A silver cross glinted at the woman's throat as she raised her long-necked clay pot and poured out a golden stream. Behind her, the Blue Nile thundered over a cliff and rainbows played hide-and-seek in its smoke. Tendrils of incense snaked into the sky, blending with aromas of dust, cow dung and the dried reeds spread at my feet. I sat on a rock sipping sweet coffee from a dainty china cup, bemused. How could a place be so wild and so civilised all at once?
It was only my second day in Ethiopia, but I was already learning to accept and even enjoy an almost constant state of mystification. It had started the day before at the same place as the Blue Nile: Lake Tana. Our boat bounced across milky-green waves as we sailed past wooded islands sheltering convents and monasteries on our way to the Zege Peninsula. We alighted at a small bay where tankwas, papyrus canoes, were spread on the grass to dry.
Vervet monkeys ruffled an indigenous forest of giant ficus and wild coffee. I climbed a narrow path past ramshackle curio stalls whose keepers pleaded with me to take a closer look at ornate handmade crosses, copies of religious paintings and solid silver trade coins.
The entrance to the medieval church compound of Ura Kidane Mehret was a carved wooden door in a thatched hut topped by a clay pot that looked rather like an inflated rubber glove. Inside, large, round, mud buildings were fringed with thousands of little bells, festooned with five-fingered pots or surmounted with circular steel crosses skewering seven ostrich eggs each. It was all deeply symbolic to Ethiopian orthodox Christians and completely bewildering to me.
Beside the church, under a mango tree, a group of children clothed in white sang to the beat of drums. I left my sandals on the stone steps and tiptoed through towering wooden doors. The hushed gloom shone with a riot of colour and action. Parchment painted in natural pigments covered the walls from floor to ceiling, peeling in places but still jewel-bright. The pictures all told stories: of saints and sinners, angels and prophets. Some I remembered from Sunday school. Others were entirely unfamiliar. My guide had to drag me away before dark.
Now hooked on Ethiopia's medieval churches, I was delighted to discover another in the city of Gondar, a former capital of the empire and my next stop. Debre Birhan Selassie was once Gondar's most important church and the only one to escape destruction when the Sudanese Mahdist attacked in 1888.
Legend says it was saved by a swarm of bees. It's best known for the ceiling, painted with row upon row of angelic faces looking in every direction.
The city itself is most famous for its 17th century castles. No fewer than five of them are grouped in a walled enclosure on a hill in the middle of the city called the Fasil Ghebbi. The oldest, built by Emperor Fasilidas in 1632, is also the grandest.
Fasilidas also commissioned an Olympic-sized pool at the bottom of the hill, although he probably never used it to do laps. In January each year, it's the stage for Timkat - the epiphany festival.
Gondar has relics of more recent rulers too. Although Ethiopia was never colonised, Mussolini occupied the country for five years and made Gondar an administrative centre of what was briefly known as Italian East Africa, combining Ethiopia, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. The fascists were forced out in 1941, but the city's traffic still revolves sedately around a piazza lined with art deco buildings and cafés where tourists gulp espressos.
Next day, a 4x4 carrying me, a cook and camping gear swept through the piazza, out of Gondar and towards the Simien Mountains. At the dusty, bustling town of Debark, I signed my name in a register and was assigned a guide who called me "Allias" and a scout who spoke no English, but had a woolly red hat, an engaging grin and an AK47. Everyone clambered back into the vehicle and it pushed through throngs of vegetable sellers, goats, mules and sacks of teff, the local staple - it was market day in Debark - on to a lumpy dirt road and up, up and up.
Not far from the Simien Mountains National Park gates, the road dropped away on one side and the valley scrambled steeply down until it reached a deep gully, which surged into another, out of which a vast, grooved ridge soared up to support conical towers and tubular protuberances. The process was repeated continually until the ridges, gullies and turrets faded into a distant blue haze. Just looking at it could create that feeling in your stomach when you descend 20 storeys in a fast elevator.
Trekking in the Simiens can be as tough or as relaxing as you choose. You need to be reasonably fit, however, as some routes involve up to eight hours' walking at altitude. Many of the peaks rise over 4 000 metres. A short three-night trek like the one I did will take you from Sankaber to the village of Geech. Your days are spent walking through mind-bending topography, past Amhara tribesmen tilling vertiginous slopes for barley. Your evenings are whiled away sitting outside your tent, breathing the thin, cold air and staring into a luminous sky.
Published by arrangement with Getaway magazine. For the full story, see the July edition.
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