The Black Country

Surprise! I’m back and ready to reveal all… within reason.

I’ve just returned from a wonderful and intensive tour of Ethiopia, which means: the black people. It’s an amazing country, full of archaeology and history, volcanoes and lava, camels, donkeys and birds of many sorts, religion and tribes, music, dancing, paintings and much more. Although we were busy every single day of the nineteen, I’m sure there’s plenty we didn’t see. In fact, there were two things we expected to see and didn’t. More about that later.

This is the notebook (given to me by my friend, Marallyn) in which I recorded activities, impressions, etc. Some of my scribblings are legible, I think. Some of them can probably only be deciphered by me. They were written while bouncing around in a jeep in the Dannakil Desert.

There’s even some music.

I plan to find a way of using it all – after writing everything else I have planned. In the meantime, when we’ve sorted out the photos, I’ll post some of them here.

What didn’t we see? The lava at Erta Ale as shown on YouTube. That’s because there was an eruption on the day we visited. (The previous eruption, we were told, was in 2005, although Wikipedia says 2009.) We climbed all the way up, but weren’t allowed to get near enough to see bubbling lava, although we watched the eruption from afar. We also weren’t allowed to sleep at the top, as planned, and had to walk down again the same night. We were lucky, though, because groups arriving after us weren’t allowed up there at all.

We also didn’t see a regular ceremony that includes bull jumping (that doesn’t harm animals, we were told) and dancing. The ceremony didn’t take place that week.

But the trip was amazing and I’ll definitely write more about it. Stay tuned…