Letters to Josh from Ethiopia, April 2009

April 3, 2009 (on the plane): My dear Josh, I am writing this first letter to you from the plane taking us to Addis Ababa. In fact, we should have been on this plane yesterday, not today! But although began trying to leave from Paris yesterday morning, it felt as if we had already plunged into the third world before even leaving France. We arrived at Gare du Nord for our train to the airport only to learn there were no trains at all going there—and of course, no one around to tell anyone anything—just pure chaos, people wandering around having no idea what to do or where to go. We finally found out there was a bus—No. 250—we saw one leaving just as we got out of the station, packed to the gills, and ran to stand in line for the next one—only to be told there would be no more buses either! The French bus drivers had decided to go onto strike just then because of some incident—no doubt an angry passenger trying, like us, to get to the airport! So we were stuck in the capital of the world—unable to get to the airport. We finally took a local bus across the city to a Roissy airport bus stop (near Opera), and by dint of pushing people out of our way, stepping on feet, elbowing our way in, we got on that bus—whew!! We would make it after all, we sighed.
But no! this bus instead of heading to the motorway, for some inexplicable reason meandered its way through the Paris suburbs, getting stuck in traffic—in road work—while all we passengers, all trying to make our planes, gnashed our teeth in helpless misery. And then when we did get to the airport, we hit all the terminals, A, B. C., III, II, before ours—terminal I—the very last.
Need I say more? We arrived at 11 pm for an 11:35 pm flight and were not allowed on. For the first time in my traveling life, Josh, I missed my plane! It was François’s second time to miss a plane—once before, in Greece, because the departure board was blocked—so he didn’t realize his plane was there—and gone!
As we were on the bus returning back to the apartment, heavy with our luggage but lighter by 200 euros in our pocket book—the penalty for having missed our flight and having to rebook for today—I thought of you. Our trip hadn’t even started and already we had a travel tale—and who of course should we wish to tell but you! I said this to F, “I wish we could tell Josh this story—he’d appreciate it more than anyone, and would even help us seen the humor of it.” I could just hear you laughing, making your wry ironic comments—maybe you would even have said “Only in Paris!” (as you so often said about the idiosyncrasies in our shared country: “Only in America!”) Telling you our woes of yesterday would have instantly transformed them from an upsetting experience to a funny travel one—just one more of life’s adventures “on the road.”
This is our first time to travel without you in the world, Josh, since we all met 13 years ago in the Philippines. And I can tell you it feels strange. Since that fortuitous meeting of ours (also at Easter, and also for Easter ceremonies though of a very different nature), we have not taken a single trip without you as our invisible third traveling companion—you have accompanied us everywhere, and a part of the pleasure of the journey was knowing we could write you about it (you and I both loved to write letters and always did to one another from our travels), or better yet, see you and spend evenings exchanging our stories!
After our encounter in the village of San Fernando, Philippines where we’d all gone for the gruesome Easter ceremonies there—the half-mock half-real crucifixions—and our traveling together up to Banaue and then a couple weeks later, meeting in Bangkok and traveling on to Ayuthya, ( a trip cementing our friendship!), we counted on more travels with you. But in fact, whenever we met each other after that, it was not in traveling together but in traveling to see each other. You came to France a number of times to visit us, F saw you in England and we traveled to both New York and then to San Francisco to see you and Laura. You continued to travel the world—with Laura—and we continued to travel too—and I am sure that had you not gotten sick, had not cancer blindly chosen you (the healthiest and purest living man we’ve ever known!), we all would have most certainly traveled together again. In fact, you threatened to plan the “worst trip ever” just for me, so I could really know what suffering on the road was all about! One of the former Soviet countries for example with an unpronounceable name and absolutely nothing at all to see!
You know, Josh, to travel again with you I believe that I—and François too of course—would have gone just about anywhere in the world you suggested. But last May—already a year now—you left us for one place we couldn’t follow, to our immense and inconsolable sorrow.
So now, we’re on our way to Ethiopia—country you knew of course. In your relatively short life, just short of 62 years, you totaled more than a hundred countries visited. No grass ever grew under your feet, dear Josh!
So why Ethiopia? For the same reason—in a way—that we went to the Philippines thirteen year ago—so F can photograph the events of the Easter ceremonies. He was doing a project on Christ when we met you—which is why we were in the Philippines, and now he’s doing a project on “magic mountains” and so we’ll be in Lalibela, 2000 meters high, where everyone dresses in white during Easter week.
When I saw F come home a few weeks ago with the guidebook of Ethiopia I thought “Oh no!” F doesn’t just read guidebooks for pleasure, and I knew a trip was in the offing. And like you, Josh, once the travel bug has again bitten him….!
As for me, I’d never thought of Ethiopia in my life. It was not on any agenda of mine at all, and at first I thought I’d let F go off on his own—but then I thought about time passing, and how we never know when our journey will end (we would never have dreamed yours would end so soon, dear friend) and I knew I didn’t want to miss out on this one with my life’s traveling companion. But I thought of you too. I thought, Josh would want me to go, he would be rooting me on, he’d have a few Ethiopian stories for me. So when F. said he was going down to the travel agency to see about tickets, I went with him. And as we were walking down there, I said, “You know, if I go, I’m going for Josh.”
We got the tickets that day.
And so here I am, Josh, on Turkish Airways and in just three hours about to discover a new country. I’ll close this first letter now—drooping eyelids you know (after all it’s been TWO days of travel counting yesterday’s aborted attempt). I will write again once we’ve set foot in my 50th country—still far from your number of countries but one more for my total!!

April 4, 2009, Saturday, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Dear Josh, OK Josh, here I am at 50 countries! (51 if I count my own, and after all I have been to all 50 states!)! I can count Ethiopia now, we’re here, arrived. In Africa, continent you knew well but which I hardly know at all—this is a leap off into the dark for me.
It’s 7 pm and we have a full day in Addis Ababa under our belt! Not quite 24 hours since our last night’s arrival—at midnight in the new shining airport just on the edge of the city. Our hotel van was there to our relief and on exiting the airport, I was kind of excited—Ethiopia! Such a sonorous sounding name with such ancient connotations. Our drive through the city however was enough to dispel our enthusiasm—the all-too-common dingy third-world atmosphere, piles of dirt, rows upon rows of shacks, miles and miles of corrugated metal roofs, a few raggedy wandering shadows in the ill-lighted or not lighted at all streets, endless unfinished cement buildings. We went up a dirt road past one more cement structure, pulled up to our hotel, described as having a “superb” view of the city! First shock, we thought it was $50 a night, but it was $70. For a very ordinary room with, yes, a balcony overlooking a highway with a few lights beyond it—this was the “superb” view (view in the morning which proved to be one of lots more dirt and lots more corrugated metal.)
But this morning after sleep and showers and a good breakfast, we felt better. Booked a mini-bus for the next morning (it will pick us up at 3 am at the hotel!), decided we would not fret the two pricey nights. We went out to meet Addis Ababa—not, I’m sorry to say, a very fortuitous encounter. At the end of the first day we are in the usual shock we experience every time we first go to a dirt-poor country: today we’ve had that violent confrontation with beggars, ragged little children, families living on the street, the old, the blind, the destitute, the infirm—and with the chaotic constructions of a city patched together this way and that—and with the simple sheer ugliness of poverty in all its manifestations. Addis Ababa means “new flower” in Ethiopian and perhaps a century or two ago this place was “a flower” but it’s a junk heap now, human debris, garbage debris….! So we walked and walked and changed money, and replied cheerily to all the hellos, and shook our heads gently and sadly to the beggars, and tried to be politely discouraging to all the young “touts” wishing to “guide” us, and I had to remind myself right here at the beginning of the trip that all these people were here before I stepped off the plane and will be here after I leave, that my passage through here will change strictly nothing, I cannot help any of them nor change the world as it exists. Their destiny was to be born here, as my destiny was to be born in America—it is fate—that some must be born wretchedly poor and spend whole lives in that poverty with no hope of ever escaping it, and that others are born in rich countries where the word hope has all its sense and meaning.
What is horrible is that such disparities in countries exist—how does it happen, and how can such countries ever lift themselves out of the poverty? It can be done—but requires not only the assistance of the rich countries but essential changes in the structures of these faltering ones—an end to dictatorships, to vice and corruption, all of which breed more poverty, more misery and inequality.
So on we wandered, through the dusty crowded streets, all resembling one another so that despite our map we got hopelessly lost. Addis Ababa is a mess, impossible to figure out where is the center—there seems to be no center! But happily we came across the National Museum, quite by chance, and so got to see the replica of our three-million old ancestor Lucy, found on the outskirts of this city. We visited her in the company of some beautiful school children, and a charming soft-spoken Sudanese man wearing the traditional white costume—clearly a very educated and very wealthy man! Not all Africans are poor! The museum is the image of the city of course, displays with no labels, empty display cases, toilets outside in little shacks, and on display a mixture of everything from ancient Lucy to modern art (in particular an interesting painting, 2003, called “Genital Mutilation!”—for yes, here in Ethiopian, even in the Christian community, terrible as it is to contemplate, clitorectomy is widely practiced).
At about one we located a hotel I had wished to see—the Taitu Hotel—and fell in love with it—old British (1898) but well preserved. We were shown a great room for $25 though not free. However, they had new rooms in an annex and we decided to change hotels—got a taxi, rushed to the $70 one, checked out, and came here--$15 a night! Our room is bare bones—just a bed—but brand new, and pine floors, and everything very clean—but best of all is the main hotel with its dark wood stairway and high ceilings and restaurant—an oasis for us, a mixture of Western and Ethiopian, lively and where, if we stayed around, we could certainly meet interesting people.
And now we’ve already had the main Ethiopian dish too—the huge injera—the thick pancake upon which all sorts of spicy foods are placed—interesting but I can’t say I’ll be eager to try it again!
It’s nearly 9 pm and we must be up at 3:30 am to take a mini-bus north—eight hours! Oh Lord! why do we do this, I wonder? How would you answer that question, Josh, you who spent your life traveling? And how will I answer it at the end of this Ethiopian journey?

April 7, 2009, Bahir Dar (Lake Tana)
Well Josh, I didn’t have to wait until the end of the journey to answer that last question—I had it answered for me the very next day, doubly answered, the two answers being wholly contradictory. This would please you I know, as you were the opposite of doctrinaire and reveled in life’s contradictions and anomalies. You were after all the ultimate traveler and knew so well that there are no set or easy formulas for the traveling life.
So we were up at 3 am for the journey to Bihar Dar, taking the front seats (one, the “hot high” seat over the motor) so F could jump out more easily if he saw a photo. After an hour or so spent filling up the van with passengers (going through the dark Addis Ababa early morning looking for them!), we were off into the darkness. The sun rose around six and we could then see the Ethiopian landscape—long stretches of plains dotted with strangely shaped trees, then climbing through a mini Grand Canyon of red and yellow rims, then through countryside where we saw little hamlets of round thatched roofs—charming seen at least from the outside and certainly in harmony with the landscape—unlike the towns and villages we went through, all drearily the same: rows of wooden and metal box-like shacks planted in dirt and lining either side of the highway. (In one though I saw a touching example of village improvement—planters had been posed along each side of the road with flowers in them!) As it was early morning, we got to see all the shepherds and goatherds taking their animals out (the van having to stop often for the animals who seemed to have a penchant for the road—one little donkey had chosen the smack dab middle for his nap). At about nine we stopped for “breakfast” in a very clean hotel, greeted by a jovial manager who welcomed F and I most enthusiastically. Everyone was having the Ingera—or spaghetti—for breakfast so we ordered a plate of spaghetti and tea. Back to our van for the rest of the journey, of course with loud Ethiopian music (and I’d left my earplugs in my bag) but being in the front seat, we could turn it down when the driver was otherwise occupied. Near the end of the trip we were especially happy to be in the front seat as F was able to shake the driver who was falling asleep.

We arrived in Bahir Dar —and indeed it was a welcome change from Addis Ababa—palm trees lining the main street! Greenery! And then, the lake! and best of all, the Ghion Hotel, with bungalows facing the lake, but even more, with perhaps the most magnificent garden I have ever seen—hundreds of tall stalked yellow and peach-red flowers with huge flat leaves blooming, looking a little like irises but much bigger and without the fragrance. The fragrance comes from the magnolia trees dropping their creamy white velvety blossoms at our feet—I pick up handfuls and put them in the room to perfume it. There are ferns and silky red-leafed bushes and all kinds of trees, palm, a tree looking a little like an acacia with blue falling flowers, and a huge Ficus tree around which a thatched roof dining area has been built—the trunk of the tree rises out of the center of the thatched hut and three huge limbs emerge out of its roof. Another Ficus rises out of the lake bank like some grotesque sea monster.
Our bungalow is the largest one with a wall of ceiling to floor windows facing the garden—we’re practically sleeping in the garden. Birds too—hundreds of them including a huge black hornbill and a kolaba monkey leaping from tree branch to tree branch. As soon as we saw the garden—and the room—the ordeals of the journey just fell off us, vanished, and I said, here is the answer to my question “why do we do this?” To come across such enchanting places! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a beautiful garden—it certainly rivals the Paris gardens, and one we love in Marvao, Portugal, and the Lake Inlé garden of our hotel there. So we were very happy. We settled into our room, washed the dirt of the journey off us (cold water only—but what did we care, choosing beauty over creature comforts), then went out for a walk along the lake, came back, read a little, then had dinner on the lake edge under the thatched roof cabana. F had fish, I had chicken. We settled comfortably into bed, read a little, turned off the lights—the garden, lit at night, continued to brightly bloom as we fell asleep.

The second contradictory answer to my question about travel came about an hour or at most two later. I woke abruptly. I didn’t feel well. What could be wrong? I lay there a moment trying to understand and then was hit with an overwhelming wave of nausea. I tried to bite it down but it was like the ocean tides, wave after wave, and I found myself bent over the toilet (with the seat that keeps crashing down) vomiting and vomiting. And when I wasn’t vomiting, I was to put it bluntly shitting. I was both nauseous and had dysentery. And no sooner had I finished vomiting and returned shivering and shaking to bed than another bout would hit me—I vomited all night long, even when I had nothing left to vomit, just miserable wracking dry heaves. I was in such misery, half-weeping by the end, and nothing I had among my medicines had any effect on the nausea. The garden vanished, and the lake, my reality was a budget hotel toilet bowl. It was only my third night in this country and already I was horribly ill.
Of course I slept not at all. By morning the worst of the nausea seemed past though I still felt horribly queasy, and the thought of food, any food, revolted me. I was exhausted, had no energy, and as soon as I got up, I felt nauseous again. I stayed in bed all day. I could not even sit outside in the garden, or read, I just lay there. I ate nothing at all, all day.
And I thought, this trip is my traveling swan song. I made it to fifty countries, less than half of yours, Josh, but I don’t think I’ll ever go to another third world country again. I seem to always get sick, and when you are sick you care about nothing—you just want to be home. Why travel such distances to find myself in a shabby bathroom with no hot water vomiting into a broken toilet? Is it worth the effort? I don’t think you ever got sick traveling, Josh—or rarely—which is why illness coming upon you was so unjust: you, never sick a day in your life, to be caught in the fatal grip of cancer. None of your friends could believe it, and even though you’ve now left this world, we’re still in disbelief.
François has gotten ill traveling—we both got Guardia in India, and he picked up some other exotic illness in the Philippines and I remember too a time he was very sick in Chiang Mai, but generally his stomach is less fragile I guess. We ate exactly the same things these first two days. I got sick, he did not.
Today, I began to feel human again, and the garden came back into focus—beauty counted again for something. I still didn’t feel like doing much (we canceled the boat trip) but did take a walk with F to the church and market in the afternoon. Still not eating much. I doubt I’ll be raving about Ethiopian food, I doubt I’ll touch it the rest of the trip—porridge and rice and fruit when I can find it—and perhaps eggs.
So, it’s a half-hearted traveler writing this—five days on the road only, and already planning my “retirement” in Jonchères! But the trip is not over—we shall see what the next days bring.

Thursday, April 9, 2009, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia: Hi Josh. A week since our trip began—and didn’t begin! Since the morning in Paris when we frantically tried to get out to the airport to make our flight, missing it by half an hour! We lost one day and of course, any change like that changes everything to follow in the sense of itinerary and encounters….taking different minibuses, with different drivers, different configurations of people encountered….we are at this moment of time and space in this particular location, and so we meet this person rather than that one—such as yesterday on the boat to visit the monasteries around Tana Lake: meeting two young Greek sisters and one young American student, Leonora, (a lovely curly-headed girl, Fulbright scholar, who we will likely see again in Lalibela)….
Our meeting with you though, Josh, was almost inevitable once we’d decided to go to the “crucifixion” village. It was a definite place, a definite date, and you were coming from a different part of the world to there also because you had decided to attend the same bizarre ceremonies. Neither you nor F and I were there by chance—it was a precise destination, and I suspect we were the only tourists (of the few there) who went specifically to see the crucifixions. There was only one hotel as well—so there we all were. Of course it could have happened that we might not speak to each other—after all, I remember none of the other travelers who were there (except the elusive Italian), but perhaps the fact that we were the same age, the same generation of traveler led us also inevitably to speak. Or perhaps our encounter came from something more primary, that inexplicable attraction certain human beings feel for other certain human beings, the knowledge of affinity that scarcely needs spoken language—it’s already been communicated by body language.
I was at the terrace over-looking the church and the bloody penitents and you were either there too or came up to me there. F was already out in the fray. I suppose we exchanged the usual initial travelers information—learning we were both Americans, and probably quickly learning as well that we were all three “travelers” in the deep true sense of the word. I can see you there, Josh, can see so clearly the two of us standing there in that Filipino hotel, exchanging the first words of what was to be our lifetime friendship. You then suggested that we walk out together to the field where the bizarre ceremonies were to be conducted.
So much is lost to memory in one’s travels—and in a life—yet my memory of meeting you has remained clear and vivid, I can run it at any moment, as if my mind had somehow known the moment was important and so recorded it in detail.
Less clear is the evening that followed (after the bloody crucifixions where you and F were right at the foot of the crosses, and I, much further away, rather horrified by it al). I know we had dinner together, but I did not record our first dinner conversation—no doubt we talked about what we had just seen, and perhaps discussed then our plans to go further north. I think I recall complaining about the miserable room we stayed in—no doubt to your amusement. I was always much more finicky than you—or F for that matter—about lodgings!
The next clear memory is of course the day we went up to Banaue, perhaps the day after Easter, how we started off early in the morning (with the Italian) on a bus, then arrived at some anonymous town where a hoard of rickshaw drivers encircled us, all shouting at us, and all we could understand was that there was no bus stop where we’d been dumped—and to get to the bus, we had to go in rickshaws. F and I piled in one with our bags, you got in another, the Italian in a third—we waved cheerily and here too, I have a clear image of you being pedaled off in your rickshaw, towering in it, waving and smiling at us.
It could have happened at that moment that we never saw each other again—for our rickshaw took us to the main highway and dumped us there and there was no sight of either you or the Italian (whom indeed we never saw again). Many buses went by, at least ten, ignoring our yells and our waves. Until finally, the crummiest most dilapidated of them all ground to a halt and we could jump on! We hadn’t gone half a kilometer when the bus shook again to a stop to pick up one more passenger—you! Our three faces were wreathed in smiles at the coincidence of being reunited on the same bus—and I think that was the moment our friendship was sealed—we were just all so glad to see each other again!!
These are the wonderful hazards and luck of the traveling life, and although now it is true that I have started to ask myself, “Why travel?”, that I have begun to feel the need to examine and illuminate the reasons for such movement and change, I must always remember the great gifts of friendship and love that travel has brought me—among them and most especially, François of course from India, and you, Josh, from the Philippines. In both cases, divergent lines that magically, miraculously at one point in time and space, crossed and connected.

Easter Sunday (non-Orthodox Easter), April 12, 2009, Lalibela, Ethiopia:
So dear Josh, it was exactly thirteen Easters ago that you and I walked down to ‘Crucifixion Field” that morning—and then—I just confirmed it in my journal, yes indeed, we had dinner together that night.
This Easter night—thirteen years later—F and I are again in a foreign country, Africa not Asia, and we are in a restaurant about to have dinner.
I had the thought this afternoon, as I was crossing down a steep red slope to see one of the rock-hewn churches, that François and I are following in your footsteps here. You and Laura were in Lalibela on one of the two major trips you took after we knew you (one, nine months around the world, and a second trip, three months in Africa. You had already been diagnosed with prostate cancer and yet took both those trips afterwards! You never changed your life, you never kowtowed to that illness). You saw these churches, you watched these sunsets, you walked up and down the broad cobbled road that links our area of hotels with the town. I wonder where you stayed—unlikely at our up-scale hotel (at nearly $50 a night it’s far more than we usually spend either! but we’re getting older, and I’m just not up for roughing it and wonder how you did it for so long). We are in the Jerusalem Hotel—yes, 13 years later and still on the religious circuit! No bloody penitents but thousands of praying Orthodox Christians covered with their white shawls and veils.
Our hotel is very nice. I picked it out in the guidebook for the “view from all the balconies of the mountains” and indeed it is a great view, especially at sunset as the mountains turn into accordion pleats, ridge after misty ridge. We have a big room on the top floor (third) of the small hotel with a large balcony overlooking several “tukas” (the round thatched-roof huts) and the “modern” rectangular houses with corrugated metal roofs that are a step up from the huts (one has a choice between red and silver metal)—and beyond this village area, just the endless brown mountains dotted with a few splashes of green (not many!) stretching away to eternity. It is especially beautiful at sunset. This hotel also has constant electricity and hot water. The hotel in Gonder where we stayed two nights had no water at all until the second day—and no electricity either much of the time. We are such spoiled Westerners, used to plentiful water, used to boundless electricity, everything that the majority of Ethiopians have no access to, including those living just down below our hotel. Coming back tonight, we bought a bottle of Ethiopian wine for 60 bir ($6) and sat out on the terrace watching the light fade away from the earth and sipping a very bad wine!! Even F did not ask to have his glass refilled.
Incidentally, it’s Easter Sunday by our calendar—but here as it is Orthodox, today for the Ethiopians is Palm Sunday--their Easter is next Sunday, and we will still be here for it—we are staying about ten days here—an easy trip really. In fact, I’m even embarrassed at how easy it is—I feel that just for your sake, for your memory, Josh, we should be roughing it much more! We’ve only had two bus trips so far—in mini-buses—and while the first was about nine hours, the road was good (we think it is a new road since you were here) so we didn’t really suffer! Since then, given we had a flight from Gonder to here, it’s been ridiculously easy—met at the airport and driven directly to our nice hotel. I’m not sure we even merit the term “traveler” so far!! Are we turning into “tourists?”

April 14, 2009, Tuesday, Lalibela
Well I’m sorry to say we’ve quarreled, François and I—a sort of “cultural quarrel” you might say. It happened very unexpectedly at least for me—I had met the young American Leonora again whom we’d first met on the boat going around Lake Tana and was very glad to see her so we walked up the cobbled road together, joining F further up who was taking pictures. But Leonora wished to see the rock-hewn church in form of a cross so I walked down with her—only to get into a quarrel with a little guard in green who came rushing after L and I about our tickets (a sore point I’ll deal with later). We had come down some steps and were above the church (which is carved below ground level of course—that’s the “specialty” here!) on a large flat stone area out of which paths lead in various directions. I was going to wait there while L went down to see the church, but the little guard became very aggressive. Although L showed her ticket, because I didn’t have mine (F had it), he didn’t want to let her go down. He screamed to see her passport which she didn’t have—and tried to force me to leave the area although I wasn’t going down into the church and that area is a passageway for Ethiopians. It made me angry—we don’t like the policy of tickets for foreigners only, but this was going even further, trying to keep me from a public area above the church, and trying to keep L from the church because she couldn’t produce a passport!! I literally put my arms out in front of him to keep him from chasing after Leonora—and we also had to grab her ticket from his hands—he wasn’t going to return it! (They are good for several days.) Some young men came by and the guard complained to them and as one spoke English, we discussed it, I saying the policy seemed “racist”—whites pay, blacks don’t. He said other people form other African countries have to pay too. Well perhaps, but nevertheless the “chasse aux tourists” is very unpleasant, the guards are constantly running after us to check our tickets.
Well then suddenly arrives François, furious, he’s been waiting “half an hour” in the sun, and he sees me “surrounded by people”—for indeed a small crowd had gathered and in particular among them the little boy I had talked to that morning on his way to school who had shown me his Obama button, along with his brother. But F just saw the perpetual crowd of “give me give” people (give me pen, give me money, from just about all the children and adolescents!) and thought I was encouraging them and got even more furious and didn’t hide it, embarrassing me deeply in front of the people but especially in front of Leonora. He remained odious all the way to the other hotel, to such an extent that neither L nor eventually I stayed with him during lunch—he was so hostile against me, against us “dumb Americans”, against the Ethiopian church, against all the “give-me kids” etc. and would not listen to my explanation (that I knew the little Obama boy already and his brother, and also that we are in a poor country where it’s “normal” for us “rich” tourists to be taken advantage of—he would certainly be the first to do so were he the poor Ethiopian)!
He ultimately calmed down and came out to join L and me and we walked back to the first churches were he took pictures of L—and then she and I walked back first to her hotel and then she came to mine and we had coffee (delicious) and talked of her boyfriend, of her work in Kenya, and I told her the famous story of how I met François in India. It was late by then and F arrived so we sat out on the balcony finishing the awful Ethiopian wine we had bought the day before—we put pineapple juice and pineapple in it and made “sangria” which was drinkable, and watched the sunset. Then L went back to her hotel and F and I went to dinner but the “cultural argument” came up again and the quarrel was again on!
It’s the next morning now—F got up early and left without saying a word.
So how does one reconcile being a traveler-tourist in a poor country? This is the essential dilemma I confront every time and one I’ve still not resolved. Here in Ethiopia, I refer to myself as a “tourist in Misery.” We Westerners blow in with our clean untorn clothes, our cameras, our watches and jewelry, our brand new bags, our clean healthy bodies, flowing through the country, seeing the “sights”, encountering the people through “hello hello hello, where are you from” on the streets or in the shops or in the buses, and then retreating to our clean tourist hotels and restaurants (where we are spending the equivalent of a year’s salary or more for most of the locals), and then we blow out through the air in the airplanes we can all afford to take—leaving everything just as dirty and poor and squalid as it was before, effecting no real positive impact and as instantly replaced by other tourists.
Do we have a right to complain that nearly every encounter begins (or ends) with “give me?” Or that prices are hugely inflated for everything we buy, including transport, even local transport—that we pay double for the same crummy buses, double for the same food, quadruple for museum entrances or—as here—are alone to pay for the churches ($20 per person for these ones, separate tickets for the ones in the surrounding area)? Do we have a right to complain that we are constantly cheated, and viewed not as people but as money bags?
Certainly it makes everything unpleasant, falsifies relationships, raises even more barriers between travelers and the people whose country they are visiting—there can be no mutual comprehension or dialogue in such a situation, as the one existing here in Lalibela.
Yesterday, when F emerged from lunch, he spoke of you, Josh, using you to bolster his arguments—“My friend Josh was an American but he wasn’t like that,” (meaning like us dumb Americans!!!), he said, saying your name tenderly and possessively, “He wasn’t stupid like that in his dealings when traveling, he didn’t let himself be cheated or taken advantage of….!”
You see how present you are here to us, Josh. We even use you in our “cultural arguments.”

One thing we did this same morning was to visit a primary school near our hotel. It has a big sign “Visit Us” and we were called in by a teacher—a science teacher who showed us his classroom (devoid of much—very few chemicals, two or three small microscopes) and told us how he has trouble teaching evolution—the children and families protest at the idea, saying it is “godless.” He took us to meet another teacher and that teacher’s class and we saw the class “perform”, replying in musical unison to the teacher’s questions, the various reading groups standing up when he called on them. I pulled out the book I was carrying (Emily Dickinson) and told the children how much I loved reading and that I always carried a book with me. We were shown some student art and I pointed to a little statuette and asked who had done it and the proud boy stood up to applause. We could see the teacher was excellent—he was teaching everything: art, English, math, science, and in addition, had three blind kids doing Braille and a group of deaf children. He showed us a display of what the children wanted to do when they grow up—being a tourist guide was high on the list! (Many children have already told us that—they see the ready money handed out to guides.) But there were also teachers, doctors and one kid who wants to be “prime minister!” We asked who it was—it was one of the blind students—who stood up and was applauded too! As we left we shook the hand of the “future prime minister.” (And let’s hope the PM is changed soon in this country where he holds dictatorial powers and suppresses all opposition). We were then taken to the director’s office—a tall lanky fellow, and at that point it was clear a donation would be welcome. I was happy to make one and gave 300 bir (about 30 dollars)—and they gave me a receipt, and we made a list of things they need I might send except that there is theft at the post office so what I might send might never arrive. Nevertheless giving to a school or organization in a poor country is one way of confronting the poverty and the “give me give me” children—making sure one’s money goes directly to help children. (I hope and assume! Unless the teachers pocket it of course, being paid so little themselves.)
Later note: F talked to someone in the town who spoke English well and who said the teachers take the money for themselves. Ach, is it true?

Friday, April 17, 2009, Lalibela, Ethiopia
Dear Josh, well we had an adventure Wednesday, one of those adventures that while it is happening is a miserable experience but which will perhaps in retrospective become a good travel story we can laugh about with friends. At any rate, you I know would have mightily enjoyed hearing about our “adventure”, laughing over it with us.
So, we had read in the guidebook about a rock hewn church about an hour and a half away (by very bad road)—it sounded interesting especially because of a bunch of skeletons supposedly behind it—your cup of tea and François’s too! Hiring a car cost 7000 bir, about $70—this is really pricey but of course it’s tourist prices again. But there was supposedly a “short cut” you could take by mule and when we asked about it at the hotel they said they could arrange it and it would be more interesting, going through the countryside….It was 20 miles there (and 20 back). I was a little apprehensive (on mules the whole day) but also remembered a mule ride in Folegrandros, Greece with our cousin that had been sublime. So we said OK for Wednesday—200 bir per person ($40 total) which we knew was inflated too but all tourists prices are—what can one do?
At six am the mules were waiting. We quickly ate breakfast and packed a lunch and water and went out—and there, first unpleasant moment—we were asked to pay all at once, and not to the two mule drivers but to a slick looking middle-aged “middleman” who reminded us we had to tip the drivers!! In other words, the two mule drivers who were doing all the work were probably getting nothing of the 400 bir—we were expected to add the “tip” for them! We should have canceled right then, but we did not. Awkwardly we got on the mules and of course made a spectacle of ourselves riding through the whole town—old foreign tourists (because yes, now we’re old!) lumbering by the natives on mules!
Once through the town, we came to the edge of the mountain on which Lalibela is built and were told we had to get off the mules. In fact, we had to descend the very steep mountain slope on foot!! I had worn sandals which weren’t appropriate for the slippery gravel-dirt descent. I fell a couple times and finally had to take off my sandals and descend barefoot. Meanwhile, the spectacle coming up the mountain as we were going down was heart-rending. Here were the poorest of the poor, women, older men, and especially many children, making their way up the mountain with incredible loads—bent over with carrying firewood, or huge heavy sacks full of leaves or other things, often too carrying long wooden planks (how could they even lift them, let alone climb a mountain with them?), others moving up with long banana fronds. It was an incredible sight. Beautiful (with the background of the mountains and the early morning mist) and horrendous.
Meanwhile, I was causing a sensation because I was walking down the rocky mountain barefoot! Astonishment and not a little admiration perhaps!
We reached the bottom and got back on the mules and rode across a short flat area through a thatched hut village where snot-nosed children ran out to see us (of course holding out their hands), past a somewhat green area with a dribble of a stream, and then, suddenly, we were facing another steep mountain, and I realized we were going to climb up it (somehow I had imaged our mule trip across completely flat land the whole time, foolish of me in this mountainous country at 2000 meters altitude)! We started up. It got rockier and rocker and it was exhausting (we were bent over trying to keep the mule moving and not fall off and crack our heads on the sharp rocks). And of course by then it was hot. Near the top my poor mule stumbled on the rocks and went down with me on him, his legs just bent double under him. I screamed of course, got myself off the poor creature, with the two mule drivers trying to get me up (while I’m saying, “no, no get the mule up!”) I didn’t much like my mule driver either who was entirely too touchy-feely—instead of prodding the mule on his rump, he preferred putting his hand on mine, and I finally had to shout at him!
At that point, still not at the top, I said to F that I thought we should recognize we’d made a mistake and return right then—for it was clear to me that on the return trip, we would have climb down this rocky mountain by foot (too steep and rocky to go down on a mule) and THEN, climb up the mountain to the town, also too steep for the mules. But better to do all that now then have to do it when we would be even more exhausted on the way back.
But F refused. He was determined to go on. I had no choice, I didn’t want him to go alone. This mountain of rock seemed to never end, but finally we did seem to reach the summit, a grassy treeless place with huge flat rocks all over it. We rode awhile and came to what seemed a road, we thought that must be the road and we couldn’t be far from the church.
Wrong again. We turned to the right, and the “road” just became a trail again but it lead out into a fairly green mountain plateau dotted with little villages, all the round thatch houses, no corrugated metal up here, we were already far from civilization. Children’s hellos echoed through the valley and a few followed us from time to time, then we had one young man following us for a long stretch, he could speak broken English and we asked him to find out from our drivers how far the church was (neither of whom spoke English), and got the quote of an hour and a half. What this poor fellow wanted was a “sponsor” to help him leave Ethiopia and I had to let him know this was impossible, and he soon after left us. By then my legs were aching from being on the donkey and I had to get off and walk awhile—but I felt quickly out of breath and think it must have been the altitude—we were probably at 3000 meters by then. So painfully got back on my beast! We kept thinking we would soon see the church. We began climbing again—and then, came the shock. We’d reached a kind of pinnacle and got off the mules to look—and there stretched out in front of us were just endless mountains, not a habitation to be seen anywhere, but what we did see, leading down from where we stood was a very narrow footpath winding precariously around the next mountain, path which we were clearly intended to follow. Impossible! Unbelievable! I could not believe what we were going to have to do, circle a whole mountain on a narrow crumbling footpath with a plunging steep mountain wall on our left for the whole distance—and I with my slippery sandals, not even hiking shoes. There was no question of going on the mules, that would have been even more perilous!!! There was no choice either not to take that path—by then we’d come too far, and we couldn’t remain in that deserted place.
So we started down. F’s mule driver often held my arm and I was obliged to let him as the path was so crumbly and without support I knew I could slip and fall. F was in front, picking his careful way along, warning me about particularly dangerous passages. When I could, I clutched hold of the rock on our right, and tried to stay as far away from the mountain edge as I could. But the path was so narrow—the drop long and terrifying alongside of us. The other mule driver followed with the two mules. This treacherous walk seemed to go on forever, we circled the one side of the mountain, and then had to continue on the other side. I was very frightened much of the way, afraid to slip and fall, partly because by then I was exhausted and my legs were shaking. And of course I was wearing those slippery sandals!
Finally however the path began to wind down the mountain, it got wider, we were no longer on the edge. It led down through a forest of pine. But here too the path was incredibly rocky and so it was still not possible to ride the mules—in fact, our “mule ride” turned out to mostly be prolonged trek by foot.
Several times we had the feeling the mule drivers didn’t really know the way. We came to a village on a grassy slope—and they walked up to someone and talked with him, and then tied up the donkeys there under a tree, so the church by then could not be far. However, it had been clear to me for a long time and had become clear to F as well that returning the same way was impossible! (Climbing up and down three mountains again?!!!! And returning on that perilous path—perhaps at night?!!!)
Finally we were in front of the church—or rather, the cave under which the church was to be found, blocked by an ugly cement wall. When we saw the ugly wall, and realized the church was in the darkness of a cave, neither of us even wanted to go see it. It looked dark and gloomy and it was 75 bir per person (per foreigner) ($30 total!) for the entrance fee. So we gave our mule drivers their “tip” and made it very clear (to their astonishment) that we would not be returning with them, and we walked down into the miserable little village below where we sat on the “porch” of the first shelter we came to, drinking a Pepsi and wondering how we would get out of that god forsaken place.
There was one 4x4 in the village, the only vehicle we could see, and that was my hope. Of course we were quickly surrounded and some young men told us the car belonged to 3 government men who were having a meeting in the village. I was about to go down to find them and ask them if we could get a ride back with them, but we were told by the young men to wait. The driver of the vehicle came up and there was a conversation between him and the young men and then we were told that yes, we could get a ride back, but it would cost us 400 bir (the price of our mules!) I thought that strange, but beggars cannot be choosers and there seemed to be no other way out of there—though I still hoped to talk directly to the government men. Meanwhile I had handed out all my balloons—it looked like a party in the village.
After about an hour of waiting, suddenly we heard a beautiful roaring noise and saw the dust of another vehicle arriving—another 4x4 but this one a tourist car! And inside that big car, just ONE tourist! F went tearing after the car and by the time I got to where it had parked, we were saved. The tourist was a young French woman, she had hired the whole car, and of course she could take us back to Dinhar Bar. She went off to see the church (she was there for that) while we collapsed in the car. The young village men were still hanging around--they wanted to know how much we were paying for the ride! We said we weren’t paying—that the tourist was a fellow countrywoman, we were in trouble, she was helping us—it wasn’t about money!
But it was about money for them! When our new friend returned, suddenly we had a problem. Her driver and guide told us we would have to pay for the ride! We argued—the French tourist had hired the whole car, and paid for it, and it was the same price for one or for six!!! Meanwhile, those once so-friendly young men, hanging still at the windows, continued talking, and we were suddenly enlightened by the guide—the young men claimed that this second driver was taking away their business, that we had agreed to pay 400 for the first car. In other words, the first driver and the young hangers-on had made their own arrangement to milk us (probably without ever talking to the “three government men”) and they couldn’t stand the idea their prey and “their” money was escaping. We left them in a cloud of disgust!
We stopped in the countryside at another church our French benefactor wished to visit. I walked down through the little wood (and across a stream) to see the outside of the church but wasn’t tempted to go inside, instead rejoined F (who’d been feeling carsick). We sat down on the ground in a small woods and little by little, children emerged from nowhere until we had 14 children who formed a ring around us, staring at us solemnly. No one asked for anything—we were out of tu-tu country there. No one spoke. No one even said hello. Just watched us in rapt fascination.
So we put on a little show for them. We sang some songs. We pointed out the cows, the sheep, the dog going by, and made the animal sounds for each one, in our own language of course. Ba-ba. Moo. MOOOOOOOOOO! Woof, woof, woof! The children were convulsed in laughter! We talked to them in English, I flirted with a little baby, trying to get her to come over to me (which she was of course afraid to do). We recited poems. We gave them quite a show and they were the perfect audience. F was making jokes about our “spectators”….how for a modest price we’d filled our grandstand…..
It was really, as F called it, a moment of grace. Perhaps the first one we’ve had so far during our stay in this country. Even though the children didn’t understand exactly what we were saying, they got the gist of it, and even though they didn’t say a word back to us, their laughter was communication enough—it felt like the first real contact we had had with Ethiopians, something genuine, fresh, pure, direct, François and me and fourteen kids under a shady woods somewhere in Ethiopia reaching out to one another.
Then our French friend arrived and it was time for goodbyes and I sang mine to the children.
There wasn’t another car on the road the whole way back. We felt very lucky to have gotten rescued and made a date with Francesca to have dinner the next night to thank her for having taken us home.
We were BONE TIRED as we walked back to the hotel. Everything in our bodies ached. We had a very quick dinner and went to our room where we watched a movie on my computer to unwind from “the day of the mule ride.”

Saturday, April 18, 2009, Lalibela, Ethiopia
Dear Josh,
I wonder if François is becoming you. You are certainly one of the people he has most admired in life—and now he even looks a little more like you, hair-wise at least—all due however to a major cultural misunderstanding!
He left our hotel room Thursday morning looking his usual self, my “Grey Wolf” as you know I call often call him, but two hours later when he returned he was “a shorn lamb”—all his long grey hair had been shaved completely off! He had decided on an impulse to have his hair cut—and before he realized what was happening, the “barber’ had taken an electric razor and cut it to the skull.
Your style was always cropped close—it’s how we always knew you and so it never seemed strange (perhaps a hold-over from your military days thought it had a more “monkish” quality for us.) But F has always had his curly locks—brown when I first knew him, and then—when did it happen? neither of us can point to the moment—silvery grey. A “high” forehead, yes (and getting higher with the years) oh but that was just his intellectual forehead, and with enough on the back and sides to merit the appellation “Grey Wolf.”
Wolfie he is no more!
It was a tremendous shock to me—because suddenly, it wasn’t François before me but his father Georges. Without his hair (or—as years before, when F cut his beard) the resemblance is very much the same—and of course now whenever I see François without his hair, I am reminded of our great ages, and how time relentlessly marches on. Don’t get me wrong, I liked F’s father Georges—but he always looked old—bald pate (he shaved it too!), round middle, pouches under his eyes, and thick neck. My handsome lively brown-eyed Frenchman didn’t look anything like his old turtle father!
So you see my quandary! I want my young François back. My Grey Wolf.
Once before—maybe fifteen years ago now—F was in Georgia in the US and in order to attend a cult religious ceremony with snakes (cult that was against beards), he cut off his beard! And the same thing happened—it was such a shock to see him beardless after 17 years of a beard that I didn’t recognize him—and again, saw his father in him. I felt I was suddenly living with a stranger, for in those 17 bearded years, his craggy face had become a round one. The beard of course grew back. And I found again the François I knew (though I always knew after that there was a secret different presence underneath the one I knew).
His hair will grow back too of course. The bristle will turn to the silvery locks I love.
And he and I will go back to our illusion of still being young and never never becoming our parents or our grandparents!

Orthodox Easter, Sunday, April 19, 2009, Lalibela
Dear Josh,
It’s Ethiopian Easter Sunday, and our last day in Lalibela. We’ve been here nine days! I can’t say I love Lalibela despite its beautiful name (sounds like the word for dragonfly in French, libulule). It’s too brown, too dusty and too poor. But I admit I have gotten a little attached to its people, very gentle and nice despite the persistent “give mes” (most from the boys I have to say), and especially to our hotel (where we’ve met some interesting travelers—a couple from South Africa, and a woman from Oregon! Betsy with her two cute adopted kids!). What I most love about our hotel is our large terrace view. I need to record it now as I’m sitting here in front of it for our last sunset.
We look directly down into a village—most roofs made of the silver and red corrugated metal but a few thatched huts as well, three just directly below us (no doubt the poorest in the village are those with the traditional huts), and so we have cameo glimpses into the life of the people of this village—the women washing their clothes in large pans of water in their dirt “yards”, preparing food over fires, talking to their neighbors, or walking along the dirt path that runs through the village with water jugs on their backs, or coming back from the market carrying a live chicken. Occasionally kids look up and see us and yell hello.
This morning we woke at six and I went out onto the balcony. Today the Orthodox Christians break their fast and there is major feasting. I looked out to the right, down into the dirt yard there and saw two men wrestling with a goat, holding it down. I realized their were about to kill the goat for their Easter dinner and quickly called F in case he wanted to photograph the event. Indeed, just then there was a loud awful goat noise—they had slit its throat and the goat lay there in the yard bleeding. F took some photos. Then the men began skinning the goat and cutting it into pieces—no going to the grocery store here for Easter dinner.
(Yesterday, Saturday, was the big weekly market and there was a huge goat market—many people leaded their purchased goats home—for Easter sacrifice!)
We also the first day here saw a gathering of shouting crying people near one of the houses down below and realized it was a funeral and we followed it into the town but funerals go on forever here and after a long time of their chanting and crying, we returned home (the defunct was wrapped in cloth and carried on a kind of stretcher with long poles).
There is constant noise coming up from our “view.” Roosters seem to begin crowing at about four am and keep it up all day long—working here in the hotel room (I’ve been doing some translations I had to bring with me) I have felt several times like strangling their scrawny necks. Chickens cackle all day long too and there are many birds—I saw a beautiful one in a eucalyptus tree just below—it had a blue-black head and two very long white flowing tail feathers looking like fluttering ribbons. Music too seeps out of the houses, and there is a great braying of donkeys! And of course, people’s voices, and sheep and goat baaing—sometimes quite hysterically—and babies crying and dogs barking.
Beyond the village are brown-red hills with green dots of yucca and scrubby bushes and beyond them about four or five ranges of mountains, brown and treeless but which take on beauty just now at sunset when they turn blue-grey and misty. In the early morning children take out into those brown hills their little herds of sheep and goats and then there are white dots on the hills. Right now I see three children bringing back seven sheep. It’s always very young children who are the herders.
Today everyone is dressed in their Easter best—the women especially in their traditional dresses (white with bright colored sashes and decorated shawls), men and boys in white, little girls in their bright colored dresses. Only the very poorest of the poor or the country people are in their usual rags.
No one is in the churches today—they were there most of the night (until 4 am apparently) and are now pretty much prayed out! We went last night about nine—where we heard again the constant chanted prayers by the people all wrapped up in white. Some of them totally enveloped in their white robes or shawls were sleeping on the hard rock. Today is the day of celebrating and feasting. As there is little for F to photograph, we thought we’d picnic at noon today. We can see straight across from our balcony one ledge of land with trees on it, so we decided to walk there with our tea, mango, toast and honey and our books.
At the end of the cobbled road we saw the trees, beginning to the left—but they were behind a high locked fence!!! Those trees belong to the church!!! We went on down the road and found ourselves in that brown landscape—dusty—hot—and nary a single tree under which to picnic! We’d gone by the “luxury” hotel however on our way down the road, with its garden of bougainvillea and on the way back we went in just to see it and ended up having a fairly decent lunch for $10 of lamb goulash in their beautiful dining room. So much for picnics in Ethiopia!
The sun is just now sending out grey-golden rays from underneath a large blue and grey cloud—will it slide down underneath and give us a rosy sunset this Easter day or just disappear in pearly grey? We are out here, waiting to see.
A couple days ago we bought a bottle of ouzo—yes, like the Greek ouzo—and it actually tastes pretty much the same , so we have our glasses and are drinking to the sunset to come (we hope) and to our last evening in Lalibela. Wish you were here with us, Josh.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009, Bahir Dar ,Lake Tana
Dear Josh,
We’re back at the Ghion Hotel—the garden hotel—on Lake Tana. And as F just said, “it’s been a pretty easy trip.”
Yes, Josh, although Ethiopia has terrible roads and you and Laura had some trips lasting two days I believe, I’m ashamed to admit that faced with a long hard trip by road from Lalibela back here to Bahir Dar we chose to pay for plane tickets and so a trip taking a full day (for less than 200 kilometers) took us only a bumpy half an hour. I’m also a little embarrassed to say that instead of going to a new place after Lalibela, we decided to return to Lake Tana—to the beautiful Ghion garden. After ten days of barren dusty mountains, we longed for green and water. Perhaps because I grew up in green Oregon, my favorite landscapes are green. I like the forests, mountains—with trees!! I love of course the blue sea too, but stark brown landscapes are not my cup of tea—nothing is so bleak to me as stretches of tree-less land! Where is one to take shelter from the merciless sun? (And in fact, in Lalibela, amazingly enough, I met two women from my home state of Oregon! Both of them working in Addis Ababa. How nostalgia flowed from our lips as we could not say enough about our “home!”)
So driving through that brown northern Ethiopian landscape didn’t really tempt either of us—and so we leapt into the sky from Lalibela, descending just a few minutes later to the banks of Tana Lake.
Our first night here we didn’t get our favorite room (No. 5) but a dark and dingy annex room (The annexes of these hotels added later are never as good as the early ones—done fast and cheaply with one idea in mind—make money from the tourists.) The bathroom was grim and this time the shower had only boiling water! So we had to mix it in a dipper with cold from the sink to bathe. And it had tiny windows instead of the ceiling to floor ones we have in the “luxury” room. So it was a little depressing and as neither of us was hungry in the evening (we had eaten about three), we watched My Darling Clementine on my computer to cheer us up a little. I slept badly—I can’t take dingy rooms anymore (I never really could!) I remember how even in Banaue and later in Ayuthya, we separated for hotels, Josh, I dragging off F to slightly more upscale ones that you were taking. Of course we were only traveling one and a half months that time—you were on a much longer journey and had to be more frugal.
The same is true this trip—it’s only about a month and so we’ve been able to take nicer hotels--$46 a night in Lalibela—and we stayed nine nights. A splurge but well worth it given I needed a comfortable place to work while F was out photographing.
So very little suffering on this trip, dear friend. Just the one night of being so sick right at first—and then the colds we both picked up in Lalilbela—but those are gone now, and we both feel pretty good, and especially, I am back to this lush and splendid garden, so rich in birdlife! (Yes, I’ve become something of an amateur bird watcher, because of living in Jonchères and identifying my own local birds.)
In the evenings here we walk along the lake path to a kind of café-bar-pavilion set right on the water. Terraces have been built going down the sloping bank, all set with chairs and tables, all facing the lake, and then, there is a pier which leads out over the water to a real pavilion floating on the water—you must pay two bir to go out there (a few cents). This place is popular with Ethiopians, and is charming. We go out to the pavilion, sit along one side of it taking beer or coke and watching the bird life: pelicans, ibis of many varieties, eagles, and many small sea birds skimming across the water or diving down for fish. In this place—or in our hotel garden—we are removed from the Ethiopian poverty. Here is a “middle class”—the young couples hold hands, families come, everyone is dressed nicely—it’s the first and only place really (except in our hotel oases) where life seems normal—where the people around us are more “like us”, enjoying the normal pleasures of life. And of course while eyes do light on us a little more often than is usual, no one asks us for anything nor even intrudes on us with their hellos, where are you from.
So at least we know there is a population that is a little better off here—a minority no doubt but still—this city is more prosperous and more of a tourist destination, and also for Ethiopians who come here on vacation.
So here we are spending the last few days of our trip in this garden we both fell in love with—I’ve got a bouquet of magnolia flowers next to the bed and bowls of their blooms around the room. I work here, doing my translations, take an occasional walk. F. goes out “into the dusty world” periodically to hunt for photos—it’s quiet and peaceful.
On Friday we will take a mini-bus or bus back to Addis, stay two days there—and we fly home Sunday night. I must confess—I’ll be glad to get home! but I will have to confess also that I’m glad I came. Even if I’m not the traveler I used to be, even if I’m no longer avid about seeing more and more and more (I’ve seen so much really of the world, its beauty and squalor, it’s enough for me I think), still I realize once again at the end of these weeks here how travel does enrich one. We’ve met interesting travelers, we’ve seen yet another different culture and society, we’ve again learned to appreciate the great gift we were given at birth—growing up in a prosperous and democratic society, reaping the benefits of education, never fearing not to have enough to eat, having medical care always available and, for myself, having experienced only minimum discrimination as a woman. (We’ve spoken to women working here in medical capacities to help Ethiopian women, the vast majority of whom suffer from lack of basic health care. We were told that the women here also get less to eat than the men, do all the heavy work of lifting, housework, field work, often give birth with no medical help at all which can result in horrible health conditions they have to live with afterwards, and on top of all that, girls are still subject to vaginal cutting!) We’ve added to our store of memories and shared experiences and, for me, a little corner of Africa has opened up: the “dark continent” now contains for me rock-hewn churches, a luminous garden, monasteries on islands, tremendous bird life, a thousand kids asking where I’m from and when I say America, all shouting “Obama!!!” In fact, from an ambassadress of shame (these past eight years), I’ve become an ambassadress of hope. The day I wore my Obama t-shirt in Lalibela, even adults smiled and said the magic word: O-BAM-A!
Why travel? To go deeper into the world. To learn. to move. to share. To make encounters. To contemplate. It’s true that however hard it can be, travel is the true education where one learns not only about the world but about oneself.

April 23, Thursday, Lake Tana, Ethiopia
Dear Josh,
These are our last few hours here “in the garden.” I’ve spent most of my time sitting on “my” front porch translating my Monaco texts (today on Russian furniture!) with breaks for lunch and breakfast over by the lake. This morning when I was out on the path--I had stopped to gaze up at the trees looking for birds,--the little “watering man” came up to me with a branch of magnolia flowers. I was very touched—I placed it in a glass of water and brought it outside and placed it on the windowsill. About half an hour later, he was at my door, adding a yellow and red bloom to my bouquet. This is one of the nicest gift of flowers I have ever received. This man spends all day every day watering the garden, with a break at lunch. I wanted to give him something—though he has this job, he is nonetheless one of the poorest of the poor, cracked sandals, ragged pants full of holes, a worn jacket over a red T-shirt. He’s stooped and grey-haired and has a gentle friendly face. I can tell he lives for this garden. I saw him later just sitting on a stone in the flower bed over by the pink rooms, just contemplating. Later, he was again watering in front of my room, and I took him 50 bir, motioning around the garden so he could understand I was thanking him for his part in making this place so beautiful. He speaks no English which in a way makes our rapport more rather than less real—he didn’t ask for anything but gave the first gift.
This morning at breakfast we saw a monkey again in the high branches—and two ducks on the thatched roof of the open-air dining place by the river—and when we got up from our breakfast table to look more closely at them, turning back we found our table full of birds pecking away at our food! I counted more than ten, many of them different varieties. And later F finally saw the white ribbon-tailed bird (with its black blue head and rusty back). All these birds are ones we’ve never seen before, except the bigger ones—the pelicans, ibis etc. This is a place I shall certainly never return to—I shall have no reason to return to Ethiopia—but here I am right now, sitting in this garden, hearing a loud cawing of birds over by the lake, twitters above my head. The little gardener has gone home. I’ll never see him again, nor the competent manager of this hotel who lives with a cell phone attached to his ear—busy as an PDG! This particular combination of fauna and flora will soon be only memory, enhanced by our photographs. I wish I could take a part of it with me—but a part wouldn’t be enough, for what makes this garden exceptional is its size, its many many trees all intermingling above our heads, the great variety of plant and bloom—and especially the hundreds of tall red and yellow flowers like elegant candles which go on showering their light all through then night.
Was experiencing this single garden worth the trip? Well, why not? Certainly for any garden lover! I love its wild profusion and how it dominates the place and all the people in it—unlike for example Parisian gardens where the actual flower-beds are always subordinate to the over-all formal design made by man. Here although man certainly planted much of this and man waters it, one feels nonetheless that nature designed it and continues doing so, letting magnolia tree intertwine with acacia and fichus and with those tall-stalked tropical trees and with palms. Here there is beautiful natural harmony and we visitors are just its accessories.
So goodbye Hotel Ghion garden—we shall leave you before dawn tomorrow, but other travelers will take our place—the garden will be full of other admirers night after night, season after season. This garden will certainly continue to exist probably until long after we ourselves (and its little waterer) have left the earth.

Sunday, April 26, 2009, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Dear Josh,
Our trip is coming to an end. A ten hour bus ride on the “luxury” Selam bus with comfortable seats, free soft drinks, water and bread plus ten hours of Ethiopian music and videos, brought us back from Bahir Dar to Addis Ababa Friday. It so happened that the Selam bus station is just next to the old yellow train station—yes, the Addis Ababa-Djibouti line! We had all our luggage with us and the place was teeming with people so we couldn’t linger then, we grabbed a taxi, promising ourselves to make a return visit, mostly because of you and Laura—we wanted to go into the station where the two of you got your train for Djibouti, train that you told us was not only an endlessly long trip to begin with but which hit a cow during the journey halting you for several hours (or were you coming from Djibouti to here—no matter, we wanted to see the station, the line, the tracks of this famous railway line).
We’re staying at the oldest hotel in Ethiopia—the Taitu—just the kind of grand old fading glory hotel we love, built in 1898 (finished a month before my grandmother was born) with some of the original light fixtures, all the old original wood paneling and doors and a beautiful curving stairway going up to the first floor where the ten bedrooms are. There are other annexes with ordinary rooms (where we stayed last time) but we reserved in the main hotel with its high ceilings, antique furniture, hard wood floors and balcony. It’s not luxury, this is a budget hotel, we pay $20 a night, and our room has no private bathroom so we have to go out to the two communal ones with their broken tile and faulty plumbing, but it’s chock full of turn-of-the-century charm. So we got our room after ten hours of travel, just relaxed around the hotel, had some beer and dinner, and collapsed early.
But Saturday was our day to give Addis Ababa a second chance—we spent just one rainy day here and couldn’t get our bearings, saw mostly the underbelly of this city (a most significant one). Saturday was a little cloudy at first but then sunny and this time we saw some actually nice areas—first, took a taxi to the University and the Ethnography Museum there. The gardens of the university are lush and beautiful too, and we were again surrounded by “normal-looking” people, well-dressed students—it’s another oasis in this country—no one asking us for anything. But I was wearing my Obama T-shirt which is a big hit here—I got so many smiles and nods and shouts.
Great museum, an excellent over-all view of Ethiopia’s multicultures and traditional ways of doing things and as I was going through the museum, I was thinking that there is really nothing wrong with traditional simple ways of existence if only they could be sufficient to feed and clothe people. People do not need all the modern accruements but they do need adequate health care, education for the children, sufficient food, and women need to have equal rights with men—and it doesn’t seem either the traditional life or the modern life is providing these things to those in need here.
We enjoyed looking at the icons and the museum’s music rooms, and especially, yes, this would be what you liked best too, Josh I bet, seeing Halle Selassie’s bedroom and especially bathroom with its two blue sinks, blue tube, toilet, bidet. How the mighty have fallen!
In the afternoon we finally found and walked down Churchill Street, the “main” business street in Addis Ababa. At the top of the hill it was still pretty squalid—so many homeless beggars, people lying on the sidewalks and in vacant lots—and lots of people asking us for money or to buy things—half-constructed buildings never finished….But further on it got slightly more chic—Ethiopian Airways, the Derg Monument (Marxist), the Ministry of Defense (behind barbed wire and large cement blocks) and then, all the way down to the very end of the street, the yellow Gare, built by a French architect in 1929. A charming yellow and white building but closed. Well, closed to train traffic. No trains have gone out of this station in years now. I managed to get into the building a first time and out onto the quay but was chased out by three raggedy “guards” and when I tried to get back in with F, we nearly quarreled with them, they absolutely would not let us in, physically barring the way. We could not go into the empty station though they could not tell us why. We got a little angry—yes, lost our cool—then started up a stairway to the right of the station which leads over the tracks and up which many people were going—at least we could look down over the back of the station from up there. But as we were climbing up it, one of the raggedy guards came chasing again after us, this time to tell us we could go in the station!
Well, not quite so simple. We were led to a back room, past closed counters, piled up desks, to a room where a little man sat at a huge desk. Three French people were just leaving. and the little man was tucking some money into his desk. He greeted us happily, and told us he would personally take us himself on a tour of the building. We had no choice but of course we understood this would not be free! He spoke French and insisted on giving us all the details of the train station, showed us where the people stood to get their tickets (and I seemed to see you and Laura there in a row of noisy ragged people), and then we went out onto the empty quay and there too, I felt your two shadows there, could so well imagine the crush of people and you two among them waiting for your train with the incredible exotic name “The Addis-Ababa-Djibouti train.”
We walked along the tracks—grass grows in them now, sheep wander through grazing and a little boy was playing in the rails. We stopped to photograph a couple of completely dilapidated wagons, and I posed in front of one of them as if I was going off to Djibouti myself—we will send a photo to Laura. The little man insisted on showing us everything, the deserted hangar, the deserted and crumbling train cars, the hangar containing Selassie’s specially-built train cars (built by the French, he told us—De Gaulle had come and he and Selassie had supposedly ridden 250 kilometers together in them). At one point, the little guy’s cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket to talk! Telling us he would have a “group of tourists” tomorrow.
“But how do they know to call you?” I asked. I was quite amazed.
“I give my name to the tour guides,” he replied.
It was all so quiet. The end of the city, the end of the line, the end. The trains stopped running five or six years ago—though our “guide” told us that the Italians have given a lot of money to redo the rails and start the train running again.
But places can hold people intact within them no matter how many years have passed nor how many changes have come about. I know that François felt it too—your presence in that deserted yellow train station.
I was getting a bit concerned about the length of the “tour” and how much we would have to give this garrulous man. Finally he led us back to the office—we didn’t have much change, so F gave him 25 bir. Then the conflict began. The friendly little man was no longer so friendly. He told us we owed him 90 bir (almost $10) for the “tour” and as proof, he would deliver “receipts.” François had reached his limit with people asking for money—it is so constant here and as a result, as I’ve said before, it makes it impossible to have any kind of real relationship with anyone. I had naively thought our “guide” was sincerely interested in us (I had even mentioned you, Josh, to him) but all he cared about was our money. He started to grab hold of François and threatened us with the police! After such a threat, we certainly didn’t feel like giving him any more money! I told the man he should have told us the price before the “tour”, that we assumed it was just a friendly action and only merited a tip. But of course, there is no real “price” for the “tour”—he’s got a lucrative thing going on the side of his railway employment with tourists who want to see the station—this is why it is guarded—anyone who wants to go in has to pay him to see it! We managed to shake him off finally and we walked out, F fuming and wishing he had given the man nothing!
Just there was a tea salon-beer garden—and so as we could not have a drink in the old train station, we settled for the garden, drinking our beers and watching the light quickly dim over the city. While sitting there I was reflecting, Josh, on how your wife and companion Laura had bid you farewell last October when she went back to Death Valley—where you had gone together—to scatter your ashes in the place you had chosen. As for your other friends and family, they had attended the memorial service Laura had held for you by the sea outside of San Francisco, and had bid you farewell there. But François and I have never been able to say our farewells to you. For us, you are still somewhere in this world, if we could only get to that place.
Perhaps though, we were saying goodbye to you in that empty Addis Ababa-Djibouti train station, train station from which no trains depart anymore, saying our farewells as we walked along the train tracks now grown over with grass where sheep graze and children play, as we imagined the journey that you had taken on that line, as we imagined all the other journeys you took, as we thought of journeys in general, ours, yours, the miles crossed, the people encountered, the landscapes seen. A train is perfect as a symbol of the journey of life—we get on it when we are born, and it starts to move, taking us hither and yon, each one of us, every single human being, on their own unique journey no one of which is ever quite the same as that of any other’s, we stop, get off, see what is to be seen, meet who is to be met, get back on again, the journey starts up. Until one day, we have reached the end of our particular line, our own train halts, stops forever. Thus it was that in walking through the Addis Ababa train station, where many voyagers have come and gone, but where none come anymore, where the trains have stopped, it just seemed the perfect place to bid you our farewell, and I think that’s what François and I were doing as we lingered in that place, and as we photographed it, and ourselves in it. We had to find a place on the road to make our farewells, it had to be a place of journeys, it had to be exotic and have charm, it had to be a place you’d talked to us about: everything which we found at the yellow and white French-made Addis Ababa-Djibouti train station.

later Sunday, April 26, 2009, Addis Ababa, Hotel Taitu
Dearest Josh,
We met you traveling, our major link was travel, and it is in traveling, that we think of you most and miss you most. Even as I write these words, tears spring to my eyes and pain twists my heart (and this, despite our “farewell” to you this afternoon at the train station). I still cannot accept or believe you are no longer anywhere in this world you loved so much and more of which you saw than the great majority of mankind living or dead—you were so much a part of the world—at home on any continent, in any country, making your calm and steady way through it, taking it all in, observing, feeling, living oh so richly and fully, content not only with the paradises you found but even with the hells—it was all part of beautiful mind and body-expanding experience, of visions, sounds, sights, colors, odors, encounters! How much you knew, how much you saw, Josh. There were so many stories you still had to tell us, we still had a lifetime of travel experiences to share. And yet, you are gone. It’s unjust, unfair, cruel, terrible—we know others just biding their time in life, taking no pleasure, just existing—who yet still breathe and see even if through a fog of incomprehension—whereas you, so absolutely fully into life, can no longer participate in the world’s glories.
Our great consolation is very simply that you had already done and experienced enough for several lifetimes! And even if François and I continue to go on with our travels a few more years, we will still only be following where you have already gone before. Following in your footsteps.
Dearest Josh, as I sit here on this little outdoor terrace of our hotel this last day in Ethiopia (my 50th country!), writing you these letters you will never read, let me tell you again how very greatly you are missed by both of us. Nothing will ever quite be the same in our lives now without you, and especially in our travels. But what is sure, and this trip has been the proof of it, is that your smiling joke-cracking generous unique shadow will always be following along with ours, on whatever journey we take from now until we too reach the end of the road on our own special trains which one particular day (date unknown to us) will make a final stop only for us.