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In mid-June 2000, a ceasefire was declared in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. My wife Linda and I were passing through Addis Abba in early July and decided to spend a week in the historic north of the country. In fact, we were told that we were the first foreigners to visit the region since flights resumed. The following relates our experiences.

We arrived in Addis Ababa - one of the highest airports in the world - in the morning of Sunday, 9 July and within an hour were whisked off on a city tour. Being the rainy season however, it was raining cats & dogs so we opted for the dryness of the National Museum and postponed the remaining sites until our return to Addis the following week.

The Museum proved to be an ideal starting point for our upcoming week on the historical route. There we saw the earliest known specimen of life on earth, the 3.5 million year old skeletal remains of LUCY - locally known as Dinkenesh, meaning Thou Art Wonderful - which were found in Ethiopia in 1974. The remainder of the tour took us through the ages from pre-historic times to the present day. Many of the relics of the distant past are amazingly fully intact.

A short hop of 55 minutes on Monday morning landed us at Bhar Dar on the southernmost tip of Lake Tana - source of the Blue Nile. The town itself has no great historical significance, but the many islands of Lake Tana are home to monasteries of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church dating back to the fourteenth century.

An hour-long motorboat ride landed us on an island, where Uru-Kidane Meherth (Saint Mary) church has been the place of worship for the locals since the 15th century. The monastery, built in the 1400's is round and the walls are made from a mixture of mud and straw. The roof is thatched and there are three distinct circular compartments within its walls. The outside ring is where the common people worship. The next ring is for the monks and deacons, with the innermost enclosure - like the hole in a donut - being the Holy of Holies reserved for priests. The treasures of the church, including a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant are contained inside the Holy of Holies. All of the interior walls contain beautiful paintings commemorating the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary (Saint Mary of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) and other saints. It was all very interesting. On the boat ride back to town, we passed several fishermen in Tankwas (boats made from reeds), which are also seen in Egypt on the Nile proper.


In the afternoon, we were off to the Blue Nile Falls, locally known as Tis Isat (Smoke of Fire), about 35 kilometres out of town. The Blue Nile originates in Lake Tana and plunges more than 2,000 metres (6,560 feet) in its 800-kilometre (497 mile) course from Ethiopia to Khartoum on the Sudanese plains, where it merges with the White Nile to form the Nile-proper.

We reached the village of Tis Isat after a bumpy 45-minute drive and commenced a thirty-minute trek to the viewing point. The footpath descends into a gorge below the falls, where an arched bridge that the Portuguese built in the seventeenth century, still spans the river. Eight chatterbox girls bearing simple souvenirs and a flute-playing shepherd boy joined us as we traversed the side of a green hill and the source of the dull rumbling came into view. And what a sight it was! Four hundred metres in width, this source of raw power plunges forty-five metres sending up a mist that drenches the surrounding countryside. This is the most dramatic spectacle on the whole Nile system and we felt fortunate to be in its presence.

Gondar, nestled in the foothills of the Simien Mountains was the destination of our third day in Ethiopia. Emperor Fasilidas (1632-1667) built the first of a number of castle-like palaces to be found in the town. The ceilings of Debre Birhan Selassie (Light of the Trinity) church have paintings of beautiful winged angels and walls bear impressive scenes depicting religious events. Next, we saw the two-storied palace of Emperor Fasilidas, built of roughly hewn brown stones. Said to have been the work of an Indian architect, the building has a flat roof, a rectangular tower in the southwest corner, four smaller domed towers, and a battlemented parapet. The "imperial quarter" contains several other buildings of interest, which were constructed by successors to Emperor Fasilidas. After seeing these, its no wonder that they call Gondor the Camelot of Africa.

On our way to the airport the following day, we stopped at a structure commonly referred to as the 'Bathing Palace' - a rectangular well-preserved building with a large pond-like bath in its back yard. During Timkat (Epiphany) on January 19th, thousands of the faithful conjugate here for twenty-four hours and on a signal cleanse themselves (some completely naked) in the bath.

The flight to Lalibela took thirty minutes. Then there was a twenty kilometre drive high into the mountains, past several traditional villages, to the town of Lalibela, which lies on a natural 2,600 metre rock terrace surrounded on all sides by rugged and forbidding mountains.

Formerly known as Roha, Lalibela now bears the name of King Lalibela (1181-1221), a member of the Zagwe Dynasty. King Lalibela's legacy to Ethiopia was eleven rock-hewn churches. Physically prised from the rock on which they stand, these towering edifices seem superhuman in scale, workmanship and concept. Some lie almost completely hidden in deep trenches, while others stand in open quarried caves.

All of the churches are spectacular in different ways, but the two that impressed us the most were Bet Medhane Alem and Bet Giyorgis (Saint Georges). Bet Madhane is the largest of all the Lalibela churches. Built like a Greek temple, it is unusual, being entirely surrounded by square columns, with a further forest of twenty-eight massive rectangular columns supporting the roof inside. Also inside we saw three empty graves symbolically dug for biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Standing on a three-tiered plinth, St Georges is shaped like a Greek cross and has walls with an alternation of projecting and recessing horizontal layers. Legend has it that when King Lalibela had almost completed his tenth church, Ethiopia's national saint - St George - rode up to him in complete armour on his white horse and reproached Lalibela for not building a church for him. Lalibela thereupon promised the saint the most beautiful church and Saint George apparently supervised the construction. This must have been so, because we were shown the hoof marks of St George's horse by one of the monks.

After visiting the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, we could understand why they are referred to as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".

The second day in Lalibela was more adventurous as this was the day we would ride a mule to the top of the nearby mountain to visit a rock-hewn monastery called Asheton Mariam. The mule party met us at 7AM and after a crash course on mule riding we were on our way to an adventure, that would take us into the clouds.

After passing through town and being fun-heartedly heckled by the locals, the mules made a right turn, and followed a well-beaten upward path. We were impressed by the sure footedness of the mules as they dodged rocks, and navigated the terrain that increasingly got steeper. After a while we navigated a narrow path along the side of the mountain with a sheer drop of about four hundred metres only one metre away. This continued for about two kilometres as we snaked back and forth up the side of the mountain. We were passed all the while by local people either going up or down and at one point we had to make way for a herd of cattle being driven down the mountainside in single file. We clung to the rocks and let the cattle take the outside for obvious reasons.

On a plateau there was a solitary tree, and green fertile fields, some being ploughed by men driving teams of two oxen like their ancestors had done for thousands of years. We paused for a breather and were soon joined by children wearing traditional hats (for sale) and bearing simple souvenirs. They spoke perfect English, as did the earlier children at the falls.

We crossed the plateau, zigzagged up the remaining steep incline and eventually left the mules tied to a bush. Then we walked a narrow path to the entrance to the monastery - a tunnel with stairs, carved out of sheer rock. Finally a rock-hewn structure stood before us. The guide narrated its history, and the priest posed for photos holding the treasures of the church consisting of crosses, crowns and scriptures. The tour of the monastery lasted for about 15 minutes. Then we left the compound, sat on a huge rock and ate our packed lunches. The priest retired to his hut, donned his plain clothes and joined us bearing a pot of tea. The atmosphere was simply wonderful as we (the mule drivers, guide, priest and us) sat in the clouds and chatted while being observed by two novice monks (boys) sitting on the rocks across the way.

The whole excursion up and down, lasted about 5 hours and truthfully, after seeing the churches the previous day, the monastery was not that spectacular - the getting there and back was the real adventure. The down side was that my rear end was sore for the next two days but the adventure was well worth the pain.

Our day wasn't over with the mountain top monastery. No, there was still a church to be seen that was housed in a cave. This was halfway up the same mountain, but it was almost entirely accessible by vehicle. From the parking spot, there was only about a half hour walk over a plateau to the cave church. The last hundred metres across the face of the mountain would have been the most difficult had it not been for the Italians who had just finished building a concrete walkway. This church was very impressive and the priest laid the treasures on a carpet for us to see and showed us some ancient scriptures.

More than mere monuments, the churches in and around Lalibela are a living link with the past and testify to the power and spirit of an ancient Christian faith. Lalibela was the highlight of my excursion. For Linda, the highlight was Axum our next stop.

We arrived in Axum at about noon on the sixth day of our excursion. Rising to importance around the time of the birth of Christ, Axum was the capital of the far-reaching Axumite Kingdom - a kingdom that dominated the vital crossroads between Africa and Asia for almost a thousand years.

We visited the most ecclesiastical building of Axum - the Church of St. Mary of Zion - where many believe (including me) that the biblical Ark of the Covenant is residing today. It is believed by the Ethiopian faithful that when the Queen of Sheba (from Ethiopia) visited Jerusalem around 900 BC, she return to her home bearing King Solomon's son. The son named Menelik returned to his father in Jerusalem as a young man, and left sometime later, having stolen the Ark of the Covenant. He then founded the Solomonic Dynasty, of which the late Haile Selassie was the last emperor. Some historians present another story of how the Ark came to rest in Axum.

The most significant biblical relic is stored in a modern building beside the church and is kept in safe keeping by its guardian - a priest named Aba Mekonen - who upon appointment never leaves the confines of the building until his death. Being the only foreigners in Axum on that day, we were honoured to be blessed by the guardian (through the fence), who sprinkled Holy water on our heads; the water having been blessed in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. This wouldn't have happened had the place been swarming with tourists. I must confess that I got quite emotional and tried to mask the tears running down my face with the holy water that had been sprinkled on my head.

The town of Axum abounds with archaeological remains including the graves of kings, the foundation of the Queen of Sheba's palace, inscribed tablets and great carved obelisks or monolithic stelae. It is with the stelae that Axum is most identified - the tallest that remains standing being about twenty-three metres (75 feet) tall. Another massive stelae - the largest on the grounds lies broken on the ground. Some say it fell. Others say that it was smashed by invaders before it was raised to the perpendicular position.

Axum is considered to be the most significant bastion of Christianity in Africa. We departed with a sense of peace in our minds, feeling glad that we had visited this deeply religious town.

Back in Addis on the seventh day, we were to be at the airport at noon, so in the morning we partook in a city tour. The previous late afternoon, we were shown Mercato market, one of the largest open-air markets in the world, operating throughout the week and almost round the clock. We have similar markets in India but it was really quite impressive with masses of people buying and selling everything under the sun.

The city tour consisted of monuments, museums and a trip to the top of the mountain overlooking the city. Throughout the morning we reflected on the sights and events of the week behind us. We feel that Ethiopia got a raw deal with adverse publicity caused by a war they didn't start. We found Ethiopians to be a peaceful and friendly people who would go out of their way to make a visitor feel at home.

There still remains a vastness to the south of Addis Abba where the Great Rift Valley originates; where wildlife abounds; and where tribal people live as their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. The books and brochures that we read have convinced us that on our next trip to Ethiopia we will be southward bound. As far as the north is concerned, we highly recommend the destination to those looking for a different African experience. Its wonderful.

All photos by Author