Elaborate plans to raft the pristine Omo River in Ethiopia are waylaid by bureaucratic red tape and the controversial construction of a hydroelectric plant that will forever change the Omo Valley.
The result: Land Rafting the Omo.
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So there we were, my friend Max and I, in the parking lot of the Pacific Hotel in Addis Ababa, loading up supplies for a rafting expedition on the Omo River. This was to be been a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel through one of remotest places in Africa; a chance to see wild country and visit wild people before the river was dammed, changing everything.
That's when the bad news arrived. The Ethiopian government acting in conjunction with EEPCO (Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation) had denied our river permit.
Although no official reason was given, the unspoken message conveyed to us was that our permit's denial had something to do with the controversial Gibe II Hydro-power dam four days downriver from out launch at the Bele Bridge. The answer to all our queries was a firm NO.
Max and I were devastated but--after all the effort of getting this far--not ready to give in. Sitting on the steps of the hotel Max and I came up with Plan B. We didn't need no stinkin' raft. We'd go overland to the Omo. We already had camping gear, food and a translator, Michael, hired for the river trip. All we needed was a Land Cruiser and driver; and that we easily obtained from Village Ethiopia, a touring company in Addis.
Frankly, the prospect of doing a road trip gave me more jitters then floating the Omo. There is little traffic in southern Ethiopia. Distances are vast. For thousands of cattle, goats, donkeys and people the roads are simply big trails between grazing lands and villages. There would be no cell phone coverage, no supermarkets, no gas stations at convenient intervals.
What if we broke down or rain or rock fall made the roads impassable? What if our paperwork was denied at one of the checkpoints? What if we stumbled into a tribal skirmish or border war? How would the tribes receive us? What would camping in Africa be like? What of the bandits rumored to surface along the road at night? Not to mention the animal factor, the lion and buffalo, poisonous snakes and insects, the tsetse flies and malaria packing mosquitoes.
Our driver, Tekle, 57, had been knocking around Ethiopia for twenty years. He'd driven every road in every compass direction and most of the dry riverbeds as well.
Our translator, Michael had grown up in one of the southern villages. He'd been down the Omo four times working for rafting expeditions and knew the tribe's languages and customs. If he didn't have a personal connection in one of the villages he could at least find someone who could help.
After Max and I explained to Michael that instead of rafting the Omo, our new plan was to drive and camp, he turned to Max and I and said in his soft, best English, Ethiopian voice, "It will be like rafting only on the land. Land Rafting."
Land rafting it was. For 1400 miles of mostly dirt Ethiopian roads, Tekle, Michael, Max and I threaded the needle of humanity and animals, weaving, honking, bumping and grinding our way south and back. Where there were no roads we traveled dry riverbeds. When there were no riverbeds, we traveled on foot.
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Near Turmi, in the village of Dumbar, we sat in a smoky Hamer lodge drinking coffee while visiting in our limited fashion with the village chief, his deputies and assorted relations.
"If not from gourds, what do you drink coffee from at home," asked Adiye, the grandmother.
We gave them oranges and apples and watched their faces light up with delight at the taste. In return they killed and roasted a goat, serving it to us fresh from the fire under an incredible star spangled African sky.
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To reach a wedding celebration in the remote village of Unga Bayno we drove up a dry riverbed and then went on foot, walking into a scene so otherworldly it was if we had tumbled down the rabbit hole in Alice's wonderland.
A hundred or more villagers had gathered to feast, dance, chew khat, drink coffee and down copious quantities of sorghum beer.
While Max and I sat under an arbor, women dressed in leather hides, hair and skin plastered with ochre, made the ground shake with their stamping and jumping. The singing and chanting of dozens of voices and the constant blowing of small tinny sounding horns filled the air with a constant confusing clamor.
Female relatives of the groom pleaded with male family members to whip them with sticks gathered from the riverbanks; if their incessant begging didn't work they provoked with taunts and insults. The crack of wood on flesh sounded from morning until evening.
The bloody gashes result in scars that are proof among the women of their passion, of being true Hamer.
The celebration cultimated in the late evening with the Bull Jumping Ceremony. A young boy gains manhood and the right to marry by successfully jumping across the backs of a line of bulls (steers actually) four consecutive times. He wears only a band of braided leather around his chest signifying childhood left behind.
On the following day we returned. Surrounded by a pressing, murmuring crowd of curious onlookers, Max treated assorted eye problems and injuries with his medical kit. One man, bitten by a cobra, had hacked his own leg off with a machete. Among these people a baby born with a defect will be taken away from the village and left to die. Only the strongest survive
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At Murle we reached the Omo for the first time at what would have been our rafting trips takeout. An old Karo woman showed me how to scare the cooguru crocodiles away from the riverbank by tossing rocks into the water, after I'd already squatted at the water's edge and dipped my hands into it.
Baboons barked back and forth across the Omo and croaking Colobus monkeys swung through the trees above our tent. Every morning birdsong awakened us as if we were sleeping in an aviary.
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During the day the air at Murle was thick with the billowing dust of goat and cattle herds being herded to and from the Omo for water by Kalashnikov rifle packing, khat chewing Karo warriors. At night the air was thick with insects.
The heat, day and night, was punishing. Max even made a game of it. "Let's play sit and sweat," he'd say. He could have added, "and drink." Water poured in. Water poured out.
We watched as locals fished for giant catfish with hand lines and were serenaded and pestered by a parade of children who followed us everywhere. I dazzled onlookers with the bluish light of my steri pen while purifying our water.
"But the water is already good," said one young woman. "He is making it better," replied Michael.
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Far into Mago National Park we met the Mursi people and were repulsed by their swirling, in your face, chest poking, arm grabbing aggressiveness and incessant demands for money in exchange for photos. The threat of violence seemed imminent if the proper amount wasn't forthcoming. By park regulations we were required to travel with an armed guard.
The lips of Mursi women protrude from their faces, stretched by clay plates. Both men and women cover their bodies with fantastic patterns of scars. The plates are considered both beautiful and a symbol of wealth; the scars on the men often signify the killing of an enemy.
The Mursi are not a people you want to bump into alone or after dark. They war with other tribes, have murdered tourists and used to terrorize the local town of Jinka on market day. There is no word for please or thank you in Mursi.
When Pasquale Saccuro, leader of the second expedition to descend the Omo, asked me how it'd gone with the Mursi, I told him, "Okay." He replied, "Things can go from being okay to a bullet in a heartbeat with the Mursi."
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Our last contact with the Omo was at Bele Bridge. Max and I spent the afternoon by the river, thinking, talking, sitting silently, trying to put things into context. It's funny in a way because we begin our journey far south where our river trip would have ended and we ended our journey where the river trip would have begun. Everything about our trip had not happened as planned or expected.
Recently divorced and unemployed--the newspaper where I worked for over twenty years had ceased publication--I went to Ethiopia in search of something, to find some part of myself and answer some of the questions in my life.
Truthfully, sitting under the Bele Bridge beside the Omo I couldn't even think of the questions I meant to ask or the answers I had hoped to receive.
I felt so overwhelmed and overloaded by the different cultures that we had experienced that the old me had seemed to shrink away in order to make room for other things to fill me up.
Our three week journey seemed like one long strange dream of voices and songs, dust and goat blood, humming insects, painted faces, suffocating heat, violent rain storms, a thousand shades of jungle green and a thousand shades of desert brown, bright pink elephant flowers in bloom, a million wild sights, sounds, smells and tastes, a kaleidoscope of colors and impressions that filled my mind night and day as if I'd taken a drug that forever altered my consciousness and wouldn't shut off even in sleep.
When you begin a journey you never know how it will come out. That's part of the mystery. Part of the fear. Part of the joy. Max and I started out on one kind of trip and ended up on something else.
The outcome is still out there somewhere, like a ghost of Ethiopia that I may continue to chase for the rest of my life.
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African Continent
