ANYWAY, ONTO THE INTERESTING STUFF the night in Nairobi, we were reading Connor’s guide book and discovered a place in the East of Ethiopia near the Somalia border called ‘Harar’. As soon as I saw the photo of a man feeding a hyena raw meat hanging from a stick in his mouth and read that it’s a tribal ritual that happens every night… I desperately wanted us to go there!
We landed in Addis, dropped our stuff at ‘mr martin’s cosy place’ where we had a small sleep before devising an Ethiopia itinerary over a jumbo mug of the apparently renowned Ethiopian coffee. Yum. In less than 30 minutes we were in a funky retro taxi listening to something that Ethiopian’s call music on our way to book 4 tickets TO HARAR PLEASE! We were told the bus journey takes 13 hours and only leaves daily at 5am. So after an afternoon and evening in Addis experiencing ‘Tej Bedt’ aka home brewed honey wine (a common Ethiopian drink that looks like orange juice and comes in the same conical flasks you get from a chemistry cupboard!) which we drank in a pretty garden packed only, other than us, with Ethiopians who had come for a civilized evening drink… We had such an adrenaline rush from being in Ethiopia and GOING TO HARAR TOMORROW. This time we didn’t knock ourselves out with tej bedt (if only we’d carried on beings so careful for the rest of the trip maybe I wouldn’t have tried to eat pot puree…) So, 6am the next morning and we were on our way (even though I lost my bus ticket!) to HARAAAR, the place with the best name ever. (Which the locals disappointingly pronounce Harur.) The landscape out of the window looked magnificent and we arrived in time to get a tuk-tuk to a hotel and arrange a guided tour around the old city (the third most holy city in the world after Jerusalem and Mecca apparently - i really will miss how random everything is here!) for the following day.
Other than trying to book a bus ticket to return to Addis the following day and finding out you’re supposed to book these things in advance, pffff, you don’t do things in advance while you’re travelling… so we had to stay in Harar an extra night – perrrfect. (well except for the fact that that meant we were getting the very last bus back to Addis to get to the airport in time to suprise Joe and Dom with ‘tall dark and handsome’ and ‘small funny and furry’ signs!)
So Harar, was fabulous. The old walled city was especially awesome. All of the locals are Bob Marley wannabe’s, and in all fairness they definitely pull it off as reggae kings with their ridiculously chilled attitude! They sit in the street and chew this local grown stuff called chat all day and eventually get black teeth from it at the age of 30, according to Will our guide, it’s totally worth it. So the elders can’t even look like they’re giving off a good example if they’ve left their ‘chat chewing days’ behind them because as soon as they even speak they completely give it away! And they ALL have black teeth! After our 2 day tour, will invited us to his friends (course he was a reggae king) house, for chats!, coffee and cinnamon tea (both of which come in a glass only a tiny bit bigger than a shot glass but they taste awesome nonetheless) and shish. Harar is also apparently the birth place of shisha, whatever but everyone owns a pipe. So we spent our Sunday afternoon casually chilling in a rasta’s house in HARAAAR with a load of other locals with the attitude ‘lets get together and feel alright…’ I remember Tom commenting on how typical ‘gap yaaar’ we were getting! Sickening, but it was pretty darn cool!
So Harar, really need to try and condense because this is only the first 3 days of a whole month in Ethiopia! The day after we arrived we made getting to the hyena feeding at 8pm our priority. We rocked up to this little village at the end of a dirt track that was practically in complete darkness and seemed pretty deserted, after a few minutes the hyena feeding guy heard us and came out… he started shouting out to behind rubbish tips and just generally into the darkness and gradually these HUGE hyena’s, literally way bigger than I expected started to come out of nowhere. We stood in silence watching him take strips of raw meat from a basket, put a twig from the ground into his mouth and hang the meat over it so the hyena’s lept up and grabbed it in their mouth’s to eat, thinking good god he’s crazy. About 2 minutes later the guy who bought us said you can have a go too you know… perrrrfect!
Anyway, to sum up the rest of Harar, cool clay coffee pots for less that £3, bags of the coffee that starkbuck’s import from THE shop, bags of frankincense (from Ethiopian trees), having discovered and made various trips to ‘the mermaid café’ the place where all the cool Hararians ate breakfast and that served the best custard apple (the nicest fruit) juice AND HAVE I SAID THAT WE ONLY SAW ONE NON ETHIOPIAN PERSON IN THE 3 DAYS WE WERE THERE… where is everyone, this place is AMAZING?!!!, and having chilled with some of the locals, had a tour of the city, seen a few museums… 3 days later we were back on a coach listening to more wacky screechy bible gone popish music for 14 hours on our way back to ‘mr martin’s cozy place’ to make signs to take to the airport where we would be reunited with Lad and mr.smooth, aka Joe and Dom!
