Lake Tana Ethiopia

We got a nice ride to Lake Tana in the south central area of Ethiopia. The roads were surprisingly good. They had a smooth gravel surface and were wide enough for two trucks to pass fairly easily. The Italians built these roads back in the 1940s when they briefly occupied Ethiopia as a hostile imperialist. Ethiopia never gave in to them despite the occupation of the country and eventually the Italians were forced to give it up. The great roads were the legacy from that. I guess those crazy Italians we met in Marsabit had some history of making good roads but to me they were more like just a bunch of happy drunks.

The scenery on the way to Lake Tana was awesome. We could see the rift valley opening up in front of us as we drove up high along the western edge of it. When we arrived at the lake I was kind of surprised by how large it was. The first thing we saw was a bunch of fat hippos along the shore and reeds growing everywhere on shore and in the water's edge. There was not much there as far as a village goes. The area was mostly unoccupied except by a few fishermen who plied the lake in their handmade reed boats. We stopped and talked to some of the first ones we came across. I always like to check out the fishing.

They waved us back and made us stand way back from the water. I didn't understand why and they quickly explained it to me. There were crocodiles and hippos and either one could kill the fishermen or us standing near them at any moment and in fact frequently did just that according to the fishermen. The hippos sometimes just attacked the boats and chomped them in half in a single bite killing the fishermen or leaving them in the water for the crocs to finish off. Their job sounded kind of dangerous the way they described it to us. I loved their banana shaped reed boats. They made me think of the early Egyptians and their papyrus boats. The boats made me think I had gone back a few centuries in time. I really wanted to buy one and take it home.

We found a woman that rented rooms in her house to tourists and we took her room which was right near the waterfalls of the lake. The falls were about 400 hundred yards wide and dropped about a hundred and twenty feet or so. The falls are the beginning of the Blue Nile river which joins up with the White Nile to form the Nile river. The falls were totally undeveloped when we were there. This one woman's small thatched house near the falls was the only development in sight. The bright green lush vegetation around the roaring falls was also memorable. We stood at the edge and looked down at the rainbows formed by all the spray. I could not believe that a place this beautiful was so raw and natural and still untamed by man. We stood around almost all day watching the falls. It was very romantic.

Our host made us some coffee from fresh green beans. She roasted the green beans in a cast iron pan over a small charcoal fire. We sat there smelling the slowly roasting beans and were dying for a good cup of coffee. By the time the beans were roasted just right and then ground up in her mortar and pestle then filtered through a mesh cloth into cups we were going crazy in anticipation. We were rewarded by one of the best cups of coffee I have ever had. We drank more several times a day.

A couple of days after we arrived we were surprised to suddenly have hundreds of people arrive in trucks and a couple of helicopters. They were led by a bunch of British men in their twenties to forties. They had a plan to take kayaks down the Blue Nile river which to date no one had been able to do. They had big plans of filming the adventure for television broadcast and maybe a film they told us. They threw money at everything they could. We were told by them that they even hired a well armed private army to follow them as they went down the river to protect them from bandits and things. I could not believe how excited they all were.

The very next morning the helicopter got in position to film and the first few kayaks were put in the water at the foot of the falls. I myself would never get in the water there. It was a huge volume of muddy brown water flowing with a deafening roar through boulders and twisting and turning around a serpentine course where every turn caused the current to surge up or down or sideways or whatever boiling in an angry display of sheer power. But these guys thought it looked fun and exciting. To each his own I guess.

As they climbed into their kayaks with their helmets on and were pushed into the seething waters one by one they screamed off. Most of them unfortunately were smashed into rocks or the walls of the canyon in a matter of seconds. The longest surviving kayak lasted maybe five minutes total before it too was smashed up. The surprising thing to me was that not one of them got killed. They all survived their stupidity somehow. A few of them were injured with cuts and huge bruises but there wasn't even a single broken bone. I don't know how they were able to do that. It showed their skill and experience in fast water. They incredibly tried over and over again until all their kayaks were gone which took about thirty minutes total from the time the first one hit the water until the last one was smashed. They all regrouped at the top edge of the falls and talked about their experiences in fast high pitched excited tones. I was laughing my ass off at the whole invasion of these guys. They were planning their next attempt already but since they had no more kayaks available this time they had to pack back up and leave which they did the next morning.

We had a lot of fun talking with the British adventurers. They told us about their other river assaults all over the world that they were successful with and some of their other failures. This seemed to be their whole reason to be in life. We drank their booze and got pretty hammered. I had a hang over the next morning as they departed. Then Kirsten and I went back to our little romantic vacation for a couple more days. I tried to find someone to take me out to the islands in the lake. I had been told that there were monasteries out on the lake where precious religious artifacts are stored including according to what we were told the Ark of the Covenant. The little papyrus boats were too dangerous and the bigger boats were not available at the time so we ended up missing out on the historic monasteries. Instead we headed north again, this time hitch hiking again.