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Ethiopia: Rough Ride Home
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The East African (Nairobi)
OPINION
15 June 2008
Posted to the web 16 June 2008
Ernest Waititu
Nairobi
IT IS TUESDAY, MARCH 5, AT THE break of dawn in Addis Ababa. The sleepy city stirs to life.
Soon, residents of the city will be out and about in pursuit of their daily bread. I, too, must get up. I have a five-day road trip ahead of me.
Against the advice of many Kenyans in Addis Ababa, I will be making the journey from Addis to Nairobi by road, through the border town of Moyale. The distance to be covered is more than 1,600 km.
My compatriots say that besides the distance, the most of the route is brutal - a tough terrain.
I have been reporting from Addis for two months. The name Addis Ababa is Amharic for "new flower."
After five years in the US, I needed a taste of something African. Addis did not disappoint. But now I must decamp, leaving behind the sights, sounds and people I have been accustomed to for two months.
I am travelling to Nairobi with four American journalists.
At 7am, the driver picks us up from Bole, the suburb where we have been staying. After packing our bags, we have a quick breakfast then head south.
The road through the Ethiopian highlands is fairly good, lined with banana and other fruit trees. We arrive at a lakeside town called Awasa. It's lunchtime, out last taste of Ethiopian food for some time. I am not sorry that I won't eat injera again. This is Ethiopia's unofficial national dish. While Ethiopians swear by it, it is too sour for me.
I loved the other food though - this country's pastries are unbeaten. Their meat too is a departure from the bland stuff I had eaten for years in the US.
After lunch, we hit the road again, heading down into Ethiopia's lowlands. Here, the terrain, the plants and animals are different.
Pastoralists walk herds of goats, camels and cattle to pastures and water points.
Acacia shrubs dot the vast plains.
Night finds us at Yabello, some 550 km south of Addis Ababa.
Wednesday. I wake up and try my luck with a dipping shower of lukewarm water.
After breakfast, we leave Yabello for the border town of Moyale, a three-hour drive.
We arrive at 11.30. Before crossing the border, we need to convert the Ethiopian birr into Kenya shillings. To do that, we have to resort to the underworld - the youngsters line up the road with huge stacks of bank notes. No one knows how the exchange rates here compare with the official rates.
We enter Kenya and I am full of excitement at the thought of returning home. It all begins well, with the warm Kiswahili welcome from the young Kenyan administration police officer manning the border barrier.
"Sasa mambo iko sawa," (Things are OK now) he tells me, referring to the post-election violence early this year and the signing of the power-sharing deal between President Mwai Kibaki and ODM leader Raila Odinga.
However, what follows is an anticlimax. Forget the nonsense about kissing the soil upon arriving home after many years in a distant land. There is nothing romantic about my entry into Moyale.
Just metres from the Ethiopian border, the tarmac ends and the rocky reality of life in northern Kenya begins
Dust blows into my eyes. We spend much of the afternoon looking for a place to spend the night and booking transport to Nairobi.
Accommodation facilities here are deplorable. Good food is a rarity; clean water is even less common.
FINALLY, WE FIND ROOM IN A small guest house at the edge of Moyale - supposedly the neatest place in town. Dust trails you to your room. In almost every way, the Kenyan side of Moyale is laughable, compared with what is available in the Ethiopian Moyale.
Roads, restaurants, coffee shops and many other amenities attract Kenyan police, civil servants and Customs officials to the Ethiopian side. It is here where they go for their lunch, dinner or entertainment.
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Quite unpatriotic, you may think, but two hours in this town and I had already joined the bandwagon and crossed over the border to Ethiopia for another beef meal.
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