First Night in Addis Ababa

In Amsterdam, I resigned myself to the fact that my ridiculous number of books was unsupportable by a frameless burlap sack. I went to an outdoors store and bought a smart Osprey bag on wheels. The price: 150 Euros. Prior reconnaissance revealed this to be the base price for such a convenience. A credit card sealed the deal.

The next day I boarded a KLM flight for Ethiopia. It was still light out when we crossed the Sahara en route to Khartoum. The view was bewitching: an endless sea of sand extending into the blue yonder. On the horizon, a rusty bar of red oxide split the difference. The colors shaded into each other, mimicking a Rothko painting. And so, from the window of seat 37A, one could contemplate eternity.

I looked over my notes on Ethiopia, and it occurred to me that the average Ethiopian's salary was little more than half the amount I paid for my new luggage. (In 1997, per capita GDP hovered around $137.) It was a snappy figure, one that said something. But as I tried to comprehend its true meaning, I found myself dumbstruck. Imagination has its limits. In America, where I have watched several times that amount poured into one night's drinking, it is simply impossible--even through the most strenuous intuition--to translate one hundred thirty-seven dollars into a year's pay. The mere thought of it invited paralysis.

The flash of a camera reanimated me. A Frenchman five rows ahead pantomimed to a couple behind me. I had seen them before, a maudlin tourist group of eight individuals anxiously zipping and unzipping their safari pockets between photo-ops. As they played hot potato with the camera, I began to wonder how many group photos would prove necessary. First they took them in the departure lounge, then the airplane, the exit terminal, the immigration line (photography not permitted), the bureau of currency exchange, and as my taxi screeched into traffic, the arrival lane outside Bole International Airport. They must have lived in mortal terror of returning home to a gathering of themselves only to find that all recollection of their groundbreaking transit had catastrophically vanished.

"And then we transferred to KLM flight 553."
"Yes, yes! And then? Summon the picture!"
"Then we sat in a wacky flying machine!"
"Zut alors! Now I remember! And then?"
"Then we walked off the flying machine!"
"Mon Dieu! We were so crazy!"

At customs, they stood in line with the frenetic excitability of children entering their first day of Kindergarten; they had the new clothes and supplies to match. Mint-condition North Face gear abounded alongside pressed pants and spotless khaki vests. As off-putting as I found all of this, the most distressing part of the picture was the ghastly mole on the ear of one latter-day Napoleon. I had noticed the monstrosity earlier and dismissed it as an unfortunate earring. But as I stood behind this perpetual motion machine of a man, it dawned on me that the earring was a horrendously huge--and hairy--mole. It peered from the lobe of his ear like a wet dog nose. It was so repulsively large that I came to wonder whether it was of the ear or whether the ear was of it. Would not such a mole strike fear in to the hearts of African children? Would the Islamic insurgents of the east behead it and march the mole around on a pike to the cheering of Ogaden masses? Why was it still there? Did he mistake it for a beauty mark?

Whatever the case, the mole was to the sense of sight what raw sewage is to the sense of smell. I determined to rid myself of it, and I took the first taxi into town; or, rather, the first taxi made available to me. A motherly woman with a laminated badge around her neck noticed me mindlessly scanning the airport. It had been a bit confusing. The procedure after getting a visa wasn't well demarcated, and I had stood in another line for twenty minutes only to find that I could have walked right through to customs.

"Taxi?"
"Yes, please."
"Follow me."

She walked me to an unlit taxi depot about 300 meters away. She spoke in Amharic to a man standing next to an unmarked car with, as it turned out, no meter. Before I had a chance to bargain over the fare, he wrested my new bag from me and tossed it in the hatchback. Not wanting to cause a scene, I followed suit with my backpack and hopped in.

"How much for Plaza Hotel? 30 birr?" I asked. The maximum fare for anywhere in town should be no more than 40 birr.
"Ha ha, 30 birr," he replied.
"So, 30 birr to the Plaza?"
"Ha ha 30 birr. You have reservation?"
"Yes."

And then he pressed down on the accelerator.

Less than a minute later, I began to grasp the reality behind the inscrutable income statistic. Under a bridge on Bole Road lay bodies wrapped in dusty rags. One of them sat slumped against a pylon clutching an infant. Her eyes wearily followed the taxi.

"Plaza Hotel, yes?" the driver asked.
"Yes."

Along the street stood lean, attractive women tapping their feet and casting goo-goo eyes in my direction. Polio victims hurtled themselves across the road one crutch at a time. Younger, luckier couples walked hand-in-hand between bars. Under the cover of midnight, Addis seemed as mysterious to me as it had on the airplane five hours before.

The taxi zoomed into the Plaza Hotel compound, and the driver accompanied me to the reception desk. After what seemed like an unusually long period of time, a lovely young lady behind the desk noticed me standing there.

"Hello, I have a reservation for tonight. First name, Dallas."
She looked at me as if I had just said, "Hello, I am an axe-murderer. Please ready yourself for a massacre."
"We have no more rooms!" she replied.
"I made the reservation last night. Could you check the book, please?"
She apathetically paged through it. "No, no reservation!"
"This is the Plaza Hotel, isn't it?" I inquired.
"Yes, Plaza Hotel."
"And you have no record of the reservation I made last night?"
She shook her head.

The driver and I returned to the taxi. He seemed more worried than me.

"How about the National Hotel?" I asked.
"No! Full!"
"Ghion Hotel?"
"Full!"
"Extreme Hotel?"
"Full! All full!"
Befuddled I asked, "Why are they all full?"
"There is African football conference."

We sat silently in the dark for a couple of minutes. The driver lit a cigarette despondently. He offered me one; I accepted. After a couple of puffs, his face lit up. He said something that sounded like a place to stay.

"Is it good?" I asked.
"Yes, very good."
"How many birr?"
"Same as Plaza."
"What did you say the name was?"
He repeated himself. It sounded like "Mariot," a hotel I knew to be near the airport, back where we came from.
"Okay."

We headed back down Bole road toward what I thought would be the Mariot. I began feeling a bit vulnerable, alone in Ethiopia with only the kindness of an unmarked taxi driver to see me through. I had no bearings, no friends, no Amharic. We turned abruptly onto an unpaved road; a sign read "Midi Pension". The driver honked furiously until, five seconds later, the gate opened.

At the reception desk was another beautiful, young woman. I asked for a room, and she smiled, "Yes, we have a room for you. Would you like to see it first?" I nodded, "Yes, please."

We walked up two flights of stairs to the room. Given the price range, I expected something similar to the promises of the Plaza: DSTV, a plush double bed, perhaps even wall-to-wall carpeting. Instead, there were unconnected cables hanging from the ceiling, a cruddy tile floor, and a box of condoms on the bedside table.

"I'll take it."

Having less than four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, I didn't want to lallygag anymore. I went downstairs to get my bags. I asked the driver how many birr I owed.

"70 birr."
I hesitated. Crossing the entire city would have cost less, but I was in no mood to argue. I withdrew a 100 birr bill. Seeing this, the driver added,
"30 birr for waiting."
I was being had. As I learned later, the primary occupation of the Addis taxi driver was precisely this--waiting. If five minutes' waiting cost 30 birr, then taxi drivers would make more in an hour than the average Ethiopian could hope to make in a month.
"Fine, 30 birr for waiting and the cigarette."
He took the bill morosely. I watched as my guardian angel turned around, got in the cab and drove off.

Back in my threadbare room, I opened a duty-free bottle of scotch. Having read about the legion difficulties of importing liquor into African countries (most notably in the works of the Naipaul brothers), I bought it expecting to have some trouble to write about. No such luck; when I showed the customs officer the liter of booze, he simply waved me through. As I took a deep draught of Johnny Walker, I despaired that absolutely nothing had gone according to plan. I fell back into the bed on the brink of sleep after a couple more gulps.

Minutes later I was aroused by the sound of platform shoes clanking up the stairs. The door of the room next to me opened, and the sounds of love-making commenced shortly thereafter. This wasn't out of the ordinary; amorous grunts had been a regular feature of the hotels in Amsterdam. But here they took on a quality closer to the rapture of Arabic singing than the desperation of coital competition. They began to weave in and out of a broader nighttime chorus of throbbing music, incessant car horns, the occasional braying ass, and an agonizingly nocturnal rooster. When I could no longer tell who or what was making which sound, I put on my headphones and listened to Sleeping in the Aviary.

I fell asleep on my first night in Ethiopia listening to Wisconsin.