November 29, 2006

My walk into town: Favourite place in Ethiopia #6

Head off an hour after dawn on the road past Menelik Hospital (my beautiful new neighbourhood – who needs Bole). Turn left and take a look at the forested hills that surround Addis Ababa, packed with hyenas and who knows what else. If you were really keen you could have climbed them an hour earlier and watched Haile Gebrselassie on one of his early morning training sessions.

Turn right and start walking past the straggled taxi stand, past Sandford English/International School, past the well-heeled parents dropping off children in their 4x4s. Past the old men a few yards down the road, taking their grandchildren to playschool (the one with the Teletubbies painted on its metal gate.)

The road curves down to a T-junction – St Matthew's Anglican Church and the Ras Amba hotel to the left, Arat Kilo to the right. Turn right and then almost immediately left, crossing the road and its endless stream of line cabs and taxis. This takes you down a rural back lane – Lovers Lane or Robbers Lane depending on who you believe.

Past the shacks and the children. Past the cemetery with spooky old photos of dead people on the gravestones. Past the armed Red Berets. Past the hardest working street youths in Addis who live behind four big skips and scrape a living recycling the city's waste.

Head straight across the crossroads with the crowds of secondary school pupils, past the Prime Minister's Palace on your right. If you are lucky and it is a Saints Day, get caught up in the crowds of worshipers and beggars and candle sellers and shiny umbrella stalls that pack the road around St Gabriel's church

You are at the top of the dual carriageway that leads down past the still un-opened Africa Park with its untouched slides, climbing frames and benches. Head down and left into the Hilton for a reminder of how the other 1% live. Walk through the grounds, skirting round the back past the barbers, the mini-supermarket, the tourist shop and the bakers.

Walk down through the back gates, past the uniformed guards and their wobbly salutes. Cross the road, braving another stream of line cabs, taxis and WFP Toyota Landcruisers. Head left, then right after the petrol station, past the beggars and street children waiting for the UN staff to turn up for work. Past the barricaded back entrances to the UN compound.

Head down to the junction with Jomo Kenyatta Avenue, past the two young polio-crippled beggars who came to Addis a year ago, all the way from Arba Minch. Turn right where the dual carriageway crosses the trash-choked river. Keep going for another couple of minutes and there you are - in Meskel Square.

Posted by aheavens at 6:45 PM | Comments (7)

October 29, 2006

Asni Gallery: My favouite place in Ethiopia #5

Head north out of Addis Ababa city centre towards Siddist Kilo and turn right along the back of Jan Meda race ground.

Drive down the steep, curving road that loops down into a valley and climbs up again to a beautiful bank of green trees and the wooded compound of the French Embassy. Pass the Embassy gates then take the first turning right after the Total petrol station.

About 100 yards down the cobbled lane, a drive branches off to your right, leading up to a big metal gate marked with four letters - A-S-N-I.

This is the Asni Gallery which, according to our indispensable Lonely Planet guide to Ethiopia & Eritrea, is "housed in the 1912 villa of Lej Iyassu's minister of justice Afe Negus Tilahun".

Afe Negus Tilahun had good taste. It's all carved wooden balustrades and cool, dark rooms and a wide balcony around the whole building where you can sit enjoy the Saturday afternoon vegetarian spread. Everything is raised up so you get views over the villas and valleys and green trees all around.

Inside there are two floors of gallery space, with hold an ever-changing display of modern Ethiopian paintings and sculptures. At the moment, the basement is given over to 'Nuru's Nastro Art' which does amazing things with multi-coloured electrical tape. I thought it was great (that is about as sophisticated as my art criticism gets).

But one of the best things I saw was one of the bare gallery walls which someone had managed to mark with a big bare circle made out of slightly lighter, cracked clay.

The picture above was taken just after most of the Saturday afternoon visitors had left. It looks a little murky because we are going through a very strange mini-rainy season at the moment.

See more Favourite Places in Ethiopia.

Posted by aheavens at 6:17 AM | Comments (2)

August 25, 2005

Addis coffee shops: My favouite place in Ethiopia #4

It is one of the greatest mysteries in Ethiopia – how has Nestlé managed to establish even the smallest market for its vile brew Nescafé here?

As everyone knows, Ethiopia produces the best coffee in the world (sorry Kenya and Colombia but it is true). Coffee was discovered here – by Kaldi the shepherd boy who noticed his goats were getting a little frisky after eating the beans. Only the most superior "arabica" beans grow here. If you can get you hands on them wherever you are, you have to try the almost lemony flavour of Yirgacheffe coffee, or the earthier taste of "Unwashed" Harar. (Does anyone know why it is called "unwashed"? There must be more welcoming brand names.)

In Ethiopia, amazing coffee is also incredibly cheap – much cheaper than a jar of Nescafé. You can get a steaming cup of it at any pavement café in Addis for about 1.25 birr. And there are lots of varieties – simple buna, buna ba wetet (coffee with milk), macchiato etc etc.

And yet, despite all this, some people are clearly buying Nescafé. You can find it in even relatively small shops – all the big supermarkets stock it. I have been offered it a number of times in people's homes. And I can exclusively reveal that there are vast tubs of it in many of the offices in the UN compound at the centre of Addis Ababa. To add to their crime, it is served with powdered Nestlé milk.

Nescafé, as everyone knows, is the vilest excuse for a cup of coffee in the world. It tastes disgusting. When it goes off, as it does quite quickly, it gives off a smell like tar. A friend in the coffee trade once gave me a hair-raising account of how it is made. In case there are any Nestlé lawyers reading this, let's just say it does not come from the cream of the coffee bean crop.

The fact that Nestlé has found someone to sell it to here is nothing short of a capitalistic, free-market miracle. Maybe it is the exoticness of it – a foreign brand seen as better than the home-grown version. Maybe it is its just-add-water "instant" convenience. But if you are really that lazy, coffee shops will deliver a cup of the real stuff on a tray to your home or office in a matter of minutes.

Whatever the reason, if you come to Ethiopia, stick to the local brew. Three of my favourite places to drink it – making them three of my favourite places in Ethiopia – are City Café & Pastry on Bole road, Tomoca below the Piazza, and the wonderful Starbucks rip-off Kaldi's on Bole Tele (photos coming).

UPDATE: If you are in the UK, a great place to order Ethiopian beans is Hill & Valley Coffee Ltd. Here is their East Africa page.

Posted by aheavens at 8:40 AM | Comments (20)

August 8, 2005

In the back of a 'blue donkey' line-cab - My favourite place in Ethiopia #3

They are not particularly comfortable. The typical seating arrangement is 12 people crammed into a space a bit larger than the back of an average Land Rover – six squeezed in on a barely-padded bench on either side with knees almost touching in the middle. When you get out, you have to bend over to half your height and apologise along the way to everyone you accidentally elbow in the face (at least that is how I do it).

They are also not particularly safe. I have often wondered what would happen if one of these packed vehicles took a corner at more than 20 miles an hour. You don't want to think what would happen if they met an 'Al-Qaida' Isuzu truck coming head on the other way. The words "crushed", "sardine" and "can" come to mind.

But the great thing about Addis Ababa's line-cabs – also called blue donkeys – is their sheer efficiency. There are thousands of them trundling through the capital, all crossing and re-crossing it in a complex grid. Once you have worked out where they are going, you can get practically anywhere in Addis Ababa for a handful of coins.

A trip from our house in the Bole Tele area to the centre of town costs one birr (6 UK pence or 11 US cents - if you are a ferengi, a normal taxi driver will try to charge you anything up to 20 birr for the same trip). A trip all the way to the Mercato is just Birr 1.60. It is not over-statement to say that once you have mastered the line-cabs and their ways you have pretty much mastered Addis Ababa.

There are many other things to enjoy about driving around in the back of a blue donkey.

There is the solidarity of the passengers. Everyone grumbles together when the cab lingers too long at a stop for just one more fare. Children are picked up and passed down the cab and people are always willing to point out a stop to a puzzled foreigner. Someone once told me that on one trip, the conductor tried to over-charge her (an unheard-of event). But the game was up when the other passengers noticed and complained loudly on her behalf.

There is also the fascinating economy that has grown up around the line-cab trade. Because of the low fares, conductors always need lots of change. And the best people to supply them with it are the crowds of beggars and street children who spend their days collecting five and ten cent coins from passersby. At the busier inter-sections you often see a child walk up with a roll of coins and exchange it for a one birr note - walking away with a five cent profit.

Finally, there is also the frequency. If you miss one, there are always three queuing up behind it.

When it comes to running a low-cost, efficient public transport network, Addis Ababa has a lot to teach the "developed" world.

Posted by aheavens at 7:14 AM | Comments (7)

July 23, 2005

Lake Tana/The Ghion Hotel: My favourite/least favourite place in Ethiopia #2

So how do you create a hotel that is simultaneously someone's favourite and least favourite place in Ethiopia?

First you choose one of the country's most stunning settings, on the banks of Lake Tana - a mini inland sea studded with islands and ancient monasteries.

Second you build your hotel close to the bank with a balcony that looks over the water and a garden with huge, old trees filled with colourful birds.

Third, you stop caring.

You leave the paint to blister in the rooms and dark stains to spread in the toilets.

When a guest comes in saying that it looks like their door has been kicked in and the lock is held together with masking tape, you tell them that that is the "natural state" of doors and there is nothing you can do.

When a guest complains that his room is the only one on the row without a mosquito net, you shrug and swear blind that there is no malaria in Bahir Dar (the main town on the banks of the lake) - so why would you need a mosquito net? When the guest insists that malaria is actually endemic in Bahir Dar, you shrug again and say that there are no mosquito nets left in the hotel and that it would be impossible to borrow one from another hotel or buy a replacement in town.

When you see that your guest is a foreigner, you brazenly charge double. This "ferengi rate" is actually common practice in many Ethiopian hotels and is always guaranteed to leave an odd taste in the mouth. There is nothing like feeling like a resourse to be exploited rather than a visitor to be welcomed.

This, by the way, is all based on two visits to the Ghion, several months apart. Not everyone has had such a bad time. The Lonely Planet guide, for example, describes it as "well managed and friendly - good value in a beautiful lakeside setting". So come and judge for yourselves. Or you can always camp.

Posted by aheavens at 11:15 AM | Comments (17)

July 11, 2005

Lake Langano: My favourite place in Ethiopia #1

We took a short break from Addis and all its election uncertainty last week and spent a night down south, on the banks of Lake Langano. (I know it is a typical ferengi hang-out. But what can I do? I am a typical ferengi.)

While we were there, enjoying the peace and quiet and flocks of multi-coloured birds, I thought it might be interesting to start a list of people's favourite places in Ethiopia. The only images that 'the West' sees of this country are the feeding centres and parched hills. They all do exist. But, as anyone who has spent even a short time in Ethiopia will tell you, they are only a tiny part of the picture.

So I thought I would start with Langano, a huge dun-coloured volcanic lake about four hours drive south of Addis Ababa. They best things about it are the total calm and the huge range of birds, baboons, wild boars (near quieter parts of the shore) and other wildlife that scuttle around outside your door. You can sit outside with a book and see dikdik run past just 10 yards away or watch bright yellow weaver birds picking apart nests on a nearby tree. (I am actually at risk of becoming a 'twitcher' - Amber bought me the Collins Illustrated Checklist of Birds of East Africa for our anniversary last week.)

One of the mosty striking things about Langano is its shore-line - a weird moonscape of pumice stone boulders. If you try the traditional male pursuit of stone-skimming, your rock hops across the surface of the water for a bit, then just floats.

Langano is becoming one of the main attractions in Ethiopia's small but growing tourism industry. For visitors who like a bit of Kenya-style luxury, there is Bishangari Lodge, idyllic but too expensive for regular visits. (Actually not so expensive by international standards.) For families there are a couple of state-run resorts, complete with cabins, restaurants and a touch of Marxist-Butlins chique. You can also camp.

None of all this activity, however, intrudes on the lake. You can still sit on the bank and feel totally alone.

So that is Langano. If anyone wants to suggest another "favourite place in Ethiopia" feel free. If I am close enough, I will try to get a picture of it.

Posted by aheavens at 5:15 AM | Comments (34)