Addis - Kombolche

29th September

Another early morning with greetings to Ron and Maria who arrived last night after my self imposed curfew of 9pm (its getting later – we had been out and I started drooping at the table!), packing and making a move up country. So began the next leg of the journey. Eight hours by road, some of it defying that description (more like 190 km of loosely interconnected pot holes) but about half of it – after the tunnel - absolutely fine. Oddly enough, for many miles through and out of the capital, there are more pot holes than flat surface. Most of the roads we travel, including a few impressive bridges and the totally amazing tunnel, were built by the Italians (using local not entirely voluntary labour) during the occupation (circa 1936-1941). Some of it seems have not to have undergone much maintenance since then. Not that that was a serious distraction from the stunning country we were traveling through. Just a bit of discomfort.



Before we left, there were jobs to do and the Cunningham clan is a smooth and efficient operation. Swap stories and make plans over breakfast that came in shifts – scrambled eggs, omelettes, lovely fresh bread, Danish raspberry jam, the last papaya juice in the kitchen and, eventually, coffee. Ron and Andrew change money and pick up the rental minibus and driver. Sam and I hit the Internet café and recharge the phone. Sadly this part of the operation wasn’t so slick, in fact, it failed on both counts. The connection was akin to watching paint dry slowly on a wet winter day in Auchtermuchty, and when Sam finally did get a message composed and hit send it ended up back in his inbox marked ‘message failed due to whatever’. I had no luck at all and perhaps too quickly ran out of patience. So no blog up dates have reached the site so far. Lorraine and Maria wait at the hotel and guard the luggage, which has grown into a mountain in one room as check out time has arrived.


Still waiting for the inbox to open, Sam’s phone rings. The minibus crew is back at the hotel. The vehicle is fine, ready to depart and all other passengers are waiting for us. The shop we try has only 25 Birr phone cards, which would not be much use on international calls. A quick dash back up the hill, load the van, many hugs, three way kisses and well wishes and we are on our way. A later than hoped for start so it will be dark before we reach our destination.

The route out of Addis is long and chaotic. There really are fleets of donkeys, goats and cattle vying for right of way with the traffic.



The road has already deteriorated to the condition that has us all wishing the journey shorter within a short space of time. Packed tight on both sides with tin shack and smarter breeze block and tin roof shops. There are patches of serious modern development visible, smart Mediterranean looking buildings, apartments, schools and up market housing developments. Side roads are wide, snaking off into housing schemes that vary from shanty town to des res suburban. All are dirt that doubtless turns to mud in the rain that is now falling one week after the designated end of season date. We do get some rain on the road and the vehicle steams up quickly. The temperature is warmer out of the city although we seem to be climbing to quite high altitude. Just before we leave the long lines of shops selling everything imaginable, couches and mattresses laid out at the side of the road, small kiosks selling everything a house might need, stands of fine looking fresh vegetables , tomatoes, lettuce, huge avocados, trendy music and video, copy services and rows butcher shops that challenge the clean air orderly expectations of western world supermarket shoppers but show the consumer here has choice. A small hold-up at a police check with no visible purpose offers a close up without staring view of people, old, young and everything in between going about business as usual. The colours of this continent are indeed bright ones.


At the end of the miles of small shops, the countryside kicks in. Clusters of round mud and thatch houses, rows of breeze block and tin and occasional plastered compounds built by overseas aid organizations. I can’t help thinking that the latter stand out from this lush sub tropical landscape. Perhaps its in my mind they are superimposed on the development canvas, or maybe it’s the fences, the aid agency signs and the way they are set separate from other activity centres. No doubt that they are welcome in a country that still lives to survive, where most activity seems directed towards this end and everyone is involved in the process. Small boys tending cows and goats, a solitary tiny girl at the side of the road breaking stones, teenagers carrying huge bundles of grass or sticks on their heads, women with babies and heavy plastic water canisters o their backs (a vast improvement on the traditional stone version), men chopping tree stumps or rendering mud with straw for buildings. Walking is the main form of transport, though minibuses run up and down between villages stopping on request and costing a few cents a journey. Many attempts are made to flag us down, even one by a determined looking figure in a uniform, who waves us on again when he sees the vehicle is full to capacity – and with ferengi (foreigners). There is not an overweight person in sight, nor an idle one, unlike the scene in the city. Does this say something about the natural balance and evolution of our species?

The route to Kombolche winds up through mountains and past a visible fault line that must have shifted sometime after the road was built. Maybe an earthquake? A serious hole in the road joined to a gash through the surrounding fields show a line that wasn’t put there on purpose but appeared, maybe to defy the order imposed on the wild and natural landscape. Incredible views down into the valleys where water once flowed and sometimes still does though in vastly reduced quantities and infrequently.


Small compounds of thatch houses look like beautiful art painted on a rich green tropical landscape. Always a gate or entrance with a small watchtower on top and sometimes a painted facade, attached to a fence enclosing half a dozen or so houses neatly clustered together. This looks like how life has been lived for a very long time. Towards the end of the day, people walk home in small groups through long grass carrying water pots, firewood and food for the evening meal. Light fades and the work of art changes tone, but remains essential and beautiful giving a sense that this is how life is meant to be lived.

After the climb to the top of the hill make a quick photostop at the top. A group of monkeys are doing their monkey business on the grassy hills at the side of the road. A group of boys are doing theirs selling woven hats that look a picture but are too course to be worn. Two of them have money skin hats and incredibly handsome faces. They ask me to take their picture – a gift where I have been shy to impose – then tell me they are students and ask for money or pens. My bag is, as usual filled with pens so I offload three more than functional ones with logos like Carrick and FLLinNZ on coloured plastic grips. They seem ridiculously extravagant in this context where the cost of their production would fund an entire term at school. The pictures are fabulous, through the horizon is too hazy to do justice to ones of the view.


A quick pit stop in a small town along the way adds another piece of evidence to Bob Geldof’s incredulous case that English football is becoming the new religion all over the developing world. The hotel bar resembles a school room with rows of chairs and eager, upturned faces staring at the front. I catch a snippet of commentary that tells me Arsenal are winning over whoever it is they are playing. So technology is alive and well. I guess the football match and the phone call to kids back in UK are both carried by satellite. However they are, it is seamless and simple, obviously taken for granted as well as taken seriously.

As seems to be the case on this trip, a few stories of earlier and other times emerged along the way. Famine and drought (or perhaps it runs in the opposite order) have been common, though thankfully reasonably infrequent, in these parts, probably for centuries. A lady in her 90s back in the 1970s told of life before the roads came. There were times then when the rains didn’t come and famine ensued. Her mother cut the animal skin rugs into thin strips and boiled them to eat like spaghetti. The challenge that Sam has taken on has a long and so far unbeaten history. I admire his resolve and resourcefulness and hope this and his courage will find a way forward. It would be easy to see this as a case of history repeating itself and rural subsistence farming giving way to urban industrialisation and mass production and movement of food. It looks like the early stages of a similar pattern that with hindsight should be constrained. The honest and direct engagement with life has its attendant risks but is less wasteful, unnatural and convoluted by greed and personal gain. There are lessons to be learned from experience and hopefully not repeated.

One such lesson is illustrated by a colonial era legacy agreement around use of the water from Lake Tanganyika. One of Sam’s dad’s many stories concerns an external administrators’ agreement that water from the lake could not be diverted for any purpose, yet the water is plentiful and the surrounding land in need of it. Tanzania has til now honoured this agreement to the detriment of its capacity to develop the potentially productive surrounding land. Other nations on its banks my be in the same situation, because of an administrators agreement such as the one that drew arbitrary lines across the top of India and other places in Africa in ignorance of the relevance and potential impact. Now building a new inland capital that sounds remarkably like Canberra – another opportunity to learn from experience perhaps - and a relatively resources rich country – in terms of land and water – the government is finally beginning to exercise the rights it has always retained.