On Foot Through a Forgotten Land

6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES JUNE 7/JUNE 8 2014 Travel ebre, our guide, was get- ting exasperated. “It’s easy,” he said. “Women come up here with babies on their backs – it’s easy.” GIt was not easy. I’d been paralysed On foot through with fear for five minutes, stuck halfway up a cliff with no rope, spread- eagled on the sandstone, starfish-like, my hands and bare feet, slick with sweat and terror, slipping from the tiny crannies. Twenty feet below was a forgotten land the narrow ledge I’d set off from; 1,000ft below that, the valley floor. Above, somewhere up there, was the clifftop rock church of Abuna Yemata Guh. And above that, only heaven. Ending up at any of them was dis- tinctly on the cards. Great walks In the second of a series on hiking holidays, Mike Carter treks to the ancient cliff churches of Tigray in Ethiopia If the 100 or so ancient cliff churches of Ethiopia’s Tigray region He pointed out the birds as we went We walked on, along the rim of the SUDAN by rock hyraxes, golden eagles soar- in the country’s far north are difficult – the black-winged lovebird and the mountains, the sun starting to fall, ing on the thermals, and along nar- to get to, the same could have been white-cheeked turaco (both endemic), gradually turning the sandstone from row, crumbling ledges with sheer said until very recently for the area as the African firefinch and cinnamon- vermilion to ochre. A Verreaux’s eagle ERITREA drops and, every few hours, in the a whole. Remote and mountainous, it breasted bee-eater; brilliant flashes was being mobbed by a dozen ravens, middle of nowhere, came across a was blighted by civil war from the of colour, all completely tame. A troop the whole like some graceful dogfight. Adigrat Red Sea church door in a cliff wall. There was 1970s until the 1990s, and in the 1980s of gelada monkeys watched us from Right at the end of the ridge, the only always a priest and nearly always was also the centre of the famine that a giant fig tree. There was a real man-made structure for miles, and Hawzen a congregation, usually just one or horrified the world. Since then, any sense of Shangri-La about these inches from the cliff edge, was the two men, eager to commence a four- Mek’ele tourists who do venture north of Tigrayan valleys. hedamo at Enaf. A simple stone build- hour mass. After another long day of Gondar Addis Ababa tend to stop at the coun- The path rose again. After an hour ing of rooms set around a courtyard, walking, we reached the hedamo at try’s headline attraction, Lalibela’s we reached a door in the mountain- based on the traditional Tigray farm- Gohgot, tucked at the foot of a large rock-hewn churches, rather than car- side. Endele disappeared and returned houses, it had been built by two sandstone bluff. Lake Lalibela rying on to Tigray. with a priest, with silver hair and NGOs, Adigrat Diocese Catholic Secre- Tana On our third day, crossing the But a new chain of community-run chaotic teeth. The door was unlocked tariat and Tesfa Community-based Shimbrety plateau, we were invited hedamos (guesthouses) dotted through and we entered a cave. In the gloom, Tourism. Dinner was cooked on an ETHIOPIA inside a sheep farmer’s house for a the gloriously stark landscape of I could make out carved sandstone open fire and served by villagers who coffee ceremony. In the country where mesas and deep ravines, means that Aksumite pillars, a barrel-shaped run the guesthouse as a cooperative. the arabica plant originated, drinking Addis Ababa Tigray, with its rock churches, its pas- knave and pews of rock. Covering the After the meal, tired from the five 200 km coffee is a serious business, attended toral culture unchanged for millennia walls were frescoes in primary colours hours of hard walking, and with no by ritual and love. Fresh straw was and so much besides, is now more eas- depicting familiar scenes from the electricity to provide night-time dis- laid on the stone floor in our honour. ily accessible to trekkers. Built by tractions, there was nothing to do but Clockwise from main picture: An AK-47 hung from the rafters. NGOs, the guesthouses are basic (but walked along the valley floor, through drift off into the deepest kind of sleep a priest at the clifftop church of “They have been having problems often with astounding views) and treks villages of stone Tigrayan tukul I’d been paralysed with on mats laid on traditional mud beds, Abuna Yemata Guh; Mike Carter’s with leopards,” said Endele. can be bookended by stays at two lux- houses, past people in white robes listening to the wind howl. group have breakfast at Enaf; climbing The ceremony began. The beans ury lodges, the Agoro at Adigrat and winnowing maize by hand, or thresh- fear for five minutes, The next day we walked across roll- towards one of the churches; a woman were roasted over an open fire, the Gheralta near Hawzen. ing millet with pairs of oxen. Clear ing plains of golden teff (Ethiopia’s prepares a coffee ceremony for the pounded with a mortar, then taken We had planned a three-night, four- springs fed fields of onions and stuck halfway up a cliff staple grain for making injera bread), group; a priest at the church around and shaken under the guests’ day walk of about 40 miles, setting off cabbages, and everywhere we went, spiked with cypress trees, the whole of Gohgot Eyesus Mike Carter noses to allow them to smell the from Agoro, the first of the luxury we were trailed by a coterie of small with no rope, my hands scene redolent of Tuscany. Then along aroma. Endele told us how three cups lodges, built in 2011 just outside the giggling children. Everyone waved at slick with terror valleys of giant candelabra cactus and of coffee are served in honour of a town of Adigrat. Our group was made us, smiling. “They will not have seen aloe, riven with sparkling brooks, so legend involving three monks. The up of four British walkers, Endele too many outsiders before,” said visually perfect and ordered that they Great Journeys first round of coffee, called the awel, Teshome, our guide from Addis, and Endele. It was a scene, he added, that looked as if they had all been formally From a boat trip through Myanmar to a is the strongest, the second, kale’i, is the two donkeys we’d hired to carry would have been little changed since Bible but with the unfamiliar twist for landscaped. Following tracks walked drive across New Mexico, read more lighter, and the third, bereka (“to be our luggage, for where we were going biblical times. a westerner such as me that all the by Tigrayan highlanders for millen- from our Great Journeys series at blessed”) the lightest of all. The coffee there were no roads. faces were African. nia, we climbed up escarpments, eyed ft.com/greatjourneys was accompanied by balls of barley We climbed, through forests of euca- According to Endele, nobody is paste skewered with twigs and lyptus, the floor carpeted with wild really sure why Tigray’s churches dunked into a chilli sauce. sage, the fragrance kicked up by the were carved into cliff faces. Just as We bought a sheep from the farmer donkeys’ hooves, the thin air 6,000ft nobody really seems to know when and invited him and his family to join above sea level making us work hard. they were built, with guesses ranging us for dinner that night. We walked A mule train came the other way, from the fourth century – when what to the edge of the plateau and there carrying grain to Adigrat. was then the Kingdom of Aksum was Shimbrety, our final guesthouse, After a couple of hours, we reached became one of the world’s first official built, like the others, on the edge of the top of the ridge. Spread before us Christian states – to the ninth, mak- a sandstone cliff. This one was enor- was a landscape of such epic scale and ing them older than the churches of mous, maybe 3,000ft high, and the grandeur that it took a while to take Lalibela, 150 miles to the south. Until views so staggering and the world it all in: vast canyons for miles, and the mid-1960s, when the churches so beautiful that even a confirmed buttes and mesas topped with juniper were first chronicled, they were atheist might start to wonder. forests, with the ragged, shark-teeth almost unknown outside Tigray – The farmer, his family, and a group Adwa Mountains forming the back- even to Ethiopians. But in many of other locals arrived. The mutton drop, like some lost world imagined ways, the mystery only deepens the was fried with garlic and onion, and by Hollywood animators. sense of wonder about Ethiopia, the eaten dunked in a fiery sauce of chilli On the edge of the escarpment, we only African state never colonised. and araki, a potent spirit. sat under a giant wizened olive tree “Encompassed on all sides by the The sun disappeared. The tempera- and looked out, the soundtrack of this enemies of their religion,” wrote ture plummeted. We moved into a world drifting up to us in snatched 18th-century historian Edward Gib- tiny room, lit only by the fire burning fragments: children laughing; a howl- bon, “the Ethiopians slept near a at its centre.

Load more