Holy holy, Holy, Chanting Room

It’s 8:30 on Friday night and I’m propped up in bed next to AP, in our little round “hotel” room in Lalibela. At an elevation of 2600 meters, Lalibela is home to 25,000 Ethiopians, hundreds of goats and donkeys and eleven rock-hewn churches built in the 12th century by an Ethiopian Orthodox priest/king.

How the hell did I get here?



Three weeks ago, upon hearing that she’d have to fly all the way to Addis Ababa for a two day meeting, Anastasia decided it would be silly to come so far and then turn around and fly right home. She started asking her friends for travel ideas for Ethiopia and, before I knew it, she was using her extra miles to buy me a ticket to join her for “a few days in Africa”. I’m not great at last minute changes in travel plans, but she did all the legwork and all I had to do was show up. Fast forward a few weeks, tack on a 24 hour travel day from Seattle via Amsterdam and Khartoum followed by a few hours of sleep and an early flight out of Addis and here we are, in the central Ethiopian highlands.



The flight into Lalibela was only a couple of hours and we arrived this morning jet lagged and low on sleep. The plan for the day was to tour the churches around the town, but we’d put this trip together so quickly that we really had no idea what to expect. Our shuttle from the airport brought us to Hotel Tukul, where we dropped our bags in our surprisingly nice room (with shower, even) and quickly scooted back out into the pre-noon sun to meet our guide for the day.

What to say about our guide? He was quiet at first, a young Ethiopian man with a thin mustache and matching pants and vest that are clearly part of his “tour guide” uniform. We walked from the hotel along the cobble and dirt streets, slowly breaking the ice with small talk, which soon became regional and international politics, about which he was probably better informed than I. But when we arrived at the entrance to the Lalibela rock-hewn church World Heritage Site, he turned into a mobile church history machine.





In the 12th century, King Lalibela traded with a local property owner for the rights to use the land at the center of what is now the town. On this land he built his vision – a recreation of Jerusalem in the form of a “museum of churches”, all carved as monolithic structures from the same broad, dust-covered hillside. They range in size from the tiny “house of the virgin”, whose entrances are the only visible portion of the 5x7 meter inner chamber, to the enormous “savior of the world”, a completely freestanding monolith 25 meters wide by 32 meters long, complete with external columns (some now reconstructed) to support its meter thick granite roof.





I can’t do justice to the descriptions of each church (or, if I could, this travel entry would consume our laptop’s battery completely), but our guide Alyewa went to great lengths to show us how carefully crafted and infused with biblical references each church was. From the number of columns carved to support each church, to the style and quantity of windows and the shapes carved into the walls, there seems little about these churches that wasn’t carefully planned and done for a reason, which makes the fact that they were carved entirely from the living stone even more remarkable. I mean, even the downspouts to shed the rain off the carefully sloped stone roof are part of the monolith. Really amazing.









The 11 churches are spread out over perhaps a square mile of hillside, clustered into three groups. The six churches around St. Mary’s, the four churches around the “Bethlehem” cone house (where bread and wine for all the churches was once made) and the single church of St. George, the final and most impressive one in the museum, shaped like a cross and carved into a perfectly square hole in the hillside – all of these groups are linked together by a series of tunnels and trenches that serve double-duty as rain drainage. To my unending delight, we used these tunnels and trenches to walk between most of the sites, including the completely lightless 50 meter tunnel from Bethlehem to St. Michael, which is meant to symbolize the passage through hell and back into heaven. My inner 7 year old, never very well hidden, was thrilled.







After church-a-palooza today, AP and I have collapsed in exhaustion (I’m still 11 hours behind, after all) and we’re looking forward to day two of the big adventure tomorrow. Our trekking guide will pick us up in the early afternoon for our four hour walk to Ad Medhane Alem, a community shelter that’s been built on one of the plateaus that tower above Lalibela. From there, we’ll continue over the next couple of days to Abune Josef, Ethiopia’s third highest peak, then loop back here the next day to complete the whirlwind Bubble’s Africa adventure.



Trek begins