Our Ethiopian odyssey (4): Addis Ababa
Day 1 (Saturday) of our trip was in fact essentially just a nighttime flight from London Heathrow airport to Addis Ababa Bole airport. All our flights – both external and internal – are with Ethiopian Airlines. This is the largest and most profitable airline in Africa and has recently been declared “African airline of the year” for the third year running. It was the first airline outside Japan to operate the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and we were delighted to find that this new airliner was our craft for the flight from London to Addis Ababa.
Take off was 8.30 pm. Roger has the remarkable facility of being able to sleep almost anywhere almost anytime, so he clocked up three and a half hours slumber. Meanwhile Vee, who can never sleep on flights, watched a couple of films: “The King’s Speech” and “The Big Lie”. It was a flight of just over six and a half hours and Ethiopia is three hours ahead of British time, so we landed 6.05 am local time.
We experienced a first when we were screened for Ebola with a handheld machine that checked the temperature of our forehead. Once through all the procedures, we met our local guide for the whole trip: Dawit (Ethiopians do not have family names) of Kibran Tours. At the same time, we met the other members of the Cox & Kings group: there are only ten of us – all very experienced and adventurous travellers, most of them our age or older (the oldest is almost 86), all British except for one American and one Brazilian, and we are the only heterosexual couple.
The journey from the airport to our hotel – the Radisson Blu – took less than a quarter of an hour but making rooms available to us took around an hour. Dawit made it clear that the first two days of our tour were going to be tough in terms of limited sleep. So we only had time for two and a half hours sleep in our room before we had to turn up for a buffet lunch.
The afternoon of Day 2 (Sunday) was spent on a short tour of Addis Ababa: just three and a half hours visiting three locations. The name Addis Ababa means ‘new flower’. The city was founded by Emperor Menelik in 1887 and today it is is the capital of modern Ethiopia and the political and commercial heart of the country with a population of 4 million. It is the fifth highest capital in the world at 7,726 feet or 2, 355 metres (we have been to highest La Paz in Bolivia).
After weeks of near freezing weather with occasional snow flurries in London, it was wonderful to feel warm sun on bare arms on an afternoon with a temperature in the mid 20s C (around 80F). As we drive though a city that is clearly undergoing a construction boom, we saw no less than three weddings which involved dancing in the street.
Our first stop was the Holy Trinity Cathedral which was built in 1944 to celebrate the country’s liberation from the Italian occupation. One of the graves in front of the church is that of Sylvia Pankhurst, the daughter of the famous Emmeline Pankhurst, who campaigned in Britain in the 1930s against the Italian takeover of Ethiopia. As we will have to do for all the churches we visit in Ethiopia, we had to remove our shoes before entering -a practice we usually associate with mosques or temples.
The church interior is fairly plain but it houses the tombs of the Emperor Haile Selassie and his wife. Also our study of the stained glass windows depicting various Biblical scenes, was the occasion for Dawit to narrate the colourful story of how King Solomon met and seduced the Queen of Sheba who subsequently gave birth to a son Menelik who allegedly brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.
Our second visit was to the Ethnographic Museum which is actually located in the grounds of the Addis Ababa University. It was originally the palace of the Emperor and then, during the Italian occupation, the home of the Viceroy Graziani ( who was the subject of a failed assassination attempt). Outside the museum is an odd sight: a set of stone steps curving upwards and leading nowhere. The steps were erected by the Italians with one for each year of Mussolini’s rule but, following liberation, the Ethiopians placed on top a Lion of Judah, the symbol of the Ethiopian monarchy.
The rooms in the museum have lots of large panels with both Amharic and English text which explain the life and culture of the Ethiopian people – a mixture of races who speak no less than 80 languages and dialects.
Our third and final venue was the National Museum, a rather utilitarian-looking building housing some fantastic artefacts representing the origins of humankind in this part of the world. Again, conveniently, all the descriptions were in Amharic and English.
The most famous exhibit is the skeleton called Lucy which was discovered in 1974 by Donald Johnson in Hadar, part of the Great African Rift Valley, At some 3.18 million years old, it is the oldest complete hominid ever found, in fact, we only have 40% of the skeleton and she is only 105 cm tall and you could miss the plain case in which she is contained if it was not pointed out to you, Although Lucy is the most famous exhibit in the museum, there is an even older human skeleton called Ardi – another female, less complete, but 4.4 million years old.
The American in our group – a distinguished lady called Peggy from Boston – reminded us how many Americans cannot it accept this version of human evolution. But we have seen some of the most vital pieces of evidence.
Our evening meal was back at the Hotel Radisson and again was a selection from a wide choice of buffet.
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We need to get an early night now because we have to be up at 4.30 am tomorrow morning for our flight to Mekele.