Tag: food

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The Road to DirÄ“ Dawa

The road to Dirē Dawa is a long one: an eight-hour drive from Addis Ababa, or so we are told.

We left Addis Ababa at dawn, our bus rattling through empty streets shadowed by new-build office blocks. As with almost everywhere currently in Ethiopia, the pavements were piled with concrete rubble, the result of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ambitious nationwide road-widening project, a controversial scheme that had already demolished parts of some poorer city districts and displaced many residents in its wake.

For the first hour or so we sped along a pristine tarmacked dual carriageway, the brightening horizon ahead weighed down by clouds the colour of watermelon juice. We could have been almost anywhere; or, at least, anywhere that comes blessed with a backdrop of purple-shadowed mountains and lush tropical greenery. Eventually the freeway morphed into a narrow two-lane highway, which meandered around the heads of valleys as we plied our way eastwards. Traffic was heavy in both directions. Coming towards us was an endless stream of heavily laden trucks from Djibouti, each one towing a trailer, vehicle and driver bonded in lockstep like driven cattle. We slotted into a gap in the fast moving crocodile of trucks that were heading east towards the coast, some of which were piggybacking another truck strapped to their flatbed.

As elsewhere in the country there were checkpoints and roadblocks to slow things down. We had already experienced these travelling the roads of the south, especially in Oromia state, although they had rarely delayed us for long. Sometimes they were administered by the Ethiopian army but more often than not they were manned by local militia who wanted to keep an eye on who was coming into their territory. It had not taken long in the country to come to the conclusion that, rather than the unified sense of national identity promoted by the government, Ethiopia was in the process of becoming increasingly fragmented by region, language, culture and political persuasion.

Before our arrival in Ethiopia we had made firm decisions as to our itinerary. These were based on information gleaned from online travel forums and British FCO warnings regarding more unstable areas of the country. Much of the north – the highlands of Amhara and part of Tigray – was considered unsafe because of rebel activity and kidnappings. Similarly, part of the large sprawling region of Oromia that fans south, west and east from Addis Ababa also came with similar warnings about safety. The FCO had produced a map of the country that divided the country into three zones according to perceived safety: red (‘Advise against all travel’), amber (‘Advise against all but essential travel’) and green (‘see our travel advice before travelling’). I had consulted the updated map frequently throughout the second half of 2024 in the vain hope that brotherly love might prevail throughout the land but the map did not appear to change very much. Much of the south, in particularly the area around Hawassa where we had spent the previous week, was largely amber and therefore considered relatively safe. The highway between Addis Ababa and Dirē Dawa appeared to pass through both amber and green zones, nudging the red briefly between the Oromia towns of Welenchiti and Metehara.

Road blocks and heavy traffic aside, the other barrier to easy progress was roaming animals – donkeys, goats and camels. The donkeys especially were a law unto themselves, totally unfazed by the vehicles that swerved around them as they pottered along oblivious to any danger. It seemed almost as if the animals understood the fast and loose rules of the road – fully aware that if they were harmed then their owners would require compensation from the guilty driver. On a couple of occasions I actually saw one cross the road using a zebra crossing. Camels were a different matter though, large enough to call the shots, they were generally unwilling to step aside or allow any vehicle to manoeuvre past them.

We passed through an endless parade of villages that had little to differentiate themselves from one other: a blurred flash-by of roadside settlements, all flimsy housing and lean-do shops thrown together out of scrap wood, plastic sheets and corrugated iron. The goods on sale – fruit and vegetables, flyblown meat, second hand clothes, spare parts for vehicles – were the bread and butter (or, perhaps, injera) of everyday life. As always in the Global South, it was intriguing how such a base-level financial system managed to thrive, a poor man’s economy in which ragged ten birr notes continually changed hands until all the value had been squeezed out of them.

There was another product on sale that seemed to be ubiquitous in this part of the world – we had seen it on display along almost every roadside in southern Ethiopia the previous week. Khat, the stimulant of choice across much of the Horn of Africa, is an innocuous looking leaf that resembles bay or privet. Legal throughout the region, khat is, as many Ethiopians will attest, less a stimulant, more a way of life. Our driver was clearly an aficionado; as was our guide, a young man who kept his own counsel throughout the journey and did not utter a word of information about the foreign (to us) country that lay beyond the window. The pair just stared ahead for the whole way, locked in herbal reverie as they slowly worked through the pile of leaves that lay at their elbow.

Khat seems to be very much a driving drug, an herbal alternative to the so-called energy drinks whose slim cans over-caffeinated motorists toss out of their windows along Britain’s motorways. It might even be considered to be a green alternative to caffeine, although there is absolutely no shortage of coffee in this land of stay-awake plenty. A week earlier, motoring through the coffee-rich Sidama region of the south, our previous guide, Wonde (‘Wander’), had regaled us with horror stories about khat-crazed drivers careering off the road due to lack of sleep and/or poor decision-making. It seemed perfectly believable. Between Addis and Dirē Dawa I counted at least eight trucks that had crashed and gone off-the-road; some lay forlornly on their side, while others had ended up completely upside down with wheels akimbo. It was unclear as to what had become of the drivers, although it did not look as if they would have escaped unscathed.

One crashed truck that we passed had unleashed a load of crated beer bottles onto the slope beside the road. Slowing down to make our way around the crowd that had gathered around the wrecked vehicle, the air smelled as malty as a Sunday morning pub. A couple of armed men were guarding the booty as approved wreckers sifted through the debris, placing the unbroken bottles in crates ready for resale. Who the men with guns were was anybody’s guess. It was the same at some of the checkpoints we were obliged to stop at, where youths with rifles peered inside the bus before lowering the barrier – no more than a rope stretched across the road – to allow us to pass. A single word from the driver, ‘Turist’, and a glance at our pale well-fed faces within, was usually sufficient for us to be waved on.

While khat consumption is widespread, it was something that was shared with other countries in the region like Somalia. Other aspects of Ethiopian culture are decidedly more unique. One is the country’s unorthodox calendar, which is seven or eight years behind the rest of the world. While the year elsewhere might be 2024 according to the Gregorian calendar, in Ethiopia it is currently 2017. ‘Welcome to Ethiopia, and congratulations,’ we had been told more than once, ‘here you are seven years younger.’ Another Ethiopian curiosity is the music that is played loud and proud almost everywhere, which whether traditional, pop, or the rather wonderful Ethio-Jazz that I had already developed a taste for, uses a pentatonic scale that has a distinctive modal sound to it. A world away from other African music that is generally more accessible to Western ears, Ethiopian music has a tendency to sound rather other-worldly and even a little Chinese at times.

Another facet of Ethiopian culture that sets the country apart is the food, which is quite unlike anywhere else. The mainstay of the diet is a sour spongy pancake called injera, which is made from an ancient indigenous grain called teff. This is eaten along with small helpings of spicy vegetable or meat sauces. For many Ethiopians, if they can afford it, kitfo (spicy raw beef) is the preferred accompaniment, although, perhaps counter-intuitively, there are actually two days of the week, Wednesday and Friday, when restaurants are obliged to serve only ‘fasting’ food, which is strictly vegan. Whether meat or vegetable, raw or cooked, freshness is probably the most important factor in regards to health, and I believe it was the suspicious, rather tired-looking sauce that came with the injera I had eaten the previous night in Addis that had been the cause of the stomach cramps that troubled me throughout the long journey.

We pulled into DirÄ“ Dawa just as it was becoming dark, the onset of the city’s flickering neon countering the rapid tropical plunge into night. The journey had taken twelve hours – sunrise to sunset. Considerably lower in altitude than where we had come from, the city felt hot and humid compared to Addis’s fresher, spring-like climate. But it was as bustling and noisy as the capital, with a honking stream of three–wheel bajajs (tuk-tuks) plying DirÄ“ Dawa’s wide boulevards. Tomorrow there would be the opportunity to visit the city’s sights, such as they were. Tonight though, after a day of unremitting motion, it was the promise of laying still on an immobile bed that held the greatest appeal.

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Tomsk Waits

In contrast to the northwest Scotland of previous posts, the central Siberian city of Tomsk is indisputably East of Elveden – both figuratively and geographically. It is, after all, almost one quarter of the way around the world heading east from where I write. I spent a few grey rainy days here last autumn as a side trip to a long Trans-Siberian rail journey.

Tomsk lies just north of the main Trans-Siberian line, a sizeable city of about half a million sitting on the right bank of the Ob, a river that snakes its way north from here to the Gulf of Ob and the Arctic Ocean. Tomsk isn’t Arctic though – it lies at about the same latitude as Moscow and Glasgow, although it does drop to less than −20 °C in winter. Back in the 19th century, Tomsk was populated mostly by Cossacks, Tatars and political exiles but the city was side-stepped during the building of the Trans-Siberian railway line, when the new city of Novosibirsk (‘New Siberia’) was favoured as a stop instead.

These days Tomsk is a youthful, student-filled city; a relatively attractive place by Siberian standards, with a clutch of trendy brightly lit cafes around Ploschad Lenin, its central square. Trendy coffee bars are all the rage in the new Russia – even in backwoodsy Siberian cities like Tomsk. Here you’ll find ‘Travellers Coffee’, where you can get a pricey ‘bolshoi’ cappuccino, and another place called ‘Food Master’ – in a land where the Cyrillic alphabet reigns supreme, Latin script and English names are considered a guarantee of Western sophistication… or cheerless fast food. Food Master dishes up Mexican food with a pronounced Siberian accent – fajitas with beetroot, refried beans with dill and so on. There’s also an awkwardly translated English menu that temptingly offers ‘Languages with mushroom sauce’ and ‘Fat lard’ – fusion cuisine perhaps, but with a ‘con-’ prefix. Even here, in an establishment that is unapologetically ‘New Russia’, a Soviet-era fixation persists that has each component priced according to weight and itemised on the final bill – bread (the precise number of slices), sauce, garnish, meat (again precise, eg: ‘pig meat, 100g’) – as it would be the humblest factory workers’ stolovaya canteen. Actually, stolovayas are the places that I generally try and seek out – redolent of boiled cabbage, they promise cheap wholesome stodge served up by plump headscarfed women – just point and smile (or scowl if you want to blend in). It’s a genuine retro experience: school dinners, Soviet style. There is one of these tucked away in a basement a little further along Prospekt Lenin.

Stylish cafes are not the only concession to Western culture. Halfway along the high street a gable is covered with an enormous poster of gravel-voiced American troubadour Tom Waits standing astride a railway line and bellowing into a microphone windscreen mounted on a crooked stick – very much Tom the iconic hobo poet. The club in the basement beneath is called ‘Underground’ (a song from Swordfishtrombones) and, of course it is a lovely pun – Tom(sk) Waits – geddit. It seems unlikely that Tom Waits’ management is aware of this brazen Siberian deployment but equally doubtful that Californian copyright law stretches quite this far.  Waits is well known as an enthusiastic litigator of those who besmirch his image but this one seems to fit the brand perfectly.

Drop down a street or two to the west, away from the clubs and cafes of Prospekt Lenin, and you immediately find yourself in Old Siberia. A leafy street called Tatarskaya (this was once the city’s Tatar quarter) has old wooden houses with elaborately carved window surrounds and friezes. Poor, a little tumbledown but undeniably picturesque, this is the sort of thing that tourists  come to see, although most tend not to wander this far off the direct Trans-Siberian route between Yekaterinberg and Irkutsk.

Heading further north along Prospekt Lenin you soon reach a part of town that seems to have far more resonance with the old Soviet Union. Naturally enough, there is a Lenin statue here – this one in ‘hailing a taxi’ pose – as well as some brutalist Stalin-era civic buildings, Krushchevski apartment blocks and rusting boats at the river quay. This really could be a scene from almost anywhere in the former USSR pre-1991 but it is not – it is simply a matter of post-Soviet redevelopment not quite reaching this far uptown yet.

Tomsk may have once been lauded as the ‘Siberian Athens’ thanks to its univeristies and large number of students but Anton Chekhov did not like it one bit, although surely it must have been an improvement on the penal colony at Sakhalin Island that he had visited prior to passing through the town.

He wrote to his sister: ‘Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too.’

Quite understandably, Tomsk citizens have never quite forgiven this scathing dismissal of their city and in response have erected a mocking statue of Chekhov close to the university. Perhaps wounded by the accusation of  dullness, the authorities seem keen these days to instil some European-style civic fun into the Tomsk city calendar. They have inaugurated a carnival, and the one I witnessed last year was the fifth according to the posters. Roads were closed and a stage set up in the main square where a variety of acts came on to dance and mime to Russian turbo-pop. There was even a group of African djembe drummers hired for the task who grinned amiably as they performed to a bemused crowd that did not really know quite what to do. Young families and groups of friends watched the action on the stage and took pictures of each other with their mobile phones before sloping off for an ice-cream. No doubt it will take a while for imported carnival culture to catch on here – just two decades ago, rather than drumming Africans or disco-dancing teenagers, the citizens of Tomsk were watching processions of tanks and soldiers with supersized hats march by.

While Tomsk may struggle with the concept of carnival it is doing well in the world of football. In recent years the city’s home side FC Tom Tomsk (their logo in Cyrillic spells TOMb) has risen like an eagle up the divisions to reach the dizzy heights of the Russian Premier League. It remains there, respectably mid-table, to this day. The Hotel Sputnik where I stayed is located right next door to the team’s stadium but sadly I had to move on to Irkutsk the day before their fixture with Lokomotiv Moscow.

For a look at another quirky Russian city, Kazan, take a look at my feature in the latest edition of hidden europe magazine here.