Where eagles dare

Guy Kelly hits the heights of Ethiopia – barefoot and suspended by an old rope – to sample all the country has to offer, from warthogs to seductive dancing

We were told only to expect a walk. A walk, and perhaps a church at the end of it. As a plan it sounded comfortable enough; as a plan it sounded like a Sunday in Hampshire. So you can understand my concern when I saw the man holding a carrier bag full of old rope.

‘It’s for the difficult part,’ he said, tramping towards a rock face. ‘Just for safety.’

It was shortly after dawn in the Gheralta Mountains in Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia. In an environment comprised mostly of sandstone and shrubbery, millennia of erosion have left a landscape of exhausted acacias, dry plateaux and hulking walls of rock tall enough to obscure the midday sun. Beside them are occasional knobbly, marmalade-coloured spires surging to the heavens. As we trundled in single file on a vague, uphill path, it became apparent that we were heading directly towards the top of one of these.

The caravan began with just me, my girlfriend, Hattie, and our guide, Sefiw, but other characters soon joined us: the man with the ropes, a pair of boys half-heartedly selling soft drinks, a possible pilgrim, six local men who’d been dozing under an olive tree, and the wordless priest of perhaps the most isolated place of worship in the world.

‘It’s up there,’ the rope man said, gesturing at what seemed to be the sun. I could see neither church nor path nor any reason to go further. The priest, who estimated he’d been up and down this route at least twice a day for 48 of his 63 years, scampered ahead. The soda boys dropped out; and soon, when we met a 90-degree rock face, I saw why.

It was just a 10-metre stretch but vertical, and dotted with natural foot and hand slots created by at least a thousand years of fearless worshippers. We kicked our shoes and socks off, out of both respect and a desperate need for more grip, and opened the bag to remove a harness, carabiners and enough rope to sling around a flimsy branch above. The band of local men spaced themselves up the ascent, dangling to offer a hand.

‘OK. Don’t look down. Right hand there, left hand here. No, sorry, I mean left foot there,’ said the nearest one, as I crept up the wall. I had told nobody there that I hate heights and ledges – apart from Hattie, of course, who was supportively taking photographs of me in my harness to laugh at later.

‘Bravo!’ they shouted every time I inched upwards. All they wanted was a tip, I knew that, but they had to keep me alive to have any chance of getting one. The arrangement was fine by me.

The wall, it turned out, was an amuse-bouche. I saw the route led now to a pathetically small stone bridge with sheer drops of 250 metres on either side. Beside it was an open-air tomb, complete with a penguin-huddle of human skeletons.

‘Tourists who didn’t quite make it?’ I asked. Priests who came up to die, I was told. Lovely.

Without a harness, we crossed the bridge daintily, before facing what we were assured was the final challenge: hugging a marble-smooth sandstone wall while edging along a 50cm-wide sill. Trembling, sweating, wondering what was so wrong with worshipping on the ground, I shuffled along. And there, carved out of the rock before us, so high that even the vultures flew in its shadow, was the door to a little church. Abuna Yemata. The priest stood waiting. Welcome to Ethiopia, where everything’s done the hard way.

‘So, what do you think is interesting about our country?’ Sefiw (his name rhymes with ‘bless you’) asked, craning around in the front seat of a people carrier and beaming, when he met us at the airport in Addis Ababa three days earlier.

I looked down at our 14-day itinerary, which seemed to contain a greater variety of environment, landscape, people and activities in one country than you’d get travelling for a month across Europe. ‘Oh, everything,’ we replied in unison. Sefiw seemed pleased. He wanted to show us everything.

Ethiopia is the only African nation never to have been colonised, defeating the Italians twice, and it is now the continent’s fastest-growing economy. Between 2000 and 2011, its poverty rate fell by a third. It has the Great Rift Valley, one of the only landmarks on the planet visible from the moon (the Great

Wall of China may also be Great, but it’s no wider than the A303). It has volcanoes and technicolour salt flats, and the Blue Nile, but doesn’t bang on about it. It isn’t at war any more, there’s no famine, it isn’t dangerous, and it’s just possible that human life originated there.

We spent a day in its capital, Addis Ababa (hardly pretty, but with an inexplicable charm), then flew north for the rock churches. On the flight, an Orthodox priest tottered up the aisle giving individual benedictions to every single passenger apart from us. We were quite literally without a prayer.

There are broadly three types of rock churches in Ethiopia: monolithic (entirely hidden in the rock and often up high); semi-monolithic (partly in the rock, but discernible from the outside as a building); and rock-hewn (carved entirely from the rock like a sculpture). Tigray is abundant in the first two. Some are as old as the 5th or 6th century, and were built by hermits on the reasoning that high meant closer to God, and that inaccessible meant avoiding the hassle on the ground. No heretic invaders would bother going to check if there’s a church where Abuna Yemata is found.

Inside the eerily silent Abuna Yemata, we found the walls and ceilings drenched with biblical frescoes, almost perfectly preserved by the aridity. It took our breath away, though that may also have been the altitude.

After three days clambering around Tigray, we set off for Lalibela. The 15-hour drive was like any in sub-saharan Africa: as fascinating as it was uncomfortable. It took us through camel markets, past baboons, and through villages of near-medieval poverty.

Lalibela is the breakout star of Ethiopia’s nascent tourism industry. Its 11 interconnected rock-hewn churches were part of Saint Lalibela’s divinely led plan to build a new Jerusalem in Ethiopia in the 12th and 13th centuries, and took an estimated 40,000 people 23 years to chisel from the sacred ‘mother rock’. They’re entirely functioning, too, so you barely need to be lucky to see some kind of Orthodox service take place, and Sefiw, in his home town, timed our visit to see the whole town come out for the Annual Feast of Saint Mary of Zion. Thousands of worshippers, in white shawls, stood in, on and around the site at sunrise, as drum beats and chanting echoed all around the valley.

‘Bravo!’ they shouted every time I inched upwards

All churched out, we headed south, flying to Addis and then driving to the remote south-west of the country, stopping for lunch en route. It was traditional fare, and the kind of meal you could find an Ethiopian of any salary eating: a mix of often fiery vegetable, meat and lentil stews dolloped on to a large portion of spongy, sour injera bread.

‘You will see something totally different here,’ Sefiw promised us, and he was right, as usual. The Bale Mountains National Park is Exmoor on steroids. Monstrous grey slopes rise up with clumps of heather. Lakes, tarns and grasslands tie the peaks together, as does the vast Sanetti Plateau, where the average altitude is over 4,000 metres.

It is said that Bale Mountains is home to more mammal species than any other region on the planet. Most of these are rodents, including the giant mole rat – imagine Ronnie Corbett in a fur coat – but it’s also the best place to see the Ethiopian wolf, the rarest canid in the world. Spotting one is just a matter of time; beautiful and fox-like, they roam around like the belle of the ball.

At dusk that night, we settled fireside at the preposterously comfortable Bale Mobile Camp and watched a family of warthogs gambol home on a path in front of us. They walk like pigs in a huff, in single file, and lined up in descending size order.

The next morning, as we explored the region with a local ranger, Awol (ironically, he was always close by), we were told about nearby hyenas, and about the dense Harenna Forest, where black-maned Abyssinian lions dwell. He also pointed out a rock hyrax, which looks like a fat badger, and told us it is the species most closely related to the elephant – which is a bit like how Danny Dyer is technically related to Edward III.

Now and then we bumped into a mountain nyala, huge antelopes that seem to run in elegant slow motion, like Muybridge’s Horse. Whenever we got near a herd, they would freeze and look at us as if we’d walked into the wrong pub.

‘Are you ready to have a total change again?’ It was Sefiw, with his grin. He was enjoying this. We were travelling even further south for a final taste of Ethiopia, and it would be the most acquired yet. The Omo Valley feels like another country, another continent again. In a day, we went from -5C overnight in Bale to 35C in Omo. The ground went from dewy grass to dusty savannah. And the people, well… the people had definitely changed.

Divided by the languid slash of the crocodileinfested Omo River (a local man was eaten alive during our visit), this corner of Ethiopia is a patchwork of indigenous tribes, cultures and languages. It is another Unesco World Heritage site, thanks to the discovery of human remains dating back nearly 2.5 million years, but it is also in peril: the government’s building of dams further up the river threatens the future of tribes who have lived there since well before Ethiopia became a state.

Passing termite mounds as high as totem poles, we bounced across the parched ground to Lale’s Camp – the only permanent tented camp in the valley, on the banks of the river under a canopy of monkey-stuffed fig trees. It is run by Lale Biwa of the local Karo people, and staffed by tribespeople. At night, the only sounds were a cacophony of animal barks, yelps and snorts. I have no idea what was out there.

The intention of Lale’s Camp is to provide a mutually beneficial, sustainable alternative for the increasing number of tourists who take photos, pay for trinkets and leave without having engaged with the locals at all. It is a laudable sentiment, but who is the beneficiary of that decision? It was a question we were to wrestle with.

Popping in to see the tribes in their villages was nonetheless fascinating, if a little awkward, when the expressions we were met with suggested the pleasure was all ours. We met the Hamar people, whose women coat their hair in ochre and butter, and the Karo, who jump bulls. And we camped with 30-odd Mursi, famous for their lip-plates, who ‘invited’ (forced) us to dance with them one evening. I laughed as Hattie, turning puce, lurched around like Theresa May. And how

everyone laughed, when I had to improvise a oneon-one seduction routine with a Mursi lady, Habija, who’d taken a shine to me. Later, during a fellasonly number, my partner was a 6ft 5in half-naked man using his AK-47 as a twirling baton. You don’t see that on Strictly.

At sunset the next evening, our last in Ethiopia, hundreds of body-painted men and boys from the neighbouring Karo village gathered, arranged themselves in age order, and began jumping up and down. Women wearing homemade necklaces piled high on their chests jumped opposite. The movement created a beat over which simple, repetitive harmonies were sung. The result was pure joy, the dust kicking up into the gloaming and returning as constellations.

Over two weeks, Sefiw turned out to be the kind of guide who is so good, so unflappable, so interesting and interested, that travelling the country without him would have been like seeing it with the lights off. On the way down from Abuna Yemata, giddy and trying to ignore the octogenarian pilgrims happily climbing up without assistance or panic, I asked him why he hadn’t just told us what we were in for. Why did he say it was a walk?

He smiled. ‘I didn’t want you to think about how hard it was and say no,’ he said. ‘I thought it was better to just go and see for yourself.’

It is, in hindsight, the way to approach Ethiopia. It is the way to approach travel. We were told to expect a walk; what we got was an adventure.

Natural High Safaris offers 14 days for £6,350 per person based on four people travelling. This includes all meals and accommodation, Englishspeaking guides, all road transfers and transport, all sightseeing and entrance fees (01747-830950, naturalhighsafaris.com). International and domestic flights with Ethiopian Airways from £757 return (020-8987 7000, ethiopianairlines.com)

My halfnaked partner used his AK-47 as a twirling baton

The church of Saint George in Lalibela Abuna Yemata church is found at the summit of shards of rock Kelly struggles up the sheer rock face ‘walk’ to Abuna Yemata

An antelope-like mountain nyala in the Bale Mountains A woman with her baby outside a church on the road from Gheralta to Lalibela