before our official tour the next day.

The next day was spent prowling around the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site now completely uninhabited. Once again, as at Nalut, the government had built the inhabitants of the traditional adobe medina a new town of concrete apartment buildings. The new town lacked the atmosphere and beauty of the old one, but had running water, electricity, indoor plumbing and lots of parking, so the inhabitants quite gladly moved house. The old town was left to crumble for a decade or more before foreign visitors and UNESCO pushed the government into preserving the town before it crumbled into dust. The result is fairly amazing, a museum town quite unique in feel.

The town is out in the unremitting sunshine and heat of the desert sun; even in December, the temperatures got pretty warm by mid-day. In order to keep houses and streets cool, the town was built as a maze of covered tunnel-like streets with courtyards and houses opening off these corridors. The Stygian darkness is pierced by dim skylights set into the roofs every once in a while, giving rise to a striking banded pattern of light and dark as the passageways curve gently away into infinity. With no outdoor clues to help, I was soon hopelessly disoriented, although Joanne did a much better job of keeping her bearings. We were both glad to have Abdul Rahman, our local guide, to show us the way around. Some of the houses are being renovated; their owners still have the keys, and see the potential for tourism to generate some revenue. Small groups of labourers from Niger trundled up and down the corridors with wheelbarrows, repairing walls, whitewashing and then painting colourful geometric designs on them. Benches were built into the walls for neighbours to sit and chat, whiling away the long, hot afternoons. They were unoccupied now; the vast caravan trade that made Ghadames one of the most famous towns of the Saharan trade network, a commercial rival to Timbuktu, is gone now, as is the street life, the markets, the cries of merchants, the bustle of camels and horses. There is great aesthetic beauty to old Ghadames, but it is a melancholy beauty that cries of loss and bygone greatness.

For me the highlights were the mosques, their whitewashed minarets a glaring contrast to the blue skies, their courtyards a welcome escape from the gloomy labyrinth of the covered streets. After taking hundreds of photos, we finally made our way past the deep spring which made life possible in Ghadmes and to a restored old house for a lunch of roast camel. The house, decked out in traditional finery, was cool and spacious, and we reclined on cushions on beautiful rugs sipping tea and admiring the painted decorative flourishes on the walls. We climbed up to the roof and looked out over the sea of other rooftops, punctured here and there by palm trees or minarets. From above, it was clear how much of the town was in ruins; some of this damage dates back to an air raid in the Second World War, while some comes from the exodus of Ghadames residents to the bright lights of Tripoli, leaving their old family houses to decay. Looking out over the town, for the first time since arriving in Libya I felt as though I was in Africa, rather than in the Mediterranean world. I could feel the pull of the Sahara, and regretted that we weren’t headed south into Niger and Chad, following in the footsteps of many generations of camel caravans before us.

We ended the day by driving to an old Turkish fort a few kilometres out in the desert. Ras al Ghoul (I had never realized that the English word ghoul comes from Arabic) wasn’t much to look at, but nearby were some rather scenic dunes. We climbed up dutifully, hoping for a breathtaking sunset, but the sun merely faded into a gray haze on the horizon, leaving Joanne and I to blow bubbles over the Sahara sands (trying in vain to recreate pictures we had taken eleven years earlier in Tunisia, not far from Ghadames). I wished we had enough time and money to head out into the deep desert, but it was not to be.

The drive back to Tripoli was uneventful, with a stop at one last Berber granary and then at a small Berber village situated spectacularly on the very edge of a vertiginous escarpment. We took photos of ourselves leaping upwards near the edge, then got back into the car for the rest of the long drive back to Tripoli and our familiar guesthouse and the ever-smiling Charles.

The next leg of the trip involved a flight to Benghazi, the second city of Libya, 700 km by air, or over 1000 km by road, to the east, on the other side of the Gulf of Sirte. We bid a temporary farewell to Hisham at the airport, as in Benghazi we would have a new minder for the next three days. Saad was a bit older and quieter than Hisham, but spoke excellent English, acquired while studying aeronautics in the UK. We sped away from the airport, headed northeast towards the Greek ruins of Cyrenaica, racing the clock to fit in all the sights before they closed.

First up was Tocra, a small and largely unexcavated city beside the sea. Although there was little in the way of actual sites, Adbul Marwa, an enthusiastic local guide, helped bring the jumbled stones to life. The real highlights, however, were an Italian fort (built out of the stones from the Roman city in 1912) and the tortoises that overran the site, butting shells with each other in a funny mating display. There were some fine mosaics in the Byzantine church and attached bishop’s palace, while the walls of the gymnasium were still covered with two-thousand-year-old schoolboy graffiti.

We sped along the coastal road to Tolmeita, ancient Ptolemais, another city still largely buried beneath the sands of time. We scarfed down a quick lunch beneath the trees of the museum before admiring the usual marble sculptures and mosaics and taking a quick run through the ruins. Only a few blocks of what was once the main city of Cyrenaica have been dug out, but they attest to the wealth of the city, and to the engineering prowess of its inhabitants. Vast subterranean cisterns stored 6000 cubic metres of water beneath the forum. We listened as Hakim, our guide for Tolmeita, told us how the city had suffered in the great Jewish Revolt that convulsed Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica in AD 115, and then the massive AD 365 earthquake, before slowly sinking into oblivion after the Arab conquest and the establishment of new cities. It was amazing to think of how many decades of excavation still remain in Tolmeita and Tocra, and how many artistic treasures and historical surprises are still buried beneath the farmers’ fields there.

Our last stop of our whistle-stop tour was probably the most interesting. We raced along back roads away from the coast, through limestone hills that provided a lush contrast to dusty Tripolitania; no wonder the Italians were such eager colonizers of Cyrenaica in the early twentieth century. Just before closing time, we drove into Qasr Libya, where construction in the 1950s had unearthed an unexpected find, a floor decorated with fifty mosaic panels, apparently from a Byzantine church. The quality of art was a bit cruder than in the breathtakingly detailed Roman mosaics we had seen elsewhere, but they were fascinating nonetheless. There were personifications of rivers like the Tigris and the Euphrates, and also of the little town of Olbia-Theodoria, where Qasr Libya now stood. There were plenty of animals and fish, including an unexpected scene of a deer eating a snake. The highlight, however, is the only known contemporary portrayal of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria, the monumental lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. It is shown as a massive square tower, accessed by a drawbridge, topped with a large statue of the sun god Helios; behind it is another statue atop a smaller structure.

We drove at a more leisurely pace, through the gathering dark, through the green countryside towards Al Bayt, the modern town where we were staying. By a happy coincidence, a conference of Libyan doctors was ending that evening at our hotel, and we were able to gorge ourselves at their final-night buffet.

We awoke the next morning, Christmas Day, to a rise of exceptional beauty that set the scene for a wonderful day. The day was devoted to the main tourist attraction of eastern Libya, the Greek city of Cyrene. On the way out of al-Bayt, we stopped in to see a ruined temple of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing. Not much to look at, but a nice deserted, wind-swept site on the pretty plateau. We got to Cyrene early and found, for the first time all trip, a number of other Western tourists, mostly Italians driving their own four-wheel-drives on their way to the Sahara. Our guide for the site, Abdul Gaafar, was the former archaeological boss of Cyrene, and was very knowledgeable and keen to share his stories of the city’s glorious past.

Cyrene, like the other cities around Benghazi, lay on the eastern side of the fundamental fault line dividing the Mediterranean in pre-Roman times. To the west lay predominantly non-Greek city-states, mostly Phoenician; the three cities around Tripoli were all founded by Phoenicians. To the east lay the Greek-speaking world, of which Cyrene formed a part. Even after the Romans turned the Med into their own private lake, that boundary was important; to the east of it, in places like Cyrenaica, Greek remained the language of business, everyday life and even government, while to the west Latin prevailed. That boundary would later become the boundary between the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic states of the west. This meant that the cities we saw in Cyrenaica had long Greek histories before the Romans ever showed up. This meant lots of Greek inscriptions to be seen, and often two quite separate city centres: a Greek agora and a subsequent Roman forum; a Greek theatre sculpted into a hillside and a later Roman one built free-standing and impressive; small-scale Greek baths and huge Roman ones; Greek temples and then huge, bombastic Roman ones.

Cyrene has been extensively excavated, and so there were a lot of details to catch our eye: graffiti and inscriptions in the old Greek gymnasium, mosaic floors, wonderful statues. The gymnasium has had all the columns around its edge re-erected, giving a vivid feeling of what the place must have felt like in its heyday. The inlaid marble floors in an opulent villa built by one of the Emperor Hadrian’s freed slaves spoke of the luxury of the Roman period. We walked down from the upper city to the old holy sites of the lower Greek town, past Greek baths excavated into the rock of a cliff, to the old temple of Apollo. I loved the feel of the town, and even the hordes of Libyan tourists who showed up as lunchtime approached couldn’t take away the blue skies, the golden stones and the air of history. Some of the Corinthian capitals, in place of the usual acanthus leaves, had instead the leaves of the medicinal plant Silphium. This plant, endemic to Cyrenaica, was one of Cyrene’s major exports but was harvested to extinction in Roman times.

We had lunch with crowds of Italian tourists, and then drove a few kilometres to the vast Temple of Zeus; it is one of the few temples that the Romans rebuilt much smaller than the grand Greek original. The city was badly damaged during the Kitos War, the second of three large-scale Jewish revolts against Roman rule; in AD 115 Jewish diaspora communities in Cyrenaica, Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant rose up and killed their Roman garrisons and the Greek and Roman civilian populations, inciting bloody reprisals by the Emperor Trajan. According to contemporary accounts, almost 220,000 people died in Cyrenaica alone, and the land was left depopulated, requiring colonists to repopulate it. The original Greek temple was one of the largest Doric temples in the Mediterranean, an Archaic structure of massive columns that owed much to Egyptian temple architecture. After the temple was torn down by the rebels, the Romans rebuilt it on a much smaller scale inside the original enclosure; maybe this was because the town was no longer such a huge population centre. The sandstone of the temple was so full of fossil seashells that it seemed to be more shell than sand.

From the Temple of Zeus, we drove through a pretty, deserted countryside, atop the limestone plateau with its maquis scrub; from the surroundings and the azure waters far below, we could have been in Sicily, or Montenegro, or southern France, or southern Turkey. No wonder the Greeks and Romans, and later Mussolini’s Italians, so loved the area: it reminded them of home. Abdul Gaafar and Saad pointed out the ruins of villages, the small mounds of prehistoric ruins, the berries and flowers and herbs. It was a wonderful afternoon to be alive and to be driving down to the Mediterranean out of the Green Mountains. We ended up on the coast at Apollonia, once the port for Cyrene. Again, not much was excavated, and most of that was Byzantine (Joanne and I had little patience for most Byzantine ruins, with their ponderous churches, sloppy workmanship and re-used stonework.) On the other hand, the theatre is wonderful, facing out to sea (how did audiences keep their eyes on the stage with such a magnificent natural backdrop), and even the Byzantine churches had lovely columns carved from striped marble that caught fire in the late afternoon light. The sunset over the Green Mountains and the ruins of Apollonia was a perfect way to end Christmas.

On our way to the airport on Boxing Day, we stopped by one last historic site, a remote and obscure piece of prehistoric Berber art, a series of surprisingly modernist figures carved into rock at a tiny village called Slonta. The carvings were completely unlike the classical formalism we had been seeing for days. Here strangely misshapen faces, carved to follow the natural contours of the rock, peered out of odd corners of the stone, beneath bulging elephants or atop a sinuous snake. It was hard to make out figures at first, but as our eyes adjusted to the style, we could make out human figures dancing and sitting, and clusters of faces staring out urgently like Gothic gargoyles. I wished we could have stayed longer to look at the carvings and try to decipher them, but time was ticking on inexorably, and we were several hours from Benghazi airport. We hurtled across the lush green fields of the Green Mountains, through an area much favoured by Italian settlers in the early 20th century, pausing for a moment to savour the Fascist colonial architecture, now abandoned and derelict, in a farming town. As we approached Bengazi, we passed through an area where overgrazing and over-cultivation had turned the land into a dust bowl. We then dropped down to the coastal plain, away from the greenery, and made it to our flight with time to spare.

After a lazy afternoon and evening in Tripoli, spent getting an awful haircut and eating excellent Lebanese food and Turkish pastry, we were ready for our last full day in Libya. We had saved the best for last: Leptis Magna. We already knew that it ranked up there with Ephesus, Pompeii, Palmyra, Petra and Baalbek as one of the greatest classical ruins in the Mediterranean world. We just hoped it would live up to the hype. We needn’t have worried. Leptis Magna was, in fact, magnificent. The amphitheatre and the Circus Maximus, outside town beside the Mediterranean, were immense and very impressive. The Circus actually had seats facing outwards to the sea so that mock naval battles could be staged for the amusement of the crowds. We made our way into the heart of the old town, via the huge port complex beside the silted up harbour.

The city of Leptis Magna was always an important port for the Romans. Its hinterland produced grain and olives for the Roman market, but it was also an important export point for slaves, wild animals for the Roman Coliseum and ivory. Its most important export, though, was an Emperor. Septimius Severus, who rescued the Empire from civil war in AD 193, was born in Leptis, and lavished funds on it to tart up his hometown, particularly before he came on an official visit. As a result, everything in Leptis is on an epic scale. It’s also well-preserved, since it was deeply buried in sand over the centuries, preserving walls and columns a couple of stories deep. For tourists today this is perfect; instead of foot-high wall foundations, you’re surrounded by a storey or more of Roman masonry and marble, allowing you to see what the city would really have looked like. It’s a bit like Pompeii or Herculaneum, except on a much bigger scale.

We started with the elaborate Arch of Septimius Severus, commemorating the big guy’s trip home. It’s covered by wonderful carving, although the originals are now in the Tripoli museum. In places, you can see where the carvings were left unfinished, perhaps because of the death of the Emperor in 211. We wandered through to the monumental bath complex, with brick walls still 2 storeys high. It’s one of the largest Roman baths I’ve seen, and it was only one of several equally impressive baths known to have existed. The Severan Forum was huge, full of impressive carved Medusa heads and arched arcades; it must have been even more impressive, even more a statement of the wealth and power of the Empire, back in its heyday. Behind one of the enclosing walls, the judicial basilica, the law court, was covered in amazing carving of the labours of Hercules, of centaurs and warriors and satyrs. Inscriptions in huge carved letters proclaimed the greatness of various emperors.

Down towards the sea, we came upon less bombastic architecture at the octagonal market. There were standardized measures of length, volume and area to prevent cheating, and reliefs of trading ships carved on the walls. Everywhere there were massive columns, carved from striped marble and granite of exceptional quality, probably imported all the way from Egypt. These were so well carved and so well preserved that in the 17th century, the French consul to the area shipped off dozens of the columns to France, where they now decorate the Palace of Versailles. Other columns lay on the shore, where they were abandoned during subsequent, interrupted attempts at looting by the French. Some of the columns bore Corinthian columns with silphium leaves, as in Cyrene. Here and there we came across old Phoenician inscriptions, and we kept an eye out for the phallic depictions scattered around the site. Unlike some other Roman cities, these were not signs to the local brothel. Instead, they were supposed to ward off the evil eye, and one carving shows a phallus with legs (and its own subsidiary phallus) doing battle with the evil eye. There are so many inscriptions in Leptis, lining the excavated facades of the streets, that it would take experts years to translate and catalogue them all. We felt very much part of the bygone city as we wandered through the grid of streets.

We finished up at the theatre, with its wealth of carvings and its theatre district. Inscriptions over the grand door report on the renovation of the complex by a local magnate. Smaller carvings report on particular plays being performed, like tattered posters of plays gone by. The theatre is hardly as impressive as Sabratha’s, but it’s still a wonderful structure, with the distracting view of the Mediterranean waters behind, and the vast sweep of the ruins visible in all directions from the upper seats.

We drove back to Tripoli more than satisfied with our overdose of classical ruins. That night, as Hisham picked us up to take us to dinner, Joanne asked once again if we were going to the Marcus Aurelius arch café to eat stew-in-an-amphora. Hisham said no, and started driving towards a fish restaurant before pulling a U-turn and heading towards the arch. The stew was worth all the anticipation, baked to perfection in its clay jar before being extracted by smashing the top. We dined well, staring out over the lit-up Roman arch and basking in the historical ambience.

Our last morning in Tripoli was spent at our guesthouse, relaxing. We left slightly left to catch our flight to Malta, and this caught up with us as we got stuck in endless traffic, and then Hisham got pulled over by a traffic cop. He searched long and hard for his driver’s license, but when he finally found it, the cop spotted that Hisham had two licenses (one that he had lost, replaced and then found months later) and promptly wrote him a huge ticket that probably cost him a few day’s profits from the trip. As we drove off, Hisham grumbled that he’d had about as much of Libya as he could take and that he should move back to Malta and its nightclubs and beautiful women. (He was off to Malta in 2 days’ time for a New Year’s party holiday.) We made it to the airport just in time, passed on the opportunity to buy the famous “Stamps of American Aggression” for sale in the souvenir shops, said goodbye to Hisham, and headed off on the brief hop to Malta, glad to have entered the strange modern world of Muammar Gaddafi and the fabulous ancient ruins that are its highlight.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Malta Retrospective (December 2009)

I didn't do Malta much justice on this blog when I went there in December, so I'll try to elaborate the single paragraph I wrote at the time. Joanne and I flew Air Malta to get from Italy to Libya in December, and on the way back to Italy we took a four-day stopover in Malta, a place neither of us had ever visited. I had heard of Malta: I knew that the Knights of St. John had made it their island fortress, that it had withstood a long siege and constant aerial bombardment by the Germans in World War II, and that lots of Brits head to Malta for their holiday. I was keen to flesh out this very bare-bones portrait when I arrived in my 90th country. Our first view of Malta came as we rode the bus into Valetta town from the airport. The main island of Malta is small (maybe 30 km in length) and very densely populated. Most houses are made of limestone, making for an attractive colour to the small towns. Valetta itself, the main city and capital, looked scruffier and didn't impress ut at first. We walked through the old town, found a cheap guesthouse and set off to explore the town. The Maltese language, closely related to Arabic but written in Roman, looks daunting, full of Qs and Xs. Luckily, almost everyone speaks great English too. Malta's position, between Sicily and Tunisia, means that it has been a crossroads of cultures and languages for millenia. While most tourists come to Malta for the nightclubs of Sliema or the diving and rocky coastline of Gozo, we decided that ancient history should be the theme of our brief visit. Our first day, it wasn't until late afternoon that we got out into the hilly stone streets of old Valetta. We walked around the seafront, shivering slightly in the brisk wind and watching other tourists walking around looking bemused, trying to figure out what there was to see in Valetta. There wasn't much, so we wandered around and watched the sunset over the Grand Harbour, the reason for Malta's strategic importance to the British Royal Navy. The next day, after an early-morning rush to get tickets to see the Hypogeum, Malta's premier pre-historic sight (only 10 people can get tickets the day before; the other 60 tickets sell out months in advance), we got on the bus and trundled the 25 kilometres northwest to the Gozo ferry. All the way, we were hardly ever out of the built-up suburbia that covers so much of the green countryside, and it took forever to get anywhere. Gozo, a half-hour ride across a lovely blue strait, was quite different, with only 10,000 inhabitants rather than the quarter-million on Malta island. We caught a bus up to Ggantija, the largest and oldest of the large megalithic temples that are scattered all over the islands. Built in 3600 BC, the temple consists of two oval enclosures with stone altars inside. The stones forming the walls are massive, a couple of metres high and with a mass of several tons. The Maltese claim that this is the oldest surviving free-standing structure in the world, and it certainly predates the Pyramids by about 900 years. There were almost no interpretive signs at the site, so the culture and architecture were perhaps less impressive than if we had known more about them. We did draw a few inferences from what we could see. The limestone temple stones seemed to have been carved with obsidian or some harder stone, and we could see the remnants of decorative swirls, raised dots and spirals on some of them. We could also see traces of red ochre that once coloured the walls. There were holes in the stones that seemed to have been for liquid offerings, and others that seemed to have been for wooden barriers. There were even a few small holes carved in the uprights that reminded me of the astronomical sighting holes I had seen in Karahundj, in Armenia, a few months earlier. Joanne was less taken with the place than I was ("No good for taking pictures!"), and was glad to head off to the Gozo Archaeological Museum as soon as decently possible. At the small museum, we saw some of the small finds from Ggantija and other sites on Gozo: little statuettes, both life-like and also with the exaggerated hips, thighs and breasts of the Earth Mother Goddess who seems to have been worshipped by the early Maltese. We saw better-preserved examples of the decorative carving in the temples, and saw models of what the temples would have looked like in their heyday. A long trek back, by bus, ferry and bus again, brought us to Valetta for a great dinner of rabbit (a Maltese specialty) and an early night. The next day we tackled the main archaeological museum in Valetta, full of more carvings and sarcophagi and full of the historical interpretation lacking at the temples themselves. I was particularly taken by the exquisite small carving known as The Sleeping Lady, and the similar Venus de Malta;I bought a replica of The Sleeping Lady for my mother. The Maltese islands have no fewer than 23 Neolithic sites scattered across their small land area, a testament to the vitality of the early agricultural society that blossomed there 6000 years ago, and the museum does a good job of putting it into the wider Mediterranean context. After this educational visit, we got on another of the ubiquitous old yellow buses and headed southeast to Tarxien temple and the Hypogeum. Along the way, we passed the neighbourhood where hundreds of African migrants and asylum seekers live for years in limbo, waiting for their refugee claims to be processed. They pay thousands of dollars to be smuggled into Europe and cross from Libya in rickety fishing boats such as we had seen near Sabratha a week earlier. The Maltese press is full of stories and letters about the migrants; Malta, like Ireland and Italy, has discovered that while it has been happy to export thousands of emigrants around the world over the centuries, it is less keen on other people immigrating to its crowded shores. The Africans sit in the sunshine, forbidden to work, waiting day after day, year after year, for something to change. Tarxien is more elaborate than Ggantija, and dates from 4 centuries later, around 3200 BC. It has been pretty extensively reconstructed, and we had seen the originals of most of the good carved stones in the museum, but it was still easier to visualize the temple in its glory days than it had been at Ggantija. We hustled off down the street to the Hypogeum to make it in time for our tour. The Hypogeum is the most atmospheric and eerie of the Neolithic sites on Malta, and also its most fragile. It lies completely underground, and was discovered a century ago by someone digging a water cistern. It seems to have been both a mass tomb and also a temple. Only ten people an hour can visit, in order to avoid the growth of bacteria and mold on the walls that would destroy the fragile wall paintings, and photography and any sort of bags are prohibited to avoid people bumping into the walls. The surviving paintings are a bit reminiscent of the earlier cave paintings I saw years ago in Lascaux, France, with depictions of the deer that the early Maltese must have hunted. The ceilings are decorated with swirls of red ochre. There are three levels of rooms carved into the rock, forming a slightly confusing maze of intersecting spaces. The walls on the second level are carved in brilliant imitation of the construction techniques of the aboveground temples we had just seen. The Central Chamber and the so-called Holy of Holies, dimly lit and seen from a distance, seemed to exude pre-historic mystery and romance. Our allotted 30 minutes was over all too soon, and we were back on the street, blinking in the bright sunlight and wondering if it had all been a dream. It was very Indiana Jones-esque, and well worth the early-morning queueing the previous morning. Not yet satiated with megalithic temples, we hopped onto another bus and rolled off to the southern coast to see Hagar Qim, the best situated of the temples. For the first time, the surrounding countryside, consisting of fields and cliffs sloping down to the sparkling Mediterranean, could be considered lovely. The two temples seem to rise organically from the stony ground, although the protective canopies that UNESCO and Heritage Malta have constructed over them do nothing for their appearance. These temples had the highest, most massive walls we had seen, and had all the features we had come to expect: massive doorframes, carved decorations on the stones, altars and rounded niches within the temples. The setting reminded me of the wonderful cliff-top ruins of Kourion that Joanne and I had visited in Cyprus in 2008. That evening, as we walked around Valetta in search of cheap eats (a tough task, given the high prices of everything on Malta), Joanne pointed out the prevalence among the teenage boys of jeans worn so low that they were belted below the buttocks, showing a good 20 centimetres of designer boxer shorts. Joanne spent a half hour trying to photograph the best examples of Maltese Teenager Butt, but it was a tough task to undertake discreetly, and the results were mixed. We had better luck photographing our third successive beautiful sunset. Our last day on Malta was pretty low-key, with a visit to the baroque St. John's Co-Cathedral, the centrepiece of the Order of the Knights of St. John, also known as the Hospitallers. We had seen their castles and fortifications all over the Mediterranean over the years: Jerusalem, Krak des Chevaliers and Tartus in Syria, Bodrum in Turkey, Rhodes in Greece, Cyprus. They had been pushed westward relentlessly by generations of Turks until they made their last stand on Malta, where they withstood The Great Siege by the mighty Ottoman fleet in 1565. Their flag, dominated by the Maltese Cross, flies everywhere on Malta, and Malta is still one of the most staunchly Catholic countries in the world, an enduring legacy of the crusading Knights. The cathedral itself was excessively baroque and gave Joanne the heebie-jeebies and left her angry at the ostentatious wealth that the church flaunted. I enjoyed the historical atmosphere, but I was glad to get out of the gilt (and guilt?)-laden interior and the huge hordes of cruise-ship passengers that packed the church. That evening, our last in Malta, was also the last evening of the decade: December 31st, 2009. We had an early flight the next morning, so we celebrated the end of the Noughties early with a bottle of prosecco at sunset in a park overlooking the Grand Harbour, composing haiku. Mine read: 2009 Burma, Canada, Silk Road Stillness and motion Dozens of countries Years flashing past like snowflakes The Noughties depart Overall, Malta was a bit disappointing, with too much traffic and suburban sprawl and not enough scenery, but the megalithic historical sites made up for that. I'm not sure I would choose Malta for a beach holiday, although perhaps the scuba diving on Gozo would be enough to hold my interest. It was certainly a worthwhile stopover, but three days was about as much time as I wanted to spend there. I was glad to fly off early on New Year's Day, 2010 to Catania, on Sicily, in search of Greek and Roman ruins.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Ethiopia--The Northern Loop

Ottawa, April 29 Sitting here in my mom's apartment in Ottawa, it seems like a large enough distance, both physically and psychologically, from Ethiopia to write about the second half of the Ethiopian bike trip. I'm well fed and haven't had a rock thrown at me in more than two weeks, so I can avoid feeling too much rage as I write. So down to details. I last posted from Djibouti, where I had been turned down for a Yemeni visa. When I finally got my new Ethiopian visa, I hopped a pair of early-morning buses to get back to Addis Ababa. The first, from Djibouti to Dire Dawa, was a truly miserable affair, involving a three-hour gong show trying to get people from Djibouti buses to Ethiopian buses at the border. I do not know that I have ever seen less competence or organizational skill in any transport situation anywhere on earth. Astounding. Dire Dawa seemed like a decent little town, with a feel of actual urban living (a rarity in Ethiopian towns, most of which seem like overgrown and under-cleaned villages). The ride from Dire Dawa to Addis, on a luxury bus, went alarmingly quickly; Ethiopian buses have a very, very high accident rate and I was a little worried at our speed, although I managed to sleep much of the way through the mountains. At our lunch spot, I talked to two American tourists and discovered that they were also staying that night with Jess and Brian in Addis. Small world! After a leisurely day off in Addis, I got onto my bike on Sunday, March 14th and fled the city, heading northeast. After a fairly steep and sweaty climb to get out of Addis over the mountains, I was into the green highlands and spent the day climbing and descending across farm fields. After 100 kilometres or so, I found a perfect spot to stay, camping in the grounds of the Ethio German Park Hotel, perched dramatically on the edge of a deep canyon. At the hotel, I had a pleasant surprise when I ran into two fellow cyclists, Rob and Polly Summerhayes. They're in the midst of riding from South Africa back to the UK, and we decided to ride together for the next few days, as far as the lakeside town of Bahir Dar. It's not often that I ride with others and realize that I am holding them back. It happened in Xinjiang in 2002 with 2 fanatical Uighur cyclists, and and in 2005 in Ladakh with an Austrian cyclist, Reini. I quickly realized that Polly and Rob were in this category: lightning quick on downhills and relentless on the flats, and pretty rapid on the uphills. Luckily they didn't mind waiting in cafes for me with a few cups of tea. It was nice to have company, too, for dealing with the inevitable begging, annoying, stone-throwing Ethiopian kids. Rob is a very fast runner, and several times he dropped his bike and ran down stone-throwers. In a subsequent e-mail, he said that on their last day in Ethiopia, he chased down and caught a stone-throwing kid and frightened him so severely that the child lost control of his anal sphincter and soiled himself spectacularly. Well done, Rob!! The second day was a relatively easy day, as we stopped early so that we would tackle the formidable Blue Nile Gorge fresh, in the cool of the morning. The third day we dropped right out of Goha Tsyon over the escarpment and dropped 1200 vertical metres down to one of the few bridges spanning the Blue Nile. The Japanese had recently built a new bridge to replace an Italian bridge, but their road-building skills left a lot to be desired, as the asphalt all the way down and back up was folded into a mess of bumps and potholes. Very un-Japanese! It took an hour to drop to the bottom (with lots of stops for pictures). On the way up, Polly and Rob hitched lifts, grabbing onto the sides of trucks and getting towed all the way up. I pedalled the whole way, which took over three hours, and found Rob and Polly relaxing in a cafe with cups of tea and books. I was pretty shattered by the end of the day, in Debre Markos; it was pretty hot down in the gorge despite the early hour, and there was climbing aplenty for us after the gorge as well. I slept very well in a swish hotel in Debre Markos ($11, with satellite TV and very, very hot water). We met a group of 15 middle-aged Spanish cyclists sponsored by Specialized bicycles in the hotel. The kids must have had a field day with them: with 15 targets, if you miss one with your rock, you're almost guaranteed to hit one of the other 14! The last two days of riding were completely contrasting. The fourth day out of Addis was a long, hard slog with tons of climbing, and we didn't make it all the way to our chosen destination, putting up instead in a tiny hotel 15 km before. We met a three other cyclists, a solo German and a German couple who had been on the road for two or three years. The last day into Bahir Dar was almost all downhill, and we absolutely flew down towards the basin of Lake Tana, past wrecked tanks from the Ethiopian civil war in the late 80s and early 90s, the big lake which is the source of the Blue Nile. The last two hours saw the downhill end and big headwinds kick up, but we still rolled into town before three o'clock. Rob and Polly headed off to stay with a doctor friend of theirs, while I went to the house of Kyle, the American Peace Corps volunteer whom I had met on the bus on the way back from Dire Dawa. After a lazy day off in Bahir Dar, spent eating and drinking and watching birds and hippos in the Blue Nile, Kyle accompanied me on the next leg, the two days of riding to the 16th century Ethiopian capital of Gondar. Kyle wants to undertake his own bike tour next year, when his Peace Corps duties come to an end; his plan is to ride from the lowest point in Africa (Lake Assal, in Djibouti; or is it in the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia?) to the foot of Kilimanjaro and then climb Kili. Human-powered transport from the lowest point in Africa to the highest. I like the idea! Anyway, he wanted to see how his preparations were coming, and so accompanied me for the weekend. He had almost no luggage, and so he, like Rob and Polly, outpaced me for the entire time we rode together. The first day was relatively easy, with little climbing, although the kids were pretty obnoxious. I had bought a kid-whacking stick in Bahir Dar that hung neatly on my handlebars, and I was keen to see whether being armed reduced the hassle factor. I can't say that it did, but it did make kids think twice or three times about throwing rocks. One idiot threw a shoe at Kyle as he went by, and there were a fair few rocks, but possibly fewer than there would have been otherwise. I emulated Rob and chased a few rock-throwers, but didn't catch any. Kyle was alternately amused and shocked by the things I yelled at rock-throwers, which were definitely not politically correct. I didn't say anything quite as memorable as Rob, who asked one Ethiopian who spoke some English and who was criticizing Rob for taking rock-throwing so seriously "Have you considered evolving? The rest of the species has evolved since Lucy, but you lot haven't!" Kyle and I spent the night in Addis Zemin, at the house of Jess, another Peace Corps volunteer. The next day was much more vertical, as we climbed over a couple of mountain ridges that extended down to the river. Kyle had ridden them a year before and remembered them as formidable climbs, but we disposed of both in under an hour; Kyle seems to be in much better riding shape now than a year ago. The highlight of the day, aside from an improbably vertical thumb of rock outside Addis Zemin, was spending a rainy afternoon in the Dashen beer brewery on the outskirts of Gondar with an interesting cast of expats and Ethiopians. We even ran into four English cyclists heading south to catch the first game of the World Cup. I wonder if they're going to make it? I took a day off in Gondar, staying with more Peace Corps volunteers, this time a couple from Seattle named Dan and Nicole. The ancient palaces of Gondar were atmospheric and a perfect antidote to stone-throwing kids, but at lunchtime the heavens opened and precluded further exploration. Instead I sat in a cafe and read books and felt very lazy. Gondar is called the Camelot of Africa, and certainly the Royal Enclosure, with its dozen old castles and palaces, has a fairy-tale atmosphere that seems completely foreign to our preconceived notions of Africa. It took two days to ride from Gondar 101 km (mostly) uphill to the Simien Mountains National Park. The paved road I had followed from Addis ended and I was on some pretty miserable gravel, although a Chinese road crew seem to be in the midst of paving it. Debark, when I got to it on the second day (getting pelted with rocks by a bunch of high school students on the outskirts of town) was an untidy, unpleasant mess of a town, full of more tourists than I had seen anywhere else in Ethiopia. I organized my trek into the park and retired early, excited to be getting, at long last, to the fabled Simien Mountains. I had heard a lot beforehand about the Simiens, and I was a bit worried that they wouldn't live up to the hype. I needn't have worried. The mountains are spectacular, with some of the most vertical topography I have seen anywhere on earth. The walk on the first day in the company of my scout (a young man with a Chinese-made machine pistol--probably without bullets--and no organizational skills) was a long slog, but led to a beautiful campsite at Sankaber, passing by huge troops of the gelada baboons that are so emblematic of the Simiens. There were about five other trekking groups in camp that evening, but I was the only person too cheap to have hired a mule to carry luggage. I carried all my own baggage and food; that first day was pretty hard slogging! The next two days were spectacular, as the path led along the edge of a very high escarpment, past extremely high waterfalls and stunning cliff-top viewpoints. At one point, Imet Gogo, I sat looking more or less vertically downwards almost 1000 metres in almost every direction, except for the narrow ridge along which I had approached. In the distance, a series of steep volcanic plugs combined with other escarpments to form an unforgettable backdrop like a Chinese scroll painting. The views from Chennek campsite, on the third evening, were epic in their sweep. I was even lucky enough to see an Ethiopian wolf (common in the Bale Mountains in the south, but relatively rare in the Simiens) running through the camp. On the fourth day, we climbed right to 4200 m elevation, stopping along the way to see a herd of walia ibex, the endemic species that makes the escarpments their home. Their horns are enormous, and you can see how they would make tempting trophies for local hunters. I didn't see the males butting heads, but other tourists saw it and said it was a spectacular sight. The ibex were frustratingly far away and in shadow, so it was hard to get a decent photo of them, but then, as we walked further uphill, a lone male crossed the sunny slopes ahead of us and paused obligingly in the sunshine for snapshots. From this point onwards, we dropped endlessly downhill, losing 1400 metres of hard-won height through a dreadful man-made desert. Despite this being a national park, thousands of people live in this valley and have cut down all the trees, leaving a shadeless wasteland behind in which the temperature (at an elevation of 2800 metres, no less!) topped 40 degrees. We camped in an uninspiring, shadeless patch of dust in the village of Ambikwa, ready for our pre-dawn departure for the summit of Ras Dashen, at 4543 m the highest peak in Ethiopia. My scout did not distinguish himself that morning: he set off for the summit without a drop of water (relying on being able to parasite off me) and then got hopelessly lost twice while trying to find the route to the foot of Dashen. I finally insisted on following a longer but fail-safe route, rather than wandering about looking for a route through a band of nasty cliffs. Dashen itself is not terribly impressive; in fact, from the summit, it doesn't even look like the highest peak in the neighbourhood. It was nice, once we were up above 4000 metres, to see some relatively intact high-altitude Afro-Alpine moorland, and to see the Simien Range extending far to the east beyond Dashen in a blur of steep escarpments and hazy peaks. After summiting, we were back in Ambikwa (following the road, which we should have followed on the ascent) by 1 pm, and, rather than staying another night in this unpreposessing and unpleasant village, I decided to cross to the other side of the valley, where I knew there was a road with occasional trucks. When we got to this village, however, the inhabitants seemed only to know one English phrase: two hundred. The price for everything was two hundred birr (about $16) : a horrible bed in a squalid hotel, a space in the back of a truck, a meal. I got tired of this very quickly and continued walking, hoping to cross the pass by moonlight and get back to Chennek campsite. My scout argued that it was silly to cross the pass after dark, so we ended up taking shelter in a small village where we slept in a family's hut. It was an uncomfortable and very noisy night (the animals sleep, or rather don't sleep, in the house along with the people) punctuated by rooster calls and mooing cows, but at least nobody threw a rock at me. The next day we got back to Chennek by 9 am and were lucky enough to catch a lift back to Debark with a tourist operator who was returning to town half-empty. In two hours we covered what had taken us three days to walk, and by 1 pm I was tucking into spaghetti and draft beer in Debark. The three days of cycling from Debark to Axum nearly killed me. I had no idea what was coming up, and so the enormous climbs and lethal low-altitude heat were a very unwelcome surprise. It all started so promisingly, too, with a 1500-metre drop over the Simien escarpment on a spectacular Italian-built road. After the downhills stopped, though, the heat was intense (my thermometer said 42 degrees) and the climbs were steep, long and relentless. By the end of the day, in the scruffy mountain town of Adiarkay, I had amassed over 2000 vertical metres and just about given myself heatstroke. This was just a warmup, however, for the next day, in which I tackled the second great river gorge of the north: the Tekeze. I rode along a fairly level plateau at 1600 metres for much of the morning, passing a huge refugee camp for Eritreans; the refugee camp bustled with business and entrepreneurial spirit, something lacking in much of Ethiopia. Precisely at noon, I dropped over the edge of the plateau and plummeted 600 metres down to the Takeze river. Despite filling up on water and guzzling plenty of soft drinks at the bottom, I rapidly depleted my stocks once I started to climb. The heat was lethal: 47 degrees in the shade, with not a breath of wind. I felt dizzy partway up and had to seek shelter in the one shade tree left standing. I begged water from passing trucks and kept on climbing. The road gained over 1000 metres on the far side of the gorge, and by the time I limped across a fairly flat plateau to the tiny town of Endaguna, I was barely functioning. I slept extraordinarily well that evening after pouring several litres of mineral water into my parched body! The last day into Axum was anticlimactic, with asphalt replacing rutted gravel for most of the day, and little climbing to test my tired legs. The last 10 km into Axum, however, were back on gravel, making for an annoying end to the day. I crawled to the Africa Hotel and fed myself before throwing myself into bed. My internal thermostat seemed to be on the fritz, as I found myself shivering heavily despite the relatively balmy temperatures; I thought this might be a lingering aftereffect of my near-heatstroke the previous two days. Axum was a great place for a day off, filled with historical remains and lots of food. Axum was the capital of perhaps the most powerful Ethiopian empire, dominating Red Sea trade for centuries from the 1st century AD onwards. The most visible remaining symbols of this great civilization are the famous stelae, standing stone columns often carved with architectural details. Most of them have fallen over the centuries, but a few have been re-erected and loom large over the centre of town. One famous stele was stolen by Mussolini and carted off to Rome, but was finally returned a few years ago and now stands beside its near-twin, both of them around 24 metres in height. The highest stela ever erected, a 32-metre, 300-ton behemoth, fell over while being erected in the 4th century, and its shattered remains, along with the splintered ruins of the royal tomb that it landed on, are still to be seen. These stelae are pretty amazing feats of stone-carving and engineering. There are also less impressive, undecorated stelae all over the town, and some other carved inscriptions, along with a rather speculative reconstruction of a royal palace. The museum has some impressive smaller pieces of art that help flesh out the picture of life in the Axumite Empire. There's also the most important Ethiopian Orthodox church, in the crypt of which the original Ark of the Covenant (stolen by the Queen of Sheba) is supposed to lie. I think the Ark is also supposed to be hidden in Jerusalem and atop Mt. Nebo in Jordan (and South Africa, Egypt, France, Ireland and even Japan); maybe, like the seven heads of John the Baptist, we live in a multi-Ark multiverse! Unfortunately, mere mortals are not allowed to see the Ark; people who try to sneak a peek allegedly die of spontaneous combustion. I was put off by the steep admission price, so I was spared the inflammatory danger of temptation. The ride out of Axum was wonderfully easy: fairly flat, not too hot, and on brand-new Chinese pavement. I stopped on the way to see the oldest proto-Axumite ruins yet discovered, at Yeha, dating to the 7th century BC. It was a highly disappointing stop: the ruins are very unatmospheric and unphotogenic, and the entire 5 km access track from the main road was a war zone between aggressive stone-throwing kids and an angry, stick-wielding Canadian cyclist. Luckily, I had one of my rare positive encounters with Ethiopians in Entitcho, where I stopped for the night. It helped that the man has lived in the US for over a decade and was in Ethiopia to visit his family. We had a relaxed, pleasant conversation and (an extreme rarity in Ethiopia) the man bought me a soft drink. The next day started off easy and ended up rather desperate. I took another detour off the main road, heading to the mountaintop monastery of Debre Damo. In contrast to Yeha, this was a huge highlight of northern Ethiopia. This part of the country, Tigray, is the historic centre of Christianity in the country. The king of Axum (which is in Tigray province) was converted to Christianity by Syrian monks in the 4th century AD (shortly after the Armenians and Georgians, and around the same time as the Roman Emperor Constantine), and Tigray has the greatest concentration of old monasteries and churches, despite centuries of religious conflict with Muslims from the coast which resulted in widespread destruction. Debre Dammo, on top of a flat-topped mountain, was spared because the only way to get up is to rock-climb 15 metres of vertical cliff. Nowadays, they put a leather strap around you as a pseudo-safety measure and haul you up from above, but it's still white-knuckle and grey-hair time. Once I got up top, I found a completely separate world where 80 monks live a life more or less cut off from the world. There are amazing views north towards the Eritrean border, and the church is the oldest surviving free-standing church in the country. I found it amusing, though, that in true Ethiopian style, the monks, rather than spending the day studying or working in the fields, pass their time lounging under the Tree of Idleness, moving around to stay in the shade. My ride that afternoon, after an even more harrowing descent, didn't go quite as planned. My worthless map didn't show a huge climb to a 3000-metre pass, and before I could get over the top, the mother and father of all thunderstorms caught up to me and put an end to cycling for the day. Gale-force winds, hail, drenching rain and spectacular lightning chilled me to the bone. I sought shelter in a half-destroyed hut (luckily the wall facing into the wind was still intact) and camped out there for the night, to the great surprise of passing villagers early the next morning. I completed the last 5 km of the climb, and the 10 km 600-vertical-metre descent, the next morning and dropped into Adigrat, a prosperous town with excellent cafes which I spent an hour or two sampling before setting off for points south. Tigray is one of the driest parts of the highlands of Ethiopia, with far less rain than in the Addis Ababa area. This makes it no surprise that Tigray was the epicentre of the famous 1985 famine; it's not an area well set up to survive a drought. There are hundreds of NGOs working in Tigray, and so, not surprisingly, the kids are far more awful than usual. White face = cash dispenser, so since I'm not handing out the cash, the kids get angry and toss rocks. Large-scale foreign aid seems to have terrible side-effects, turning an entire country into foreign-aid junkies with a huge sense of entitlement. The kids in Tigray greeted me as they ran towards the road with cries of "Give me!! Give me!!" They seem not to have heard of "Give me, give me never gets, don't you know your manners yet?" Somehow "Give me!!" is even more annoying and grating than "Money!! Money!!" I was supposed to stop and see some centuries-old rock-hewn churches that afternoon, but I was foiled by a combination of an oncoming torrential downpour and some really unpleasant Ethiopian youths hanging out at the turnoff to the church. I came as close as I did all trip to punching someone, as I dealt with an obnoxious young man who grabbed my bike and wouldn't let go. I was glad to ride away towards a comfortable, dry hotel in Wukro, where I arrived seconds ahead of the deluge. The next morning, I tried my luck with another church right in the town of Wukro. From the outside, it looked interesting, rather like a Petra temple, and there was a crowd of worshippers in the courtyard waiting for food handouts in a picturesque way. However, the priest and his sidekick were grasping, greedy and thoroughly money-obsessed, and I decided I didn't really want to hand over the equivalent of $10 to see the interior of the tiny church. I had a good day of fairly easy riding to the Tigrayan regional capital of Mekele, where I loafed for an enjoyable few hours before heading south to a small town called Adi Gum. I stayed in a friendly little hotel which may well have been the noisiest place I stayed in all of noisy Ethiopia: the bar and its thumping Ethiopian dance music closed at 3:30 am. From this point on, the last four days of riding proved to be a never-ending marathon of climbing. I don't think that I've ever had four consecutive days with so many vertical metres covered. I totalled 9100 metres, or roughly the elevation difference between the Dead Sea and the summit of Mt. Everest, in those four days. It started with a long, tough slog to reach the town of Maychew. After a morning of continuous small climbs and descents, I spent the afternoon climbing up to 3000 metres and then plummeting into Maychew. The area lived up to its advance billing as one of the most unfriendly stretches of road for cyclists, with plenty of rocks and packs of baying kids pursuing me. I chased one boy, waving my stick, for several hundred metres and came tantalizingly close to clouting him before he dived over a precipice and made his escape. The next day was harder going, with a morning spent on pavement climbing and descending to a pretty highland lake, and then an afternoon spent on an insane gravel road roller coaster that left me exhausted. The only bright spot to a day of dismal cycling was that I got to camp undisturbed in a farmer's field, which made for a night of quiet, restful sleep quite unlike a typical Ethiopian hotel. I was frustrated the next day by my miserable, inaccurate map. The map told me that to get to Lalibela, my ultimate destination, I needed first to pass through Sekota. After a crazy amount of climbing and descending across the grain of the land, I got to Sekota, had a massive lunch, and then discovered that I had actually passed the turnoff to Lalibela 18 hard-won kilometres previously. This mistake cost me four hours of hard work, and I ended up benighted atop another 3000-metre pass as it started to rain. I did find a perfect campsite and cooked dinner amid the downpour, but it rained so much that run-off got under the tent and soaked everything from below. My last day, into Lalibela, seemed never-ending. I had several plummeting downhills cancelled out by steep, grinding uphills infested with stone-throwing kids. The last 30 km were mercifully level, however, and I found myself at 3:45 at the bottom of the final climb up an escarpment to the ancient capital of Lalibela. Appropriately, I had one final encounter with unpleasant kids who tossed rocks, and then spent the next 40 minutes chanting "Fuck you!" at me as I climbed. Sort of a microcosm of cycling in Ethiopia! I was very glad to find my little hotel and settle in for several days of rest, recuperation and kultchah!! Lalibela was a great place to finish my cycling. I had planned to ride all the way back to Addis, but I ran out of days, as I hadn't realized how mountainous the ride would be and how many extra days would be eaten up by slow climbs. I spent four nights in Lalibela, eating and visiting the famous rock-hewn 13th century churches. I was impressed with the churches, particularly the incredible amount of rock excavated to create them. I loved the tunnels and trenches that were dug to link the churches: very Indiana Jones/Petra-esque. My favourites were the cross-shaped Debre Giyorgis (St. George) church and the massive Bet Alem Medhane church with a huge pillared interior that reminded me forcefully of Cordoba Cathedral in Spain. I was less impressed with the town of Lalibela, a muddy, untidy, noisy sprawl of rusting tin roofs, devoted to ripping off tourists. All the schoolkids have evolved their own hard-luck stories to try to prise money out of tourists; I was amazed how many orphans there were! "My mother, my father died. I no have money for T-shirt. You buy T-shirt for me?" The prices for everything in shops and restaurants were inflated two- or three-fold, which was irritating. It also poured rain every afternoon, turning the streets into mires. I took a long two-day bus ride back to Addis Ababa on the Vomit Comet bus; my seatmates on the first day were two women whom I christened the Barfing Narcolepts; they slept constantly, waking up only to be profusely sick. The second day saw less vomiting, but more road construction. My bicycle survived its rooftop ordeal unscathed, and I rode it from the bus station to Brian and Jess' house through the most epic downpour of the trip; I had to stop riding and take shelter in a cafe because I was getting motion sickness looking down at the water hurtling past my slowly-moving bike tires. My two days in Addis passed quickly, reading a fantastic book about Africa, Michela Wrong's It's Our Turn to Eat about large-scale corruption in Kenya, and finding a box for my bicycle to satisfy Ethiopian Airlines' luggage requirements. It was good, after the hostility and primitive conditions in the countryside, to stay with warm-hearted, friendly folks and have some good discussions. And then it was time to ride to the airport (my folded bike box strapped across my panniers) ahead of another rainstorm and fly back to Canada, my nine and a half months of cycling and exploration at an end. Overall, I would have to rate Ethiopia as a fascinating destination, but not a good cycling country. On a bicycle, you are just too exposed to the tender mercies of uncontrollable feral children to really enjoy yourself. I also found Ethiopia to be too much of a poster child for everything afflicting modern Africa: poverty, terrible education, overpopulation, corruption, begging, over-dependence on foreign aid, lack of entrepreneurial drive and general idleness. After a while this starts to get depressing. When I got back here, I discovered that I have a job teaching next year in Switzerland, at the Leysin American School. That means that I can loaf for the next few months, writing my Silk Road book and playing tennis, with a clear conscience! As a final postscript, a haiku about cycling Ethiopia: Rocks fall like raindrops Children scream "Money! Money!" Cursing, I pedal

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Start of Trip

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

12

3/14 1134.2 109.4 2560 1571 7:31 14.6 54.6 Debre Libanos turnoff

13

3/15 1219.1 84.9 2579 1044 4:58 17.2 58.4 Goha Tsyon

14

3/16 1328.5 109.4 2549 2171 8:50 12.3 54.4 Debre Markos

15

3/17 1453.9 125.4 2524 1685 8:14 15.3 60.1 Telili

16

3/18 1584.6 130.7 1890 768 7:05 18.5 55.5 Bahir Dar

17

3/20 1669.1 84.5 2029 661 4:32 18.7 50.3 Addis Zemen

18

3/21 1761.3 92.2 2259 1395 6:23 14.5 57.1 Gondar

19

3/23 1801.9 40.6 2884 1076 4:37 8.8 33.9 Amba Giyorgis

20

3/24 1863.6 61.7 2780 690 4:58 12.4 38.3 Debark

21

3/31 1943.6 80.0 1719 1600 6:43 11.9 39.8 Adiarkay

22

4/1 2032.9 89.3 1868 2000 7:57 11.2 41.1 Endabaguna

23

4/2 2119.0 86.1 2161 1100 7:27 11.5 51.1 Axum

24

4/42192.773.7200210005:4612.854.3Enticho

25

4/52270.778.0281521007:2510.550.015 km from Adigrat

26

4/62357.686.9214910006:0214.250.5Wukro

27

4/72451.293.6213517007:0113.353.8Adi Gudom

28

4/82539.488.2242522007:3311.758.7Maychew

29

4/92633.494.0207522558:2411.258.555 km beyond Korem

30

4/102706.873.4268023508:188.846.190 km from Lalibela

31

4/112798.992.1248522508:3710.746.3Lalibela