The Road to Dafe Jema

The most difficult and stressful (and certainly dangerous) part of getting to Dafe Jema is the drive.  From Addis to Adama especially.  There is one main road that goes from Addis all the way to the ports of Djibouti, and that road passes through Adama. The road has only two official lanes, one going in either direction, and they are dominated by huge trucks hauling cargo. These trucks inch along, as if the drivers are paid by the hour, and they travel close together, making it difficult and dangerous for cars to pass.  And the truck drivers seem to take pleasure in their ability to delay and frustrate the other drivers.  They smile as you drive by, taking your life in your hands.  I guess they need some way to pass the time.

Ethiopian drivers, however, fear nothing, not even oncoming traffic. They will happily pass a long line of large trucks, even on a curve and even across  a bridge.  It doesn't matter, so long as they see some theoretical daylight between them and where they are heading. And if the traffic coming towards them is somehow too thick, they simply opt for the unofficial dirt lane on the right, which we would call the shoulder.  All the while they are leaning on their horns to warn pedestrians and other drivers not to test their determination.  Meanwhile, the shoulder is everywhere  sprinkled and in some places  saturated with farmers, many of whom are just children, herding goats or cows or carrying bundles of grain or corn or sticks--all headed to the market. As night falls, the farmers are replacd by young men, smiling and laughing, dressed in American clothes and walking to the nearest pub, of which there are many along this road, which further erodes one's confidence in the safety of the situation. It is a miracle that any car traveling this route ever avoids getting squashed by a truck or colliding head on with another car or killing someone or someone's livestock on the side of the road. And yet they do.  

Or we did.  Our driver was not your average Ethiopian cabbie, however. As mentioned in a previous post, he is a professor of geophysics.  And that means something in a driver.  At least in Ethiopia.  It means he has driven to every corner of the country in search of seismic anomalies or rock formations that are conducive to freshwater wells.  His specialty is studying the great rift itself.  He is the person who sets up research posts to measure the extent and nature of the movement of the plates that collide to form the horn of Africa..  He actually set up a research station years ago within 15 miles or so of Dafe Jema, a fact he recalled only as we drove past the station.  (He told a great story there of the time he drank some local liquor that was offered to him, which of course he couldnt refuse, and that gave him such a stomach ache that he had to abandon his car and phone a friend to come get him. Good times.) He has a four wheel drive Toyota land cruiser, and he was more than able to handle the Addis-to-Adama traffic. When we got past Adama and were on the rural roads to Dafe jema, Shimeless became a fount of interesting facts.  For example, he explained at one point that we were crossing a plain called a caldera, a place where a gigantic earthquake had erupted millions of years ago and then collapsed on itself, into the empty magma chamber.  All around us were the peaks left at the edge of the collapsed volcano. We were in effect crossing a volcano grave.

He also regaled us with stories of his adventures, the scrapes he'd been in and the close calls.  He is the one who was worried about the extremist presence in the area, and he told an uncomfortably scary story of a time when he and an American co-researcher had been among Somalis on the day the Somali pirates were killed by the American navy seals.  He told them his friend, who was from Montana, was German.  They bought it.  We planned to use France in the unlikely event we found ourselves among Somali pirate sympathizers. Shimeless said that would be fine, that they wouldn't be able to distinguish our accents.  Good to know.

We picked up two of Feleke's brothers during the drive.  Kabede in Adama and Sime in Dera. Sime is the oldest of e siblings, in his late 30s, and e most successful professionally so far.  He is a policeman in Dera, which is a job of high esteem and good pay.  He is usually very serious and rarely smiles, Feleke tells us, but he was smiling on this day.  We picked him up at the police station, as he requested, and he seemed very proud to be getting into the land cruiser with our group.  He came bringing wine for the party.

Eventually we came to a point where the road bent right and a dirt path continued to the left past a cluster of traditional Ethiopian mud huts.  We pulled off there, and Shimeless decided to park his car and go with us.  He had been planning to stay in his car and work on his laptop, but the stories of Feleke's family had captured his imagination, and he wanted to see the celebration.  It was here that our car got stuck in a mud ditch, so deep that the 4 wheel function was not enough to free us.  A group of men and boys came to offer advice and then to offer their shoulders.  The eldest among them actually got a tool from his hut to dig some dry dirt to fill in around the spinning tires.  We were able then to push it out.  Kabede told me how to say thanks for the help in oromiffa, which made them gasp and then laugh.  

On the road to Dafe Jema, the volcanic ring around the Caldera.

This group of characters helped us get our Land Cruiser unstuck from some serious mud.  The guy on the far left kep his face covered the entire time, although he seemed very interested in what was going on.

This is where we, Thomas and Shimeless and I, were required to mount horses.  The horses were on the small side, but they were sure footed and were decorated for the occasion.  We were then led for over an hour along a narrow path, sometimes muddy, sometimes rocky.  

That is Sime, Feleke's oldest brother, on the left, and Derege on the right, fixing the ceremonial head gear on the horse.

Thomas mounts his steed as well.  We are obviously too big for these horses, but these are the ones they brought.  And actually, they seem to manage the difficult footing quite well.

They even had a horse for Shimeless, pictured here in the back.

The scenery on all sides was simply astonishing.  It was more than rolling hills.  It was rounded mountains on both sides covered in different shades of gold and green, interspersed with lovely little huts.  There were friendly farming people working the fields here and there the old fashioned way, by hand, pulling weeds or using a Scythe to harvest the grass.  

The beautiful fields of wheat and millet all around us.

Here is one woman bringing some grain to market.

After a long while we came to a river, the river where Feleke and his family get most of their water, and our guides asked us to dismount so we could cross by bridge and they could lead the horses across.  (Feleke later got a big laugh out of that.  He always rides right across that river, no matter how high the water, but there was special treatment for the ferenji, who were, rightly, assumed to be novices on horseback.). 

It was in this valley, next to the river and at the base of the last and steepest hill to Feleke's village, that the landscape was most beautiful.  I wanted to get off my horse here and just sit down and look around, but we were on a tight schedule, as Shimeless had to be back in Addis later that evening.

***

I will describe the celebration in another post.  We go to the US embassy in the morning and from there to the Ethiopian immigration office, which will be the biggest challenge.  We will have the help of Dr. Rick's passport expert, Berhanu, and we will probably need it.