The Pilgrim Bus to Lalibela

We awoke at 4:30 am and traipsed over to Debre Birhan's bus station, intent on advancing as far as Dessie. The bus stop was surprisingly astir with activity for so early in the morning. Ethiopia's buses embark at ungodly hours; I came to view them with weariness, being the vampire that I am. Hassan, my traveling companion, went in search of water while I attempted to load my backpack on the roof. A disturbed-looking man clutched my arm and began babbling about the astronomical price such an novelty would incur. He was resolute in his quote of 30 birr, repeatedly shoving his open hand at me in demand of payment. Everyone else projected a variance of opinion. As it turned out, he was wholly unconnected with the administration of the bus and not even a passenger. My backpack was shoved in a lower compartment, I wedged myself into the front of the bus, and threw a couple pills of Immodium down the hatch. Soon we were off.

A heavy mist hung over the mountains that morning, a condition completely unacknowledged by the bus driver. Given the high fatality statistics of road travel in Ethiopia (the highest in Africa I'm told), he didn't inspire me with confidence. Now overtaking a truck on a blind mountain pass, now arranging his purple towel of a headdress in the rear view mirror, now craning his neck to carry on with his friend in the back of the bus, the rheumy-eyed driver seemed unprofessionally distracted from the zero-visibility of the road.

By far the biggest distraction was the tape deck. In a country where technology tends to be sadly outdated, the tape deck of the Pilgrim Bus was the saddest of all. The entrance of a tape effected a hideous, earsplitting screech . This did not prevent the driver from focusing all of his attention on it. As we jolted over a road like an exploded mine field, he boxed the tape deck repeatedly, rewound the tapes by hand with a ballpoint pen, inserted them into the tape deck, punched it, ejected them, bashed them against the dashboard, and inserted them again. Finally, between the screeching, I could make out a thunderous, reverb-drenched voice ranting about Haile Selassie, Jesus Christ, and God. I rightly took it to be fire-and-brimstone preaching.

I comforted myself with the lack of cataclysmic car accidents in the papers. In Kenya, at least, you can't open up a newspaper without reading about a matatu plunging 1,000 feet off a sheer cliff and bellyflopping its payload of 40 passengers below. Then again, the press in Ethiopia doesn't exactly enjoy freedom, and the government is pretty touchy about anything that could damage its reputation abroad. The likelihood of an English-language report on one of the four buses we saw capsized between Debre Birhan and Dessie was decidedly low.

So far the only vehicular carnage I saw was one exceptional instance of minibus violence. Three days prior, Hassan and I were heading back to Hannah Maryam by bus. The metropolitan buses of Addis are ramshackle affairs with mouldering seats and aisles pregnant with blowing trash. They have a kind of ghost town quality to them, only they are full of bitter-looking people. We got off at the major intersection between Saris and Meskel Square called 'Baghdad' by the locals--a place where the settlements have been torn to the ground by the government for reasons as of yet unrevealed. We got on a minibus, and I took my seat on the wheel well. At the next stop, a crush of people slammed against the door and tried to gain entry. One person disembarked; twelve tried to get on. Their efforts seemed unusually desperate. Then I noticed a maniacal barefoot man around my age tormenting everybody.

He reached in and grabbed the minibus tout and started strangling him. It was an uneven match, as the boy was all of thirteen. The maniac pulled the boy out of the van and began barking at him, his hands tightening around his neck. I took it to be a dispute of some longevity between the two parties. After all, one doesn't gad about indiscriminately strangling minibus touts. But when I looked to the back of the bus, I realized there was more to the altercation: I could see Hassan's eyes aflame with rage.

Hassan got out of the minibus and began yelling at the maniac. Two men of the crowd inserted themselves and freed the tout. They pushed the maniac to the ground. I saw a man flash through the air as if he had leaped from the top rope of a wrestling ring and land a punch full on the face of the lunatic. His head landed heavily against the concrete and bounced up. The blow would have knocked a lesser madman unconscious; as it stood, it only knocked out his front teeth. He now used his bloody spit to keep the crowd at bay while he persisted in throttling the tout.

Hassan had finally had enough. He grabbed the tout, placed him in the minibus, and confronted the aggressor with his superior frame. Faced with so colossal a foe, he backed off. Everyone got back in the minibus and it seemed that the conflict had ended. The tout thanked Hassan and proceeded to close the door. Just before it clicked shut, the maniac jumped in, pulled out the tout, and started strangling him again. Hassan and I decided to get out. A couple of parries later, we decided to leave. The maniac was knocked to the ground once again; the minibus took off, but not before a well-aimed rock shattered the window. A shower of glass fell onto the street amid horrified screams.

I asked Hassan what the point of contestation had been between the tout and the angry young man. Apparently, the maniac was despicably drunk and in need of more drink. Having spent all his money, he held up our minibus and tried to extort it. He aimed his efforts at our hapless tout as he was the treasurer. Finding it all strange, I found it particularly so that the driver had completely absented himself from the tout's defense; he had just as much to lose. Hassan, for his part, was ashamed that a minibus full of his countrymen had responded so apathetically to the threat. And that's the grand tale of Minibus Violence.

Meanwhile, the sun rose on the Pilgrim Bus--and that's when I realized what it was. About forty people in spotless white raiment sat behind me, some in checkered head wraps, others holding walking sticks surmounted with silver crosses. I asked around; the bus was headed to Lalibela for Ghena, the Ethiopian Christmas. So too was I, a happy coincidence.

After the heights of Debre Sina (Mount Sinai), the thick mists lifted a bit. It would be difficult to overstate the natural beauty of the scene before me. In the foreground, elephantine grasses sprung out of the roadside between cactii that looked like crockeries of giant ping pong paddles. Behind lay fields of golden-hued teff and emerald green patches of sorghum riven by jagged riverbeds; these cut deep into surface like open wounds in the red earth. The enormity of space was interspersed with huts of mud and grass called tukuls, with woodsmoke curling out of their kitchens. A background of fleecy clouds nesting on peculiarly rounded mountains completed the picture.

The mountain ranges of Ethiopia are ancient, predating the formation of the Rift Valley. Millenia of erosion have stripped the peaks of their sharpness, but left their slopes nearly vertical. On the road to Lalibela, they appear to be the bellies of sleeping giants or shoals of humpbacked whales. Ambas, flat-topped mountains, abound--some peopled with minuscule settlements . Amid such drastic scenery, it is difficult to imagine the survival of any meagre notion; Ethiopia is truly a land of kings.

From Debre Sina, a good asphalt road makes a straight shot for Dessie. Enjoying the unfolding panorama, I had no recollection of packing my travel wallet. It wasn't in my carry-on bag; perhaps it was tucked somewhere in my backpack or sitting temptingly on my bed in the Akalu Hotel. I mentioned this casually to Hassan who immediately stopped the bus. A dozen people got out with me in a frenzy of concern. I removed my backpack from stowage, and twenty-six hands rifled through it. Sure enough, there it was at the very bottom. The discovery set off an explosion of joy among the lost-and-found posse, with everybody smiling and slapping each others' backs.

I was a bit sheepish about stopping the bus in the first place and climbed back in with a bit of trepidation. Instead of leering at me, the passengers clapped and seemed genuinely pleased I had found my lost article, no one more so than Hassan. He let out a sigh of relief.

"Now," he said, "we do not have to worry."
"I wasn't that worried," I countered. "I was reasonably sure it was in my backpack."
"But what if it wasn't?" he moaned. "What if you left it at the hotel? That would be shame for the country of Ethiopia!"
"Shame for Ethiopia that I'm an idiot?" I asked.
He shook his head as if I couldn't understand.

We decided to continue with the friendly bus all the way to Lalibela. After stopping in the drizzly town of Dessie for lunch, I brought out my camera and showed everyone in the back some of my photos. The bus tout was the most impressed.

"You make beautiful picture!" he said gleefully.
"Thank you."
"And you show to us!"
"Of course."
"Because you love the people! You are different faranj!"
It was one of the nicest compliment I'd ever received.

As our thirteen hour bus ride continued along occasions of road between potholes, I grew more and more impressed by the passengers around me. Most were older, many of them elderly ladies wrapped in shawls of white. I tried to picture a bus load of American soccer moms taking a twenty hour ride to Church on a road slamming their heads against the ceiling. Probability: zero. The hardship was taken with good cheer, joy even. I received oranges and Pepsi with a nod of the head from people far up front. I passed my iPod full of photos around. Many remarked on the beauty of my estranged girlfriend: "Enchi konjo no!"

Ten hours into the bus ride, one of the women brought out an Arabic calendar. It was a book full of hand-written hymns. The entire bus began clapping and singing; the tout stood up and shouted out the verses; both women and men ululated; and the bus filled with the strains of voices praising Maryam, Mother Mary. While the transformation of a dingy, rattling bus into a choir was moving, the most miraculous transformation took place in the person of a small boy sitting next to me. He'd had a haunted, harrowed aspect to him thus far. His brow furrowed with concern and his eyes lush with anguish, he'd spent most of the time anxiously looking around the bus, waiting for some great calamity to strike. But with the opening of the hymns, the angst melted from his face and he sang like an angel. He was possessed of the finest voice on the bus, that of a prepubescent boy absolute in his devotion, unencumbered by the doubts of adolescence.

But as the bus rode on, I realized that even the awkward looking youths with thin, fuzzy mustaches and pimply countenances were singing with equal conviction. A blind old lady in front stood swaying in the aisle raising her hands and giving thanks to God. The bus tout ran around leap-frogging over seats and clapping giddily. Everyone was in a state of spiritual ecstasy on the way to Ethiopia's Holy Land. Not one person wore a trace of sanctimoniousness. There was none of the competition for visibility I see so often in the dress of church-going Westerners: everyone wore the same humble cloth. My overall impression was that of a mild-mannered, solemn and deeply devout people on an ineffable journey to the heart of their faith. For the first time in many years, I felt a connection to Christianity and the power of God. Still, I couldn't locate it outside the people and doubt I ever will.

As the bus pressed into its thirteenth hour on the road, twilight fell on the landscape, now an amphitheater of mountains, each a huge hulk of wrinkled flesh. A blushing horizon heaved pink streaks into the purple clouds above as they scudded over the range. Row upon row of serrated mountaintops, like clusters of shark teeth, extended into mere suggestion. Suddenly, a maniac boarded the bus and began strangling the angelically singing boy.

Just kidding.