WEATHER: HOT 30C, sunny and humid
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Seeing the Mursi tribe – even though they are pushy
BUMMER OF THE DAY: It really is quite humid
BUYS OF THE DAY: Lunch in Jinka
WORD OF THE DAY: Dic Dic’s and Blu Blu Blu Blu Blu
We have a big travel day today with 200km to travel. Alarm went off at 6am, breakfast was at 7am and we left early again at 7.50am. I have to say I am finally starting to feel half human again after that dreadful Araki stuff. That 65% proof can really knock you for a 6! Can you believe that! Yeah probably not the smartest move, but by geez I had a great night!
As I was packing my bag I saw a spider on the wall right near my bag. I am not a spider person by any means, but I was in Africa and trying to live by the rule that I have to expect all creatures’ great and ugly have a chance to live. So I kept packing around this spider the size of 2x.50c pieces till it moved to within jumping distance to my nag and I just had to draw the line, so I took off my shoe and took a swipe to kill the bugger (stuff the Africa thing) and of course I missed and it ran under my bag. Bloody hell. So I finished packing, zipped the bag and moved it carefully near the door with no sign of the now blood sucking scary spider. I went for breakfast and when I returned to pick up my bag, momentarily forgetting about the spider till I saw him leering at me from one of my backpack straps, so there was no missing this time as I swiped him off my bag, grabbing it and then making a run for it leaving this dreadful animal in the hut for his next victim. I hate spiders.
Today is car number 2 and Abraham our driver. Today was pretty much views of the Omo Valley the whole day and beautiful scenery with our final destination of seeing the Mursi (Moorsi) people. These guys are the ones you see with the lip plates and their ears with blocks of wood inserted and beaded necklaces.
We are still getting hit for the Highland plastic bottles as we drive along. Highland is a brand of bottled stilled water, and they are chasing the empty bottles. They don’t speak English so all you hear as you drive past is “Highland” “Highland” Highland” with these children the age of 8-10 running beside the car. It is sad, as what harm can a bottle do, but it is the culture of the begging that we just can’t cave into. It is tough when you know you have empty bottles, but we are not helping by giving into them.
After passing through a tribe checkpoint, we came off the mountains and hit the agricultural flat plains and the temperature has risen an extra 5 degrees with it. As far as the eye can see were cotton fields and a lot of the traffic today slowing us down were herds of cattle on the road that we would have to honk to get the dumb animals to move to one side. The roads are amazing so far today, but we have been warned the last 60km this afternoon will be rough going. The people have also started to change. The local people now have longer hair dreaded into small locks, their clothes have also changed with the men not wearing shirts and to describe it a sarong like material wrapped around their waist held up by a belt. Their bodies are so lean and strong looking, but looking at the mountains we are again climbing, they certainly get the exercise.
We arrived into Jinka just before midday, so we placed out lunch order at the hotel we were eating at and then jumped back into the cars and went and visited the Jinka Museum while we waited. It was actually a pretty good museum going through the cultural differences based on a conversation boards stuck on the wall between people. It was a nice difference to learn about female circumcision, which is still practiced today and the information behind the lip plates and to see the actual size of these things is just unbelievable and will be super interesting to see them on the ladies.
After lunch it was time to head into Mago National Park and to our final destination and first camping night of the trip and my first night into tents without my tentie L. As I am not sharing with anyone I am going to have a tent to myself which is okay based on the demographic of the group, but I hope there is some-one available to help me set it up. The weather is starting to turn and there were some black clouds and small showers as we drove along. The scenery is amazing and having the black clouds helps enhance your pictures and makes for some great photos. There was one point where we were coming off a mountain with a view into the valley and it was raining in a section of the plain and not around it. It was like a tap had been turned on just in that area. It made for a great photo – it looked amazing.
Just before entering the national park, we visited a small village of Ari people and got a brief look into their village. They showed us how they make that wicked wicked stuff I drank Araki, and just the small of it as a sample was passed round was enough to make my stomach turn. Ugh, it really has a distinctive small as well as taste and I just couldn’t do it. There were women there picking the dry kernels off the cobs which they then crush, ferment and make the Araki. The perk of their job, was there was always a glass of the Araki by their side, not a bad perk, not sure if the liver would agree though!
Mago National Park is one of the National Parks of Ethiopia. Located in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region about 782 kilometers south of Addis Ababa and north of a large 90° bend in the Omo River, the 2162 square kilometers of this park are divided by the Mago River, a tributary of the Omo, into two parts. The Park was established in 1979, making it the newest of Ethiopia's several National Parks. Its highest point is Mount Mago (2528 meters). Minaloo told me that there would be plenty of opportunity to see Dic Dic’s on the trip and Mago National Park was the place. After driving for only 20 minutes we saw our first set of Dic Dic’s. The trees are pretty close to the road here, so the Dic Dic’s were only 5m away from the car. They are just the cutest animals and the smallest of the antelope family, and I have to say they just might be edging out the giraffe as favorite animals. In total we drove foe around 2 hours in the park and we saw 14 Dic Dic’s!!! How awesome is that and I think I took a photo of each of them as well. They are flighty critters, so you have to be quick before they bounce off into the shrubs. We also got warned about the Tse Tse fly, which are primarily found on cattle and apparently the bite hurts like hell and there are versions of the fly that make you sleepy after you have been bitten. Well this particular fly does hurt like hell, as I got bitten, but it doesn’t make you sleepy, but man it hurt.
So after driving for 2 hours and with the rain on and off all day, we got to a section of the dirt track that was quite muddy and on a small incline. Number 1 crew and Zeme attempted to get up the slope to no effect, so they tried again, and again and again, till eventually they got bogged and had to be rescued by car number 2 crew, which was us. So after winching the car to us and with 6 men pushing the car backwards we got them unbogged and a change in game plan on where we were going to camp that night. Minaloo’s main concern even if we all got up the slope, if it keeps raining then we could possibly get stuck out here and throw the rest of the programme out. So plan B was put in place pretty quickly and we turned all the cars around and headed to another site where we could camp for the night. Number 3 and Johnny got bogged on the way out, but only for a round 10 minutes and no help was nesscessary which just means that Minaloo made a great call on turning the convoy around at that point. It meant driving for an extra 2 hours, but we got some more great scenery of the Omo Valley and we also stopped a few times and managed to get a group photo as well for the books. It really is beautiful out here. AMAZING.
We travelled the way we had come back for around 45 minutes, which was fine with me as it gave us an opportunity to try and see some more Dic Dic’s and then headed further over the mountain ranges getting us into the largest Mursi (Moorsi) village in the area just before 5.30pm. As like any village once we pulled up we got mobbed by the locals, but these are locals in the true sense of the word. Besides westerners visiting the village for income for them, they still live a very traditional way of life. The children didn’t have clothes on, the woman have a simple blanket wrapped around them, so they are also half nude and the men wear a sarong like piece of material around their waist and either have a fighting stick in the hand or a AK47 gun (calashkinoff). The guns are a status symbol that is part of the dowry when they get married. They need the guns to fight neighboring tribes and we just aren’t talking about a word fighting, they shoot each other if required. It is serious stuff out here and it is hard to not do a double take when driving along seeing guns slung over the men’s shoulders as an everyday accessory.
So we got out of the cars camera less. The Mursi people are renowned for being ruthless in asking for money for photos and Minaloo just wanted us to walk around the village without all the hype to take away from the experience and getting hassled for money and us getting side tracked. The other thing is they fight over who gets a picture and who gets the money and then a whole new set of issues for them and for us. I mean how bad can they be I hear you ask. Well it was the best move not having our cameras, as we really were want for a better word attacked from all angles. People come running out of their huts to come and check us out and try their luck in making some money. Once they knew we didn’t have our camera’s they laid off a little bit, but it was very full on and definitely detracted from the experience to start with. The Mursi people look like those you see in books when you read about Ethiopia. They have the lip plates, which were as big as a tea saucer, they have inserts in their ears, some of them as big as a .50c piece, they have beautiful jewellery on, some had faces painted, others had on head dresses made out of beads and some had babies either hanging off the side of them or on their backs in slings. There were also some women that didn’t have the lip plate in, so there was a big piece of loose skin hanging down which is technically their bottom lip and it was just incredible that can be done to your body. The men had on the sarong skirts around their waist and the children as mentioned were nude or partially clothed or just had beads around their protruding bellies, but otherwise naked. As it had also rained here recently the whole village was mud. As you walked the mud stuck to your shoes and pretty much your foot just grew in size as more and more mud stuck to the sole. As usual I was a bit of a ‘freak’ show if I was to put it crudely. It is my size that fascinates them. The children kept coming up to me and trying to put their little hands around the top of my arms and thought it was hilarious when their fingers could just touch or not touch at all. It would be easy to take offence to it in the western world, but they really have no contact with the outside world except us, so beside being white I really do look different to them, and I am here looking at them, so I guess it works both ways, I am sure if they had a camera they would probably take pictures of me to! I have also had a bit of sunburn from driving in the car, so when they touch my skin it goes from red to white and back to red. This they find fascinating and were getting a good old kick out of that! My boobs were another interesting thing for them. There were a couple of times they lifted up my shirt so I let them do it once as I have a bra on anyways, but I had to draw the line when they wanted to keep on doing it. My bracelets are also a subject of fascination. I have pretty much collected a bangle from each country that I have been to, not wearing them all at once of course, but out of the 5 that I am wearing this trip is my beaded bangle from Namibia and it has been the most popular, which is a little strange as they have beads here, so I am sure they could make their own. They are all happy to pose for photos in lei of a swap for the bangle. Firstly it’s a little hard to give one bangle when there are 15 children all around and I paid like 6 bucks for that so that would get me like 80 photos and we can’t encourage begging so it is a big fat NO I’m sorry kiddies. You can look at me with those big beautiful brown eyes all you like but the answer is still no.
So we walked around the muddy village while our camp was getting set up in the grounds of the medical centre that has nearly been completed in the village. As it had rained recently there was a lot of mud which didn’t seem to faze the Mursi, they don’t wear shoes and at one point we walked across some ground cover that had prickles and the kids walked on their heels and were prickle free on the other side. I mean we were also walking through cow poo, mud, prickles you name it and we had shoes on, they were in bear feet. I wonder what they think of us wearing shoes, wearing clothes walking around with our fancy cameras. So we were out and about for around 40 minutes before it started to get dark and to be honest it was good to get a little break from them as well. They are a very full on tribe and it wears you down and I am not looking forward to tomorrow when we head back in armed with our camera’s. Heaven help us then!!!
So camp was set up between 2 buildings in the medical centre. When we got back more than half of the tents were already up and they were just finishing the last few. So the drivers had been driving all day and then they had put up our tents for us as well. That is pretty amazing. As I am on my own I have a one man tent, which is big enough for me, it is just one of those tents that is low and flat, so you can’t stand up in it. We were also given a mattress cover and 2 thin mattresses to sleep on, which actually look okay. So my sleeping bag and pillow make another appearance for the first time in 5 weeks. There are no showers here and apparently a really dodgy drop toilet, which I didn’t use; my call of the wild was taken in some bushes at the back of one of the buildings on advice from the previous toilet uses.
Even though we were in the medical compound, it wasn’t fully enclosed, so some of the villagers could come and go as they pleased. It was only to a certain extent though, as we had a park ranger with an AK47 at the ready guarding us all night and he would shoo them off if there were too many hanging around. Which was a good thing as dinner was served I would hate to have these hungry faces looking at me eat my delicious dinner, it just wouldn’t be right. So tables were set, table cloths and all, for dinner with camp chairs in one of the alcoves out of the rain and by candlelight, so it was a nice way to finish the day. As we got in late to camp, dinner was a little late getting to the table and we were all pretty tired by this time, but we sucked it up and after dinner Minaloo has a Mursi friend that lives in the village, Olibilley, so we got him to come over for us to have a chat with him. It involved a triple translation as he spoke Mursi, to which it was translated by the park ranger into Ethiopian and then Minaloo would translate for us into English. There are 12,000 Mursi and only 2 of them can speak English. It was interesting though and we asked about his wife and he is getting a second wife that is going to cost him 38 cattle and pretty much cleans him out. He keeps a few cattle for himself and then starts to collect his herd all over again. He is also one of the few that has left his village for a cultural exchange to Addis Ababa and then to Japan for 11 days. So we are talking about someone that has never left a remote village and got on a plane to a place full of neon lights and Japanese people to which he had never seen before. A few things he mentioned was a metal box that went up a tall scary thing ( lift in a building) and a snake that had no head or tail ( a train) and food that went around on a small track constantly ( sushi train) and the lack of open spaces, grass and trees. It would be kind of scary and it reminded me of Crocodile Dundee when he went to the city or The Gods Must be Crazy.
We went to sleep to the sound of cow bells and cattle walking in the field next to the medical centre.
It was a BIG day but totally rewarding and this is what we came to Ethiopia to see. This tribe was amazing, even though they were chasing a buck out of it all, at the end of the day are they any different just making the most of an opportunity, they just don’t realize how pushy it is but I would classify this as a once in a lifetime experience and once again Ethiopia has shown some true colours and it is just an amazing country.
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