Africa No.1 - The first country / Ethiopia

What is the typical image of "Africa" then? This was the question challenging me for my first few weeks in Ethiopia. 

(live to meet/Jinka)

Unlike many travelers coming to Ethiopia-they first come up to the northern region filled with churches for two to three weeks, then head down to the southern part decorated with vivid-colored tribes-, I took an opposite route.
I went down to southern part staying there for 10 days, once got back to Addis Ababa, then crawled up to the northern part for a week(knowing one week is obviously not enough to check all the heritages since there are a LOT). After being back in Addis to get rid of the weariness of the journey, I checked the last town, Harar.

(live to sit/Harar)

Cities and towns I visited; all of them are quite attractive. They have their own atmosphere. People are nice, sometimes too nice and rather inquisitive. Weather is fine, basically calm but sometimes nasty with dry air and fierce sunlight. Among all these things this country is safe. Totally safe. You can get around easily by local buses anywhere(local buses only leave in the early morning at 5-6am and it's fully packed but this is another thing).
There are two things that haunted me though; no.1-extremely persistent bedbugs and no.2-extremely rough transportation. Starting a day being completely shaken up on bumpiest road, I’ve spent long nights being unable to get rid of the annoying bugs wriggling beside me. It was just harsh.

For all that, I loved being here. At the end of October I dumped my thick down jacket, finishing off exploring Germany and Italy, where chilly winter season just started. Things around me have changed a lot at that point. Even though it is a bit cold as well in here, it’s still much warmer than there. Even though people are inquisitive, it feels much nicer than being lonely in a neat but empty bus.
And that this is the first African country for this trip. This fact is just enough to make me excited.

(live to pray/Bahir Dar)

After staying here for awhile however, I felt something weird. 
Isn’t it a bit too cold here, why do I have to wear jumper and scarf and still feel chilly? Are you sure it is Africa? 
Number of the animal kinds I see here are so few, aren’t they? Didn't somebody tell me this continent be an animal-paradise? There should be some more if here is the continent they are talking about. 
And that food here is not something I expected as African. They have their own staple food called Injera and it’s totally different from Fu-Fu type African food. Injera is like a roll of dry towel, smells sour.

At a certain point I started to feel that Ethiopia could be somewhat different from my stereotypical image of Africa. Or was my image from guidebooks and TVs just too stereotypical;"a very natural continent with wild animals and national parks"?

(live to eat/Arba Minch)

This country is rather cultural, still enjoying prosperity from early orthodox Christianity (Ethiopian orthodox) which was truly sophisticated for that time. 
The weather here doesn't suit my typical image of African Africa. Average temperature throughout a year in the capital Addis Ababa is around 16℃ though, partially because of the city's high altitude. The fact that this is not a city of ‘hot Africa’ startles me.
Extra point which hit me was an islamic town Harar. It looked familiar and I was deluded with a deja-vu. Then I sensed that the town had Middle-east flavor, quite similar as the one from Sana'a, the Yemen capital.

Probably I have been too misled by a preconception. I've tried hard to make sure that I BE in Africa. Which is African Africa and this idea has been obsessing me a lot. 

It was after a few weeks that I barely managed to escape from this obsession. It was when I was climbing up at the mountain to see a church in Lalibela. It was also when I was watching a movie Ruby Sparks at the mall in Addis. Or when I was gulping down some bottles of St. George beer in the middle of Konso. 
I found that I was enjoying that time for sure. Comparing the atmosphere facing me with my prior image was a trivial thing. It could be something matching my preconceived image. It could be something different from it. Didn't matter. Africa doesn't have to be something that I expected to be so.

(live to smile/Konso)

Actually there should not be any stereotypical image of Africa. What is spread out before me at the moment is Africa, replaced by nothing else. Even though the place is a bit different from what I thought, I still stay no doubt in this continent. I just happen to be here and it's not that bad.
After all what I have to do is to enjoy in any event drinking local beer, no matter how cold the weather is, how few animals there are, how cultural they are. And the beer here-especially St. George is delicious. 
Well, Ethiopia is the first country in this continent anyway. The first one always blows up my preconception and it should. 

(live to dance/Addis Ababa)

Africa No.0 - A Continent

Travelling in Africa is like taking a ride on a roller coaster which never ends.

Landscape from your bus window flip-flops dramatically, no matter if you like or not. Locals surrounding you changes at all times no matter if you like or not. And literally, buses go up and down the bumpy road, no matter if you hate it or not.

Indeed, simply being packed in the harshest transportation through the land of Africa is one of the highlights of the trip.

On every bus floor orange peels and skins of anonymous green beans are piled up, which are left for a whole day and dried up completely.

20 Africans sit in a minivan of originally-7-seater, in order to make it as hot and humid as sauna. What differentiates these African vans and a proper sauna is; you get very much squeezed and suffocated with the smell of dust and sweat. When you need help from outside world to get fresh air, look out the windows. These windows are dark brown with dirt and dust at the best, normally broken, cracked and weathered enough to prevent you from imagining the fresh air outside.

Babies crying hard, mothers lay their balloon-breasts bare, until babies fall asleep.

Kids crawling along the aisle, mothers scream for random passenger next to her to take care of them, and he/she does. Kids are cradled on the lap of a stranger.

Similar things happen to the elderly. There is always somebody leading an old man by hand, and this somebody is not always his own family. It seems like every single passenger takes care of another passenger who is either smaller or older then him, regardless of their relationship. Surprisingly, I am also the one who get categorized as a smaller person, partially because I am a stranger I guess. Every bus has a lady who is in charge of me; to take out for a break, to accompany me for lunch and to prepare a taxi when a bus gets to the bus terminal.

(a walk under the sky/Kenya)

So that’s how I survive.

From rocky Ethiopian highland to flat Kenyan savanna decorated with tons of big animals.

From rainforests with pygmy in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi to a tropical island of Zanzibar flying, seeing Mt. Kilimanjaro below you.

Taking Tazara railway which runs through mountains of inland Tanzania until the transferred bus reaches the edge of Malawi Lake, which boasts super-clear blue surface. Then the huge savanna leads me via two wonders of the world; Victoria Falls in Zambia and Zimbabwe and Okavango Delta in Botswana, up to the third wonder; the great red Namib Desert.

Driving a rented car on your own across the vast South African plain takes me up to snow-covered mountains in Lesotho to do pony-trekking; and to valley of the King in Swaziland to see the dance of the last kingdom. Looking out the spacey island of Madagascar across the swift water of Mozambique Channel, dreaming about reaching there, which I am doing after a while.

(a walk across the valley/Swaziland)

West Africa is somewhat different. Hardly ever seen a tourist in most of the part, locals there are even nicer to foreigners than the other parts of Africa, partly because they are not used to see tourists walking around. And the more horrible part is; seemingly the most unpredictable transportation system in the world.

Buses are delayed for hours, out of order for another few hours, and sometimes, completely cancelled. Staring from Senegal, the bus ride to Mali takes 36hours, which is supposed to be less than 30 hours according to the announcement of the bus company. 16hours plus 48hours to Burkina Faso, 20hours to Benin, which gets cancelled for no purpose and makes us(who are being afraid of getting Malaria) wait for the whole night for another bus.

What makes things even worse is the condition of buses. Bodies of vehicles are older and more broken than the ones from east and southern Africa, and once in a while we have to sit in jump-seat for such a long time as 18hours.

Then although difficulty of the bus rides start slowing down though Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, same kind of hustle and bustle continues, until I get out of the continent to Cape Verde to wrap up the African trip.

(a bus-drive/Mali)

 And that’s how I escaped.

Taking a flight to this green-covered island country Cape Verde was for sure an escape. I was so torn after 10-month-journey around and needed genuine fresh air with less people and more organized town. Cape Verde had all of them. I have slept thoroughly for the first few days and realized that I needed this. In order to get rid of the African toxic accumulation of 10 months in my body, the toxicant which eventually turned out to be the one I loved.

As Cape Verde boasts the cultural mix of Africa and Latin Europe(and surprisingly South America as well because of the slave trade history), they play different music, sing different songs and eat different things from the continent. Staying there made me feel like I was finally out of Africa, and it also gave me other perspective about Africa, which is this;

The route I took had a subtle gradation but basically in the same color; it was brown.

(a death in the desert/Namibia)

Desert area had light sandy brown, which is whiter with violent sunlight.

Savanna had golden brown, just as same as the color of lion mane.

Highlands with rocky deep brown. Delta with muddy dark brown. Plain with the simple grey brown. All of these were poured into deep crimson right after sunset.

Rainforests were colored with more reddish-brown than green, mysteriously, sometimes dyed with pink brown with the rivers and lakes they had.

Only exception was the limy green ocean from the island of Zanzibar and the rich green of the island edge of Madagascar.

(a walk down the mountain/Lesotho)

Ok I have to admit the islands in Africa have unique features, but how about the continent? The images which captured me in this continent were mostly in brown colors after all.

I was frightened when I realized this, not because I found the similarity of the colors the sceneries had. But because I found this; loss of my ability to sense the diversity. I was about to integrate every experience I had in African continent, starting with the colors of the sceneries.

For 25 countries I visited in Africa, there are different animals and different plants. Different languages and different clothes. Different lifestyles. Some of them living in the rain forest and dreary wasteland are even not the genuine black African people; they are the natives of San Bushmen and Himbas.

History also makes them different. Why did Rwanda get into the civil war earlier and end it earlier than Burundi, in spite of the same ratio of the ethnicity these two countries have had? Why don’t Ethiopian speak English compared to the other parts? Why are Benin and Togo so thin and why can’t I see any white people walking around in Johannesburg, South Africa?

Oh no this is serious. To think about all of these, the brown continent of Africa again got scattered in pieces, and each piece has risen to surface on my mind with each color, like embossed carving.

Now I know that travelling in Africa is like putting together a giant, Kaleidoscope jigsaw puzzle which never ends.

(to sing and live/Swaziland)

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