Informal Tail Guide

Lalibela tour

I’ve learned a couple of things today. For one, there are tour groups that describe their trips in the most benign way possible to take advantage of your perhaps-optimistic assessment of your own physical abilities. Once they get you to commit, they go to great lengths to make you aware of that optimistic assessment by putting you on a trail with dozens of children that can run circles around you while carrying a 35 pound bag of barley.

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Our first day of trekking started at around 1:30, in the heat of the Ethiopian afternoon. We met our guide Zenabe (Zeb for short) at the Tesfa Tours building. We’d gone into this adventure with no idea what to expect, so when we began walking right from the front door, climbing through the city with our stuff, we weren’t too surprised. Our destination for the day was Ad Medhane Alem, an established tukul campsite outside Lalibela, which our guide informed us was a 13 km walk (about 8 miles). We were meeting our hired donkeys at the upper end of the town and, once AP’s bigger pack was secured, we joined the procession of locals of all ages as they climbed out of the city on the donkey highway.

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We’d noticed the huge crowds across from our hotel earlier and Zed told us that Saturday was market day, so people came to Lalibela from the surrounding villages for their shopping. Instead of bringing their own grocery bags, they bring their own donkeys and load them down with all manner of things, most of them stuffed into a durable woven bag and lashed down with leather straps. We filtered in with this procession and were quickly climbing out of town toward the ridges and plateaus above the town.

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The geography here is pretty incredible. Lalibela itself sits on a broad, sloped bench, capped at the top by a steep butte and surrounded on the other three sides by similarly steep terrain – it’s pretty contained and doesn’t really have a lot of room for expansion. The donkey highway moves quickly away from the town, passing through a vast patchwork of farmland and small villages, gaining ridges, crossing benches and winding ever higher into the distance. Some of the folks that were climbing along with us had come to the market from up to 36 km away (24 miles, more on that later).

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Anyway, we plugged away in the heat, resting under the acacia trees from time to time, climbing from Lali’s 7500 foot elevation toward our camp at 10,500. Anastasia had two days of acclimitazation on me from her stay in Addis, which is at 6500 feet, and she’s been working out a lot more, so she and Zed did a lot of waiting for me as I plodded upward. Among the travelers on the donkey highway was a fuzzy-headed young girl who, as far as we could tell, had taken on an informal role as our tail guide. Though she was clearly faster than the out-of-shape American, I could not get her to pass me – every attempt was met with a shy smile and a wave of the hand. I’m quite convinced she wanted to make sure she was on hand to provide CPR if I keeled over on the approach.

Eventually we rounded a corner and saw, on a cliffside in the distance, the cluster of tukuls that was our home for the night. We departed the donkey highway and bid farewell to our tail guide and climbed up a steep scree gully, popping out on the broad plateau that was the first stage of the next day’s walking.

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I was pretty knackered when we rolled in, but we were served a simple bread and delightful hot tea with sugar, which kept me going until dinner. As the sun set we took in the views – the broad expanse of the valley spread out below, with the donkey highway clearly visible all the way back to Lali in the distance. It was hard to believe we’d come so far.

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Delicious soup and an enormous plate of chicken curry with rice around a fire in the big kitchen tukul came next. Once we were done, Zeb made every effort to find English music that we knew on his cell phone – turns out I know a lot more Shakira than I thought. Also, AP is not as bashful about singing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” in front of two older Ethiopian men as I would have expected.

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On to Abune Josef tomorrow. Twenty-six kilometers and a summit at 4295 meters – how the hell did Anastasia find this trip?

The march continues