Raiding, and learning about, the lost Ark

The other night, Raiders of the Lost Ark was on BBC3, the digital channel which occasionally justifies its existence by showing films like this. This film, which I was astounded to note was released in 1981 (meaning that it’s the same age as my brother), is the first Indiana Jones adventure, and concerns everyone’s favourite university professor’s quest to find the Ark of the Covenant, while battling with his nemesis Belloq – who’s in cahoots with the Nazis, naturally – and romancing Marion Ravenwood to the accompaniment of a large runaway boulder, early-Eighties special effects, a Nazi-saluting monkey, many snakes, Denholm Elliott and a somewhat anachronistic prototype Luftwaffe aircraft. Archaeology and action – what’s not to like?

The Indiana Jones films constitute my second-favourite movie series (James Bond’s always hard to beat) and while my favourite is The Last Crusade (probably because I got taken to see it in the cinema, back when Edgware still had one of those, although the presence of Sean Connery as Indy’s dad is no doubt a factor too), Raiders is a film that I can happily watch again and again even though I do have a couple of issues with it.

The main one was the afore-mentioned aircraft – the one from the scene where Indy and the character credited as ‘First Mechanic’ have a fight which ends in the latter’s bloody demise by way of the propeller. It always frustrated me that I could never find such a plane in any book about the aircraft of Nazi Germany and/or the Second World War, and it was only after the advent of the Internet that I realised it was fictional! It was based on a glider that was developed into a prototype jet towards the end of the war. But even if it wasn’t real, what on Earth was such an advanced-looking military aircraft doing in British-controlled Egypt in 1936, given that the Nazis presumably wouldn’t have wanted to draw attention to themselves while they searched the ruins of Tanis for the Ark? That said, though, US intelligence had already figured out what they were up to, which is of course how Indy comes to be involved.

Another, more of a slow burner it must be said, was the question of whether everyone was looking for the Ark of the Covenant – that Biblical chest containing the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed – in the right country. If it exists at all (and, let’s be honest, that’s a very big ‘if’), isn’t it supposed to be in Ethiopia?

When I went travelling in Africa – ten years ago, I note with surprise – I visited a town in northern Ethiopia called Aksum. It’s part of the ‘northern circuit’ – other towns on this are the medieval capital of Gondar, the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and, on the shores of Lake Tana, Bahar Dar. These are all popular tourist destinations and as such are accessible by plane from Addis Ababa. I, however, visited all of these by bus during my African journey, starting with Gondar (a day’s journey from the Sudanese border), then up north to Aksum, down and across to Lalibela and on to Bahar Dar before heading south to Addis. Ethiopian public transport, I should point out, is not for the faint-hearted; on almost all of the buses I was on, I was the only faranju (‘white man’ – the Amharic equivalent of mzungu).

Although somewhat dusty and nondescript-looking at first glance, Aksum is said to be one of the oldest continually-inhabited places in Africa, with ruins of palaces and underground tombs littered across the town amid the donkeys, the market-traders and the farmers. It’s the home of the Stelae, tall stone obelisks believed to have been carved and erected in the fourth century AD. Decorated with multi-story false windows and doors, they are believed to be markers for underground burial chambers (plenty of those in Aksum) and they are some of the largest monoliths in the world (one of them was stolen during the Italian occupation in the 1930s and was on public display in Rome for many years before being returned in pieces in 2005 and put back together and re-erected in Aksum three years later).

Local legend has it that the Queen of Sheba, the Biblical monarch who visited King Solomon, came from Aksum; one of the ruined palaces is called the Queen of Sheba’s Palace (although her ‘bath’ is in fact a modern reservoir).

Then there’s the church. St Mary of Zion (actually two churches, one built in the seventeenth century and the other in the twentieth) is Ethiopia’s holiest shrine, for this is where Ethiopian Christians believe the Ark to be located today, it having been taken to Ethiopia by King Menelik, the Queen of Sheba’s son by Solomon and the ancestor of the Ethiopian Kings.

The Ark itself is – so I was told – located not in either of the churches but in a separate building between them called the Chapel of the Tablet. Access to this building is strictly forbidden to everyone with the exception of one elderly monk. Only he may look upon the Ark, for reasons which will become apparent if you’ve read the relevant parts of the Old Testament and/or have watched the ending of Raiders.

For me, Aksum was part of a crash-course in Ethiopian history (with particular emphasis on the religious aspects) which had began in a church I visited in Gondar (said to be the only church in which the Prophet Mohamed is depicted on the walls) and would continue with the frankly unbelievable churches of Lalibela that are carved out of solid rock – a place that is for the most part several centuries behind the rest of the world.

By the time I got to Bahar Dar, I was quite literally ‘churched out’ and as a result probably less appreciative of the island monasteries of Lake Tana than I might otherwise have been.

Amid all of that, the story of the Ark got merged in with everything else – the Ethiopian version of how it got there is indelibly tied up with the wider story of the Ethiopian variant of Christianity (one of the world’s oldest), the heartland of which is the highlands of the north that I had visited before heading to the capital; the southern lowlands are mostly Muslim, and have been since the Aksumites were driven back to the mountains in the seventh century AD. All of the Ethiopian kings, down to and including Haile Selassie (the last one, deposed by the Communists in 1974), claimed descent from King Solomon as a result of the legend about how the Ark got to Ethiopia.

Anyone looking for more details about the Ark, and how it (apparently) came to rest in Ethiopia, is advised to get hold of a copy of Graham Hancock’s book The Sign and the Seal which was published in1992, not long after the Indiana Jones movies. A journalist with plenty of previous experience of the region, Graham Hancock (who at around the same time made a cameo appearance in the Ethiopia section of that superb Michael Palin travelogue Pole to Pole) set out on a quest to discover the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant. This took the Old Testament as a starting-point, and moved onto various Medieval texts from diverse places, the Knights Templar and several locations in the Middle East, Northern Africa, France and Scotland.

Hancock’s theory is that the Ark was removed from  Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in or around 650BC, and that it subsequently spent a couple of centuries in Egypt before it was taken to Ethiopia by way of the Nile and was kept on an island on Lake Tana for around 800 years before being taken to Aksum. The Knights Templar come into the story in the 13^th century when, having searched for the Ark on the site of Solomon’s Temple (present-day Temple Mount), they somehow figured out that it was in Ethiopia; they travelled there, where they may have had a hand in building the churches of Lalibela before the Ethiopians, fearful of losing the Ark, got in touch with Pope Clement V; his fear of the Knights Templar acquiring the power of the Ark is given as a key reason for his suppression of the  Knights Templar in the early fourteen century.

Readers of a serious disposition should bear in mind that this is no scholarly work. No academic would dream of making such assumptions as Hancock makes here based on very scant evidence, what I strongly suspect is a fairly fast-and-loose interpretation of certain historical texts and a ready willingness to resort to outright speculation based on the author’s own assumptions wherever the facts dry up. Which they do ... frequently. That said, this is a work that is part-travelogue, part historical detective work that quickly captures the reader (this reader anyway; perhaps unsurprisingly given that I’m a fan of the Indiana Jones movies and have been to Aksum, I was hooked after the first chapter) and leads us on such a fascinating journey that I for one was prepared to forgive Hancock his various foibles.

Perhaps they were all digging in the wrong place... 

No picnic on Mount Kenya (part 3)

When I was unable to sleep during the night at Shipton’s Camp, all I could hear in our dorm was the sound of the mice scrabbling around on the floor. I did manage a few hours though, and was woken up by Jesse at around 3:10am.

           

I got dressed very quickly – tee-shirt, clean boxers, shirt, trousers, three pairs of socks, jumper, fleece, waterproofs, gloves and woolly hat. Everyone else, it seemed, was heading down via the Naro Moro route and so had to sort out all of their kit, which would be carried by the porters, while I didn’t have to bother as I would be coming back down the way I’d come. Which was just as well really, because I didn’t much fancy having to lug my kit all the way to the top, which I would’ve had to do as I was the only trekker who was too cheap to pay for a porter.

           

While getting ready, we all got a bit of a laugh at the expense of a group of Irish girls. They’d taken much longer than the rest of us to reach Shipton’s the previous day, and so their guide had decided that they’d better start before everyone else. By 3:20, though, one of them announced that they were running late. “Since when,” asked Jesse, “has 3:20 in the morning been late?”

After several cups of tea and some of my chocolate biscuits, Moses and I set off at four – after everyone else had left; he had reckoned that, given our pace on the last two days, we could still make it to the summit for sunrise. As we left the hut, I couldn’t see the gully we had to climb up, but I could see the pinpricks of light at various points from everyone’s torches. Sticking behind Moses, with my Maglite on and with the theme tune to Where Eagles Dare inexplicably playing in my head, I made my way to the gully.

Luckily, it wasn’t a scree slop and we made it up there with a steady, slow pace suited me at that altitude. Pole, pole – slowly, slowly in Swahili – is the unofficial motto of mountain-trekkers in East Africa. Well, I thought we were going slow but it wasn’t long before we passed the Irish girls, got out of the gully and onto the scree above it – according to Moses, another reason why the final ascent is always done before dawn is because that means you can’t see how bad the scree slope is. I have always disliked scree because you lose a pace for every couple you walk on the loose surface. Despite this, we still made good pace.

           

By around five, we caught up with Jesse and his guide, and subsequently we stuck with them and continued to make our way ever upwards in the darkness. By this stage, my hands were numb with the cold despite the fact that I’d kept my gloves on and had been constantly moving my fingers in order to help with the circulation. We couldn’t have been walking for more than forty minutes as an extended group until Moses stopped us. He explained that we were just below the final ascent, and that as we’d made such good time we needed to stop otherwise we’d get to the top while it was still dark! So we had a short break, during which I offered around some chocolate that I’d thought to put in my pocket back at Shipton’s. We sat facing east, watching a distinct glow appear on the horizon. The sun wasn’t up just yet, but there was enough light for us to switch our torches off – apart from Jesse, whose torch had died on him some time previously. It was in this grey pre-dawn that we made the final ascent.

          

 

We climbed to a saddle, from which we could see a glacier below – the same glacier that we’d seen when looking up from Shipton’s. Point Lenana itself cannot be seen from Shipton’s, from which it is obscured by an outcrop of jagged rock. This outcrop was now to our left, with Lenana itself to our right. And after a short scramble, we were on Point Lenana – 4,985m (or around 16,300ft) – and we truly felt that we had reached the top of the world.

           

The high-point itself is marked by a metal cross and a metal Kenyan flag, along with a couple of memorial plaques. Although my fingers were by now frozen, I got my camera out to take some photos – we could literally see for miles, although all that we could see for those miles was low cloud. But that’s missing the point – all that cloud was just so low compared to us! As we were on the peak itself, the sun rose – a fantastic experience, watching sunrise from the top of an African mountain. We all shuffled round so that each of us could get their photo taken on the high spot – and despite the wind-chill-induced sub-zero temperatures, everyone was really excited – sunrise at the summit! We’d done it!

           

Too soon, it seemed, we had to head back down, and it was therefore time for me to part company from the others, who'd be going down via a different route and then heading straight back to Nairobi. Jesse and I had exchanged e-mail addresses – though quite how we were able to write anything with our frozen hands I don’t know.

           

Walking down, and with my waterproof jacket now off as we were out of the wind, we passed the Irish girls who were still on their way up and looking as though they’d definitely bitten off more than they could chew (so to speak). I told them that they didn’t have far to go and that it was “totally fuckin’ worth it” – clearly I was still on some sort of adrenalin high as a result of reaching the summit – and the only one of them who had sufficient energy to respond called me a “bloody liar”.

           

Descending that scree was no fun at all, as I’d known it wouldn’t be, although Moses was most definitely in his element and I had a job to keep up with him – a job not helped by the fact that I had to stop to take my waterproof trousers off before the lower part of my body became drenched in sweat, as the sun was now well and truly up.

           

I reckon it took us an hour and twenty minutes to get down from Point Lenana. As soon as we got back, Moses went straight into breakfast-making mode (what a guy!) while I staggered into my dorm and tried to sort my stuff out. Breakfast was some sort of millet-based porridge which was great with plenty of sugar, followed by sausages, omelettes and pancakes. As well as being an excellent guide, that man was an amazing cook.

           

Over breakfast, I chatted to one of the Irish girls, who’d decided after about an hour’s walking that she wasn’t going to make it to the top, so she came straight back down to Shipton’s and went back to bed. Probably a wise choice in the circumstances.

After breakfast, Moses announced that as he’d now ran out of food he could carry some of my kit in his backpack. Just when I thought he couldn’t have gone up any higher in my estimation!

           

We set off at nine. Most people who trek Mount Kenya tend to take two days over the descent; I’d opted for one – from Point Lenana at sunrise, I’d be spending the evening in a Nanyuki bar with a well-earned bottle of Tusker beer. The trek from Shipton’s down to Old Moses took us just over three hours, and the pace killed off any lingering post-summit elation I still had. Nevertheless, I took great delight in telling anyone who I met going the other way that I’d stood on Point Lenana at sunrise that morning. One group of English students I encountered looked absolutely shattered, even though by the time I encountered them they were less than an hour out of Old Moses, and they had porters.

           

After lunch at Old Moses – I could’ve sworn Moses had told me he’d cooked all the food, so he’d obviously left enough behind to rustle up a vegetable omelette for our return journey – the walk back down to the park gates was fairly straightforward. I’d caught my breath back from the fast descent from Shipton’s, and after being fed and rested I flet good. Moses, by the way, seemed utterly unaffected by both altitude and pace  – but then, he did this for a living.

           

The final part of our walk became a bit of a nature trail. We saw loads of baboons, who seemed disturbed by some sort of predator lurking in the trees – Moses reckoned that there was probably a leopard nearby – along with several colubus monkeys and a blue duiker. There was also plenty of evidence of buffalo (hoof-prints), elephants (piles of poo) and spotted hyenas (more poo; hyena poo is easily identifiable because it’s white, from the bones of whatever animal they’ve eaten). Moses, who’d already admitted earlier in the trek to being an addict of wildlife documentaries, was a walking encyclopaedia as far as African animals and birds are concerned. Factor in his cooking skills and his expertise on the mountain, and I think that I’m not exaggerating when I say that I had the perfect guide for my Mount Kenya trek. Not bad considering that I met him on a street corner while he was touting for business!

           

We made it back to the park gates at four; I reckoned that, taking stoppages into account, I’d walked for nine hours that day, a fair amount of which had been at altitude.

Back in Nanyuki, I got my stuff back from the Montana Trekks office and checked into a room in the Jambo House Hotel where said office was located – on the grounds that I didn’t feel like lugging all my stuff any great distance. Even taking it all up two flights of stairs was a challenge in the circumstances though. After finalising the paperwork at the office – saying very nice things about them in their visitors’ book, generously tipping Moses and ordering my certificate (to be collected the next morning, I did what everyone had been talking about doing the previous evening. Still clad in my sweat-streaked walking-clothes, without even removing my boots in fact, and smelling like I hadn’t washed properly for a few days (because I hadn’t), I headed straight for the hotel bar and ordered an ice-cold bottle of Tusker. Beer has rarely tasted so good.

No picnic on Mount Kenya (part 2)

I was amazed at how warm I was on my first night in a Mount Kenya bunkhouse – especially as I only had a lightweight, two-season sleeping-bag. If Old Moses was anything to go by, the bunkhouses were evidently of better quality than I’ve been led to expect from reading my guidebook.

On the morning of Day Two, Moses excelled himself with a breakfast of omelettes, sausages and pancakes – by far the most substantial breakfast I’d had since leaving England. Jesse and Laurie seemed very jealous of this, until they got the same served up by their guides.

           

We set off at 7:20am, about ten minutes after Jesse, Laurie and their assorted guides and porters – I, evidently, was the only hiker who was cheap enough to want to carry his own backpack. We’d be walking a total of 14km (just over 8½ miles) and ascending 900m (just over 2,900 feet) up to Shipton’s Camp, the departure point for the (very) early morning assault on Point Lenana.

           

We were above the tree-line. Moses pointed out several different types of plants to me as well as birds; of the latter, we saw starlings of the slender-billed and red-winged varieties, and a female beautiful songbird. There were also several mountain chats, who get very close-up to you; Moses says that they are nicknamed ‘friendly chats’ because of this. I felt lucky to have ended up with a guide who is as keen on birds as I am.

           

For much of the morning, we walked along with Jesse and Laurie. At one stop, we had a clear view of the peaks of Mount Kenya – Lenana to the left of the two highest points, Nelion and Batian, which can only be climbed by mountaineers with the proper skills and equipment. We stopped at this viewpoint, and took some photographs.

           

The walk then became an exercise in contouring for the most part, rising by Shipton’s Caves and then becoming steeper as we made our way up to the camp itself. We arrived at 12:30 – not bad at all when you consider that the guides had all estimated that we would be there at 2! I felt tired but felt much better after a cup of tea (some things don’t change, even at over 13,000 feet). Even so, I had during the course of the day’s hike decided that if I was going to attempt Kilimanjaro after this I would definitely arrange to have a porter carry my kit.

           

That said, the only kit-related problem so far was that Moses had asked me this morning to help him carry some of the food – including an avocado. I wouldn’t have given this much thought, but the confounded thing split during the walk, meaning that part of the inside of my backpack got covered by a green slime-like substance. Luckily I kept all my kit in plastic bags, a trick I learned in the Scouts, but I still had to use some toilet-roll to clean the backpack out.

           

In terms of layout, Shipton’s Camp was similar to Old Moses – a collection of huts with separate accommodation for the guides and porters. The bunk-rooms were smaller, and there were a lot more mice, who all had black-and-white stripes on their backs.

           

In the afternoon we went on another acclimatisation walk, climbing a further 900 feet up, although we didn’t go up the gully that is the route up out of the camp towards the summit. Moses, who was still able to smoke at altitude (I’d decided to leave my cigarettes back in Nanyuki) reckoned that this would stand us in good stead for the following morning, and he even insisted that we stay up for at least 20 minutes so that I could get used to the extra altitude. 900 feet may not seem like a lot but there was a definite difference in the air compared to Shipton’s; I found my pulse racing and I was very short of breath.

           

Back down, Moses told me that we would have a 3:30am start the next morning; he reckoned it would take 2-3 hours to get to the summit, which has to be reached at sunrise because that’s the time of day when it’s least likely to be cloudy at that height. Looking up as he said this (at around 5pm), we couldn’t see anything for the clouds, in contrast to the clear skies we’d enjoyed on our earlier walk. In fact, on our acclimatisation walk we’d gone up the the cloud level, more or less.

           

I wished I’d thought to take a book with me, or at the very least a deck of cards, which would have been a great way to pass the time before dinner. All I’d brought was a Mount Kenya map-guide that I’d purchased in Nanyuki, and Moses has more or less convinced me that the information on the map is somewhat less than reliable. That said, I was the only trekker who had a map and everyone else wanted to have a look. Dinner was be served at around 6:30, and after that was an early bed-time for everyone. Only one man has bought a book with him, and it was a true story called No Picnic on Mount Kenya. This was written by Felice Benuzzi, an Italian who was taken prisoner during the Ethiopian campaign in the Second World War and sent to a POW camp in Nanyuki. There, he persuaded two of his comrades to escape with him, their only purpose being to attempt to climb Mount Kenya and then return to the camp.

There was plenty of conversation to be had over dinner, initially at how big the portions were. The guides – Moses was by no means the only one who doubled up as a cook – they had all carried fresh food up with them, and we ate very well. One bloke, a New York-based Englishman, even had a table-cloth laid out for him before his meal was served!

           

No-one stayed up for very long though – we would all have an early start the next morning. Before going to bed, the New York Englishman apologised to me in advance; my bunk was right next to the toilet, and as a result he was convinced he’d wake me up during the night.

To be concluded...

No picnic on Mount Kenya (part 1)

 Way back in 2005 I went travelling in Africa. Actually, that’s an understatement. Over the course of six months, I travelled from Cairo all the way down to Cape Town. When planning this trip, I’d made a list of things that I wanted to do there. Hiking up Mount Kenya came towards the top of this list. I could boast of some previous experience of trekking in the mountains, although in terms of high-altitude multi-day treks (in the Alps and the Pyrenees) I hadn’t done anything for several years.

By late August of 2005 I had made it down to a provincial Kenyan town called Nanyuki, which is located on the Equator. Nanyuki is also the nearest town to Mount Kenya, and it’s where a lot of the trekking companies are based. But where were they? I went looking, but I was looking on a Sunday and they were all closed. I resolved to go back the following day, but just when I was heading back to my hotel I was approached by a man in the street (near the bus station, as it happens) who asked if I was looking to trek up Mount Kenya. If you’re a mzungu in Nanyuki, that’s a fair assumption. His name was Moses and he worked as a guide for Montana Trekks (yes, that’s how it was spelt), based in the nearby Jambo House Hotel.

We got chatting, and after being taken to the company’s office (located on the ground floor of said hotel) I decided that there was no point in extending my search for other trekking companies. I’d found what I was looking for, and I’d even found the man who’d be taking me up the mountain – Moses, clearly a man who knew his stuff when it came to mountains in this part of the world, was to be my guide. It was a choice I would not regret; I wouldn’t usually recommend trusting a random local you meet on the street, but this time it paid off!

Anticipating some serious mountain trekking, I’d bought my hiking boots with me on the grounds that I hadn’t wanted to chance it by borrowing or hiring a pair once I got to wherever I would be starting my trek from. So far, said boots had been used for strolling around in the hills surrounding Aksum and on that day when I’d gone to the Blue Nile Falls. Now, I hoped, they would come into their own – as would the the waterproof jacket which had already seen African service in Gondar and the hitherto-unused fleece. I hadn’t packed everything I’d need for a proper mountain trek, though – for some reason I hadn’t thought to include such obvious essentials as gloves, a woolly hat and waterproof trousers when loading up my backpack in anticipation of going to Africa.

Luckily for me, though, Montana Trekks – like all good trekking companies – had taken this into account, and when I turned up at the office on Monday to book my trek and sort out payment Moses let me loose in their store-room, which was full of items that various backpackers had left behind over the years. I emerged with a pair of decent gloves, a pair of red, heavy-duty waterproof trousers (which he reckoned I’d only need for the summit walk anyway – and only then for protection from the wind) and a multi-coloured woollen ski-hat that I’d have liked to have kept. After arranging my trek for the following day, I went to a local general store to buy some snacks for the trek – to my delight, the place sold McVitie’s Chocolate Hob-Nobs, so I bought a packet of them along with some chocolate bars.

The following morning, I got to the Montana Trekks office early, and deposited my non-walking kit (which filled five plastic bags) in the store-room. Shortly after nine, Moses arrived and started sorting out his kit; he reckoned that my pack was too heavy but quite frankly I wasn’t sure what I could have left out of it. I’d decided to carry my own backpack, mainly because I hadn’t wanted to pay the extra money to have a porter to do it for me. For his part, Moses was carrying all of our food as well as his personal kit.

We would be trekking up to Point Lenana, which at 4,985 metres (16,355 feet) is the third-highest peak of Mount Kenya and the highest that can be reached without specialist climbing equipment.

           

Our transport to the Sirimon Park Gate was a Toyota saloon that had to be push-started. During the journey itself, our driver turned off the main road onto a dirt-track, which his car was patently unsuitable for. Was this the road to the Mount Kenya National Park gate? No. It turned out that Moses had decided that he needed to pick up an extra jumper from his home.

When we got to the Sirimon Gate after a journey that took over an hour, we completed the signing-in formalities with the rangers on duty. Moses had to show them his official guide certificate (complete with hand-print, as not all guides are literate) and sort out the park fees, while I had to show them my passport.

           

We got started at around eleven, and the walk itself lasted for about three hours. Using the Sirimon Route, which approaches Mount Kenya from the north-west, we walked through woodland for the most part along a very clearly-defined path. Moses pointed out several piles of elephant dung (apparently recent), and identified two types of birds for me – mountain chat and auger buzzard.

           

Old Moses Camp, our base for the first night was above the tree-line at around 3,300 metres (11,000 feet) above sea level; it consisted of several single-storey wooden huts. Once we got there, Moses made his way into the kitchen hut and got on with the business of preparing lunch while I claimed one of the bunk-beds for myself (us tourists were in a different bunkhouse to the guides, cooks and porters). I do not wish to sound ungrateful but I did not like the lunch at all – it was an avocado salad, and things probably weren’t helped by the fact that it looked disconcertingly like green vomit. The tea, made with sugar and condensed milk, was much appreciated, though.

           

As was expected, I wasn’t the only hiker at Old Moses – although I was the only one with Montana Trekks. Over the course of the afternoon, I was joined by a couple of Americans, some Irish girls and one other Englishman. He was called Laurie and he must’ve been in his sixties. In fact, he hadn’t been in England for years – he ran a commercial fishing company in Madagascar but had taken some time off to go mountaineering. He said he’d climbed Kilimanjaro the previous week.

           

Some time after lunch, Moses and I did an acclimatisation walk to help get me used to the altitude – we went up another 200 metres. The ground around Old Moses Camp seemed to be very boggy – although Moses assured me that it is not as bad as the eastern Naro Moro route, where ‘vertical bogs’ – I shuddered to think what those were – are a common feature.

           

I spent much of the afternoon chatting to one of the Americans, who was about my age. Jesse was from Colorado, although he’d been studying in Cape Town and after Kenya planned to visit Morocco and travel around Europe. Last week, he’d been down in the Maasai Mara, which I intended to visit after Mount Kenya – he’d had a great time there and showed me plenty of photos he’d taken of animal kills on his digital camera. Like everyone else apart from me, he’d arranged his trek from Nairobi.

           

After watching the sunset, we all sat down for dinner – prepared for us by our respective guides. My main course of meat-and-about-six-veg was immense, and the others were served with similar-sized portions.

It was a clear night, and the sky was full of stars. I felt a twinge of regret that I couldn’t identify any of the constellations.

To be continued...

Adventures on the Blue Nile

Africa has featured on the BBC’s schedule a lot recently, most notably David Attenborough’s epic wildlife series and the more tongue-in-cheek special on Top Gear. Their ‘quest’ to find the source of the Nile in a trio of second-hand estate cars has been rather amusing and it brought to mind an episode from my own African adventure, when I got to visit one of the Nile’s sources.

 Ethiopia is an interesting country in many ways and experiencing it for the first time is a complete culture-shock. One of just two African countries not to have been colonised in the nineteenth century, it has its own distinct language and alphabet, and it is widely to be believed to the region from which homo sapiens originated. Its take on time is very different from our own, and to the tourist this is somewhat disorientating. I was there in August 2005 but according to all the local calendars it was in fact November 1997, and as far as telling the time of day is concerned, 12 o’clock happens to be at dawn. Thus, when you are told that a bus is leaving the following day at 11, they mean it’s leaving at 5am.

The buses, which usually leave before dawn, are dilapidated vehicles that, once they get out of the towns, invariably have to cope with unsealed roads. Punctures are frequent. While the buses are in motion, no-one is allowed to open any of the windows (no matter how hot or smelly it becomes) as this brings in evil spirits. This was how I, very often the only faranju (white man) on the bus, travelled around the whole country, trying to communicate with the locals (taking packets of biscuits onto the buses helps to break down the barriers), marveling at the scenery and listening to a lot of the Amharic pop music that all Ethiopian bus-drivers love to play on the PA system.

My African travels had started in Cairo, from where I’d followed the Nile south down to Aswan, then into Sudan via Lake Nasser. At Khartoum, the Nile’s two main tributaries, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, meet. Of these, the White one is the longest but the Blue one, coming as it does from the Ethiopian Highlands, supplies most of the Nile’s water. From Khartoum, my journey took me into northern Ethiopia where I experienced a complete culture-shock as I travelled along the northern circuit, taking in the historic towns of Gondar, Aksum and Lalibela before reaching Bahar Dar, a pleasant city located on the shores of the source of the Blue Nile, Lake Tana.

The hotel I stayed in was right next to the lake and organised boat trips for any guests who wished to visit the island monasteries for which it is famous. The man behind the reception desk put me onto a man who he called the ‘official guide’, who I found by the boats having an argument with a French couple who (also) wanted to visit the island monasteries but were tempted by another guide who was charging a quarter of what this man wanted. He had a ready answer to that: “He has no official licence. He knows nothing. That’s why he’s only charging 5 birr!” Eventually, they, and yours truly, went with the official bloke.

From our boat, Lake Tana seemed like a very peaceful place, and it wasn’t long before we got to see some of the traditional papyrus-reed canoes, which the guide said last for about four months before the papyrus becomes waterlogged and a new canoe has to be built. They have been used by local people to travel on the lake for thousands of years.

We were taken to three monasteries, and although it was great fun arriving at the islands and being greeted by groups of children trying to sell us the usual trinkets before we’d made it off the jetty, I found myself unimpressed by the monasteries themselves. That’s probably more to do with me than it is with them; I’m sure that they are fascinating in their own right, but I had just come from Aksum (where Ethiopians believe the Ark of the Covenant to be located) and Lalibela (home of the famous rock-hewn churches), and as a result I was already overwhelmed by what I had learned about Ethiopian Christianity and was very much ‘churched out’ by this stage of my journey. Back at the hotel, I felt relieved that I had only opted for a half-day boat trip rather than the full-day one.

Much more to my liking was the excursion I took to see the Blue Nile Falls, some twenty or so miles south of Bahar Dar.

This started with an hour-long morning bus ride to the village of Tis Abay in a vehicle which looked as though it had been made by welding bits of old minibuses together. It was the only bus I travelled on in Ethiopia where I got to sit next to an open window – although it was only open because it had no glass.

           

I had two options once I got to Tis Abay. I could either take a boat trip across the river (above the falls) or walk the long way round to approach the falls below; having assumed that there would be plenty of walking that day, I had put on my hiking-boots on rather than my sandals or trainers so I went for the latter. My guide, a local man called Joseph, was a friendly and knowledgeable type who spent much of the walk telling me all about the new hydro-electric power-station which had been built a couple of years previously. Water from the Abay river (as the Blue Nile is called in Ethiopia) is diverted by a canal to run through the hydro-electric generators, thus providing electricity for most of the region while reducing the flow of the falls somewhat. This is to the extent that in the dry season there is not much to see at all by way of a waterfall. “I had this German tourist once,” said Joseph. “He said, ‘you haven’t taken me to the waterfall, I want my money back!’ But I had – I had to tell him about the hydro-plant and the dry season. He didn’t believe me and swore that I’d taken him to the wrong place!” Since I was there in August, at the height of the wet season, not getting to see any water at the falls wouldn’t be a problem.        

    

The walk to the falls lasted for about half an hour, including the crossing of the fast-flowing Blue Nile by way of a stone bridge that had been built by Portuguese missionaries – the first Europeans to come to this part of the world – in the seventeenth century. The path then took us up to the viewpoint over the falls themselves, which looked spectacular. They’re over a hundred feet high and stretch a few hundred yards across. A lazily-flowing river above the falls, the Blue Nile seemed to transform into a raging torrent before my eyes. An incredible amount of spray was being thrown up, which makes the local name for the falls, Tis Issat (‘smoking water’) very appropriate.

Walking down from the viewpoint, Joseph took me even closer to the waterfall, a walk which involved having to wade through a fast-flowing tributary en route. For this, I had to take my boots off and roll my trousers up to the knees. A local boy clad in a dirty tee-shirt and wielding a long stick was on hand to carry my boots for me; he lent me his stick so I could keep myself steady, and as I waded through the river I momentarily felt like a character in some old-fashioned exploration adventure.

From there, we walked up to the base of the falls, scrambling down a rocky outcrop and past a small herd of cattle – God knows how they got there – to get to the edge of the pool at the bottom of the waterfall itself, and got absolutely covered in spray. I could barley hear myself think above the sound of the falls.

We then climbed a narrow path up to the top of the falls, where I got Joseph to take my picture before he led me across a boggy field to the next stage – a small boat across the river and back to Tis Abay. By now I was very glad I’d chosen to wear my boots for this trip, as the field was a quagmire. Less lucky than me were a group of Italian students who’d gone on a walk by the top of the falls in their flip-flops, and were now reduced to walking bare-foot and slipping over in the mud at regular intervals as they made their way back to the village, from where we would all get the bus back to Bahar Dar.

The next day, I took a bus to Addis Ababa, the capital. This took two days – two days of closed windows, body odour and Amharic pop music! The highlight was without doubt the Blue Nile Bridge – after the falls, the Blue Nile flows through a gorge as it heads westwards, out of the mountains and then north towards Sudan. The road had to descend down to the bridge itself, and then climb up the other side; being in a window-seat I had a great view of the gorge and the bridge from on high, although sadly the driver didn’t stop to let the only faranju on board take some pictures of what would be my last view of the Nile.

The Rollerblade King of Mzuzu

During my African journey back in 2005, an excursion to find the nearest cash machine led to an interesting encounter on the streets of a Malawian town…

Staying at the Mayoka Village backpacker lodge at Nkhata Bay overlooking Lake Malawi was a fun and relaxing experience during my African odyssey. The place was very laid-back, the food good and the staff and villagers were friendly; one of the local chiefs even had a stall by the bar where he sold sweets in the evening. I spent my days wandering around the town and snorkelling in the lake while I waited for the weekly Lake Malawi ferry that would take me further south. However, after a couple of days I realised (not that this was too difficult to work out) that Nkhata Bay possessed virtually nothing by way of money-changing facilities or cash machines – there wasn’t even a bank where I could change my travellers’ cheques. 

The nearest place with a bank was the city of Mzuzu, the regional capital which was 30 miles away. I’d passed through there on my way to Nkhata Bay and hadn’t thought to get some cash from an ATM while waiting for the minibus to leave (naively, I’d assumed there’d be one in Nkhata Bay), and being short of ready cash I decided that my only option was to retrace my footsteps, head back to Mzuzu and find a bank. Not feeling much like doing this on my own if I could help it, and suspecting that I wasn’t the only backpacker at Mayoka Village in this situation, I happened to mention this to some of the others, and as a result I found myself accompanied for this day-trip by Peter, a South African who was also staying in the main dorm. I’d have preferred one of the girls, but there you go.

Once we’d got as far as what passed for the High Street in Nkhata Bay, we found a pick-up truck heading ‘our’ way. If nothing else, we reckoned that the fresh air would do us some good (we were both rather hungover that morning). It took the truck half an hour to fill up enough for the driver to decide that it was worth going – but only as far as the first police checkpoint on the road out of town, where he stopped to pick up even more passengers and some livestock. When we eventually set off from the checkpoint, the rather motley (human) cargo included a priest and five of his female ‘followers’, carrying among other things a large wooden collection-box which they thankfully didn’t pass around, and several mothers with young children. One of these was sitting directly in my line of vision, which meant that when the inevitable breast-feeding routine started I had an unobstructed view of what is a common sight on African public transport.

Thanks to numerous stops, it took over two hours for us to cover around 30 miles. There is nothing unusual in this as far as Africa is concerned, and as far as major African towns go there is nothing remarkable about Mzuzu. In fact, this excursion of ours would not have warranted a mention at all were it not for what happened next.

The minute we disembarked in Mzuzu, one of the street-traders approached us with, of all things, a pair of rollerblades. New-looking rollerblades. This did not interest me in the slightest – it’s not my sort of thing, they looked far too heavy for my backpack and in any case all I wanted to do was find the banks and maybe find an Internet café so that I could check my e-mails for the first time since Zanzibar. I made to move off, but I had reckoned without Peter.

'Mate, have you got a thousand kwacha you could lend me?’ In less than a minute, he had commenced negotiations for the rollerblades, knocked the asking price down to 2,000 kwacha and then realised that he didn’t have that sort of money on him. Luckily for him I was able to make up the difference with what money I had left – well, we were there to get some money, so it wasn’t as though he wouldn’t soon be in a position to pay me back.  On the way to the banks, Peter explained that these rollerblades were more or less brand-new, and back in South Africa he’d have had to pay the rand equivalent of a few hundred pounds for them; here, in Mzuzu of all places, he’d got them for less than a tenner. Jointly, we decided that speculating on where the street-trader had managed to find a pair of almost-new rollerblades wouldn’t get us anywhere apart from assuming that Peter had purchased stolen goods. More to the point, so pleased was he with his new purchase that he soon put the ’blades on and set off down the roads of Mzuzu, which unlike the road from Nkhata Bay were sealed. He had clearly done a lot of rollerblading before.

Well, we did what we’d gone to Mzuzu for – at the bank we both took out enough ready cash to tide us through the couple of weeks, and subsequently found an Internet café where, to my despair, Hotmail proved impossible to access. Our business done, we set off back to the bus-station, myself on foot and Peter on his new ’blades, performing all manner of stunts on the thankfully not-very-busy roads as he went. I’m no rollerblading expert, but I could see that he was good.

It was by a garage that I first noticed small gangs of children laughing and running after him along the street, and by the time we got to within two streets of the bus-station Peter had amassed a ‘following’ which amounted to well over a hundred people. He performed some sort of stunt in a driveway which involved a hand-stand (told you he was good) before getting himself ‘dragged’ along the road by a passing truck. Then, with his new fans in hot pursuit, he entered the bus-station itself, where his various rollerblade tricks almost bought the place to a standstill. Mzuzu had probably never seen anything like it before.

After this, the matatu ride back to Nkhata Bay was somewhat anti-climactic, though Peter, buoyed up with his success and still on a bit of an adrenalin high, achieved the hitherto impossible by getting one of the many street-traders to get a bottle of ‘green’ (local slang for Carlsberg beer) for him to drink when we stopped at a village on the way back. On reflection, my only regret about the whole affair was that I hadn’t taken my camera with me, so sadly no photographic evidence of the Rollerblade King of Mzuzu exists.