The Land Cruiser finally groans to a stop. The dry riverbed has become a narrow, sandy wash choked by thorny vegetation. We can travel no farther by vehicle.
There is also the matter of the nearly naked young man with a half-shaven head and mud-plastered mullet. He had popped out of the brush in front of us like an African jack-in-the-box. For a few moments I thought he was going to start beating on the Cruiser with his club.
"What was all that about?" I asked Michael, our translator, after we'd been given permission to proceed.
"He's jumping the bulls today," Michael answered. This tribal custom would become clear later. "He thinks you ferengis (foreigners) are bad luck."
Gathering up our camera gear and packs, my friend Max Young and I begin making our way through the bush on a faint trail to the Hamar village of Ungabanyo. We're following Michael (his Ethiopian name is Endalk Bezawork) and Kayla Kale May, the translator for the translator. Michael speaks English and Amharic, the universal language of Ethiopia. Kayla is a Hamar who speaks Hamar and Amharic.
Our trip wasn't supposed to be like this, with Max and me driving and walking across the Ethiopian wilds. We were supposed to be on a rafting trip, floating down the Omo River.
Sometimes you can plan all you want, and then Africa just happens. Or in my case, you can try to live a normal life, and then Max happens.
The fateful telephone call had come in early June.
"How'd you like to go to Africa, bro?" asked Max, who owns his own adventure travel company in Denver. "Do a rafting trip down the Omo River in Ethiopia."
Hmmm. On our last whitewater adventure, I'd spent a feverish jungle night beside the Jatunyacu River in Ecuador being fed a rain forest elixir called "Blood of the Dragon" by a shaman. Two weeks later I'd nearly died of dengue fever.
Now this. I'd never heard of the Omo River. I'd always considered Africa a huge, dangerous leap up from what world traveling I'd done: lions, hippos, hyenas, crocs, cobras, mambas, malaria, mosquitoes, tsetse flies, sleeping sickness, people with automatic weapons.
Wasn't Ethiopia just one big wind- blown desert filled with starvation, war, pestilence and disease, next door to al-Qaeda and the pirate havens of Yemen and Somalia?
During that pregnant pause, Max played his trump card.
"The main thing about the Omo are the tribes," he said, rattling off some names that meant absolutely nothing to me: Nyangatom, Hamar, Karo, Bodi, Suri and Mursi.
"A lot of these people have never even seen a white person," said Max. "Or danged few anyway. We'll have to sleep on the rafts to protect our gear."
Then he tossed in the final caveat. The Omo was being dammed. Construction on the Gibe III dam was nearing completion even as we spoke. A sister company Max works with on international trips, Water by Nature, was planning a last descent.
This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to float through one of the remotest and wildest places in Africa before the dam changed everything.
"Could be dangerous," Max said. "But fun." The Horn of Africa. A wild river. Max. Danger. Fun. What more could I possibly want?
"I'm in," I said. "When do we leave?"
Two months later we arrived in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa only to have our rafting permit denied at the last possible minute. Supplies had been bought. The rafts loaded. The truck that would take us to the launch at the Bele Bridge was idling in the hotel parking lot.
Jane told us the bad news in the hotel lobby. Because of critical testing taking place on the dam, the government was closing the Omo to travel. Our portage across the construction site would be a distraction to workers.
Max, Jane and I spent a frustrating week in Addis Ababa making the rounds of various prime ministers and power-company officials trying to get the necessary approval, but the answer was always the same. Not now. Maybe in a few months.
We were devastated. We'd come so far and planned and invested so much that we just couldn't give up. Sitting on the hotel steps, Max and I came up with Plan B. We'd rent a Land Cruiser, procure a driver and travel into the Omo Valley on our own, getting to the river whenever we could and visiting as many of the tribes as possible.
When we described the change in plans to Michael, who'd been hired for the rafting trip, he asked in his soft, best English-Ethiopian voice, "We will be camping out?"
"Yes," we answered.
"We will have a fire and cook our own food?" Michael asked.
"Yes."
"Then it will still be like rafting," he said, smiling. "We will call it land rafting."
Actually, the prospect of land rafting gave me more jitters then being on the river. There are few paved roads in southern Ethiopia and little vehicle traffic. Distances are vast. For thousands of cattle, goats, donkeys and people, the roads are simply big trails between grazing lands and villages. There would be no cellphone coverage, no supermarkets, no gas stations at convenient intervals.
What if we break down or rain or rockfall makes the roads impassable? What if our paperwork is denied at one of the checkpoints? What if we stumble into a tribal skirmish or border war? What of the bandits rumored to surface along the road at night? Not to mention the lion and buffalo, poisonous snakes, tsetse flies, etc.
And what about the killing heat away from the river? The Rift Valley, through which the Omo flows, is one of the planet's hot spots. I don't do well in the heat.
Changing landscape
We left Addis Ababa on a good highway. Our driver, Tekle, threads the needle of humanity and animals on the roadway, weaving, honking, bumping and grinding our way south. Wind blasts through the open windows, and loud, jingling Ethiopian music on the tape player drowns out the sound of everything else.
The Ethiopian highlands, to my surprise, are cool, green and lush. If there had been snow on some of the rugged landscapes we view on the horizons, it would look just like Colorado's Front Range.
Past Lake Chamo, we enter the Omo Valley. The land browns and flattens, the heat blasts us like the inside of a furnace. The highway deteriorates into a narrow, intermittent asphalt road — emphasis on intermittent. The population of buzzing and biting insects increases from merely annoying to constantly annoying.
"What's this place known for?" I ask Michael as we sit, sweating in the shade of a hut, drinking warm soda in the crossroad village of Weyto. "Malaria," he answers.
Broken asphalt eventually gives way to dirt. Then, near the village of Turmi, the dirt dissolves into a twisting four-wheel-drive track and, finally, a sandy riverbed. Then a trail.
The scene in Ungabanyo that Max and I walk into is as otherworldly to us as if we had tumbled down Alice's rabbit hole into a strange wonderland.
We sit down on hides under a brush arbor dense with acrid wood smoke and a murmuring of people like wind. A hundred or more villagers have gathered to celebrate the wedding of Amori and Doevo. The party of feasting, dancing, chewing khat, drinking coffee and downing copious quantities of sorghum beer will last for days.
Outside the arbor, women with ochre-plastered hair, dressed in leather hides decorated with beads, cowrie shells and bells, shake the ground with rhythmic, stamping feet. Singing, chanting, leaping into the air and blowing on cheap tin horns to summon the bull jumper, they work themselves into frenzies, filling the air with constant, confusing clamor.
Adding to the noise is the crack of wood on flesh as tribesmen ritually whip female relatives of the groom with sticks. In scenes that make me wince, the women plead to be beaten. If their incessant begging doesn't work, they provoke with taunts and insults, even kicking sand into the faces of men sitting on the sidelines.
At dusk the celebration culminates with the bull jumping. The bulls, steers actually, are pushed and jostled into a line and held in place by a human fence. Spectators fill every square foot of space and crowd up into the barren limbs of a nearby acacia tree.
Without warning, the angry young man from the river bottom appears, balancing on a bull's back. His name is Lingo Arte. Wearing only a leather cord around his neck, he runs back and forth across the steers' backs in the twilight like a man dancing over coals. By accomplishing this feat four times without faltering, he gains passage into manhood and the right to marry in the coming year.
Lingo's success is a huge relief to me. Hamar tribespeople surround us, many already well lubricated by homebrew, high on khat and openly agitated by our tenacious presence. Some of the women have begun turning their faces away or raising their hands and waving me off whenever I bring the camera up. Most of the men casually pack Kalashnikov rifles. If we had jinxed Lingo and he had failed, our walk in the dark back to the Land Cruiser might have been a lot more interesting.
Injuries treated
Returning to Ungabayno the next day, we are surrounded and crowded by a noisy gaggle of curious onlookers as Max treats a stream of eye infections, festering sores and minor injuries with his medical kit. And more serious injuries: A man bitten by a cobra had hacked his leg off with a machete.
That night, sitting in a smoky Hamar lodge, we visit in our limited fashion with the village chief, Balanca, his deputies, assorted relations and wives. Balanca has a teasing, rich laugh.
Balanca tells us that the Hamar people's greatest fear is change and how fast it's happening. More tourists, more missionaries, more young people leaving the villages for the bright city lights.
When we present them with gifts of oranges and apples, their faces light up with delight at the taste. In return, they introduce us to a potent snuff snorted off the back of the hand and serve us freshly ground and roasted coffee. Ethiopia is, after all, the birthplace of the bean.
"If not from gourds, what do you drink coffee from at home?" asks Adiye, a grandmother, as she pours me a calabash full. All along, I have avoided the local food and water like a plague. Looking at the well-used gourd, I wonder what I'm supposed to do now. I look at Max. Max looks at me. "Drink, and pray, Deano," he says. I do.
Later, sitting beside a fire under a star-spangled sky, I don't hesitate when I'm offered freshly roasted goat meat on the tip of Balanca's knife.
Our trip through the Omo Valley is off to an auspicious start, and we still have three weeks and more than 1,000 miles of a 1,400-mile trip to go.
At the hunting camp of Murulle we reach the Omo for the first time at what would have been our rafting trip take-out. A Karo woman shows me how to scare the crocodiles away from the riverbank by tossing rocks into the water. Every day, she says, the village loses a goat or cow to crocs.
Less threatening wildlife entertain us, as well, at Murulle, our most pleasant camp yet. Baboons bark back and forth across the Omo. Croaking colobus monkeys swing through the trees above our tent. Bird songs awaken us as if we're nestled inside the world's largest aviary.
During the day, the air is thick with the billowing dust of goat and cattle herds being driven to and from the Omo for water by rifle-toting, khat chewing Karo warriors. At night a tornado of tiny bugs swirls around our lantern whenever we dare to light it.
The heat, day and night, is punishing. Max makes a game of it. "Let's play sit and sweat," he says.
Over the next few days, we watch as locals fish for giant catfish with hand lines and are serenaded and pestered by a parade of children who follow us everywhere. I dazzle onlookers with the bluish light of my sterilization pen while purifying water.
"But the water is already good," says one young woman.
"He is making it better," replies Michael.
We trek even farther south to the tiny Karo village of Korcho, perched high on a bluff above the Omo, then turn our Land Cruiser back to the north and begin the journey home.
There are two more stops. The first is Mago National Park, where we meet the Mursi people.
The Omo Valley remains a remote and hostile destination, a bone-jarring multiday drive from anywhere, and the farther south you travel, the rougher the trip becomes. The Omo long has been a destination for Europeans. It is now being discovered by adventure-hungry Americans.
Among the Mursi, living within quick striking distance of the town of Jinka, there is no avoiding the impact of tourism. An armed escort leads us to a village where we are repulsed by an aggressive, swirling, in-your-face, chest-poking crowd made worse by incessant demands for money in exchange for photos. The threat of violence if the money isn't forthcoming hangs like a cloud over us.
The threat is real. Michael once received a gun butt to the head in a Mursi village.
The lips of Mursi women protrude several inches from their faces, stretched to extreme limits by decorative clay plates. The plates have been explained to tourists as signs of maturity, beauty and wealth. It's also possible that the size of the plates is encouraged by tourism. The bizarre decorations draw the ferengis, and the ferengis bring cameras and money.
Both sexes cover their bodies with fantastic scar patterns. The scars on the men often signify the killing of an enemy. They war with other tribes, have murdered tourists and used to terrorize Jinka on market day.
Our last contact with the Omo is at Bele Bridge. How strange: Our trip began where the rafting trip would have ended and ends where the raft trip would have begun.
SOURCE: http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_17088386#ixzz1BLzgt62x
