Monday - March 14 2011 - Jinka Ethiopia
End if the day and I'm a tuckered lil cowgirl. I didn't sleep all that well and lots of rough roads consisting of jostling and such. I didn't consider exactly how much work it is just sitting in a car and staying erect.
Today started at 7:30 take off for a visit to the Muri people. The first two reasons for coming to Ethiopia are in this order the rock hewn churches in Lalibea and the Mursi people. Both at opposite extremes in the country. The Mursi people are one of the iconic African tribes that I think about when thinking about Africa (that and the cliche' of Missionary in cooking post (which may not be that bad for the world)) The Mursi are the tribes that have the round plates placed in the women's lower lips. At the proper time, the guidebook says 20, the local museum says puberty, a hole 4 lower teeth wide is cut into the lower lip and a wooden plug is inserted. Then over time, my guide says 3 years, the museum says one year, the lips are stretched with larger and larger disks that look something like a rope pulley wheel. Some are plain and some are painted and some are etched. According to the guidebook the Mursi people didn't even know that Ethiopia existed until about 50 years ago, and I can see why.
The drive here from Addis is arduous trek in today's 4X4's and
reasonably modern roads. Omce you are here in Jinka then you need to
cross the mountains to the Omo valley. The road was mostly a graded road
cut through the mountains. Only problem the last grading was in the
Truman administration and the dirt has been packed down leaving only
real sharp rocks pointing you. We were flying along at a breakneck 20
KMH (12 MPH ?) when we hit the straightaways. Of course we had to slow
down for the hairpins and somehow make a 3/4 lane road into a 2 lane
road when someone was coming the other direction. Fortunately for us
there were guardrails at the places where the vehicle would cartwheel for
miles if the worst happened. The guardrail consisted of a small and I
mean small berm made when the last road grader passed through.Dry rivers and creeks were no problem for the Landcruiser. The 4 Landcruiser long pond was worrisome for me. He kept it in 2WD and mushed through it with water splashing up onto the windshield and water about 1/3 the way up the door. The worst part was knowing we had to come back that way and how bad the water smelled. To put it nicely it was "wiffy". My imagination went on overdrive and started looking for a sharp knife to commit HariKari (Supoku ?) if we stalled on the way back. Better that than living with the aroma of fermented cow poop, insect larvae and mosquito piss - plus a few other things I'd rather not think too hard on.
