Ethiopia reminds me a bit of an Asterix comic: The year is 50 BC. Africa is entirely occupied by brutal colonialsts. Well, not entirely… One small village of indomitable Ethiopians still holds out against the invaders. Luckily, unlike the rest of Africa, Ethiopia was never colonised. From the Hamer and lip-plate-toting Mursi in the Omo Valley in the south, the Oromo and Amhara in the center to the Tigray in the north, Ethiopians are beautifully proud people. Only Ethiopians once rode on lions and only Ethiopians can even outperform Germans in bureaucracy.

The great book „The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat“ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński tells the story of the greatest bureaucrats of all: Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. But Haile Selassie was more than a bureaucrat. He even became, with his pre-regnal name Ras Tafari, the messiah of many Rastas, helped to establish the first Rasta community outside of Jamaica and also helped to establish the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union).

Everything feels unique in Ethiopia, food, histoy, the Queen of Sheba – and as a traveller, it never takes kong to feel it: The basic staple of Ethiopian food, injera, looks like beautiful eatable wrapping paper, slices of it make Fir-Fir-breakfast. When I eat Shiro, a chickpea stew, me, the hard-core-carnivore, could (temporarily at least) become a veggie. Which would not be necessary since there is my favorite: Shekla tibs (preferrably goat cubes), cooked with rosemary, which I love to be accompanied with Ehiopian Syrah.

Ethiopian Food is legendary, but there is a lot of legend in Ethiopian history, too: There is legendary Queen of Sheba, mystic symbol of wisdom and beauty, mentioned in the Bible and the Quran visiting King Solomon to test his intelligence. According to Ethiopian legend, Queen Sheba not left it at a visit, but became more private: She bore him a son, Menelik I, believed to be the founder of the Solomonic dynasty in Ethiopia which only ended in 1974 – with the a.m. Haile Selassie.

Menelik went back to Jerusalem to meet his father, and is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant, containing two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments with him. Since then they have been stored in a church in Aksum in northern Ethiopia, the very town, where Christianity was adopted by King Ezana in the 4th century AD as state religion, making Ethiopia one of the first regions in the world to officially adopt Christianity.

With all this in mind, Ethiopia always ranked supreme on my Africa travel bucket list. In 2006 I went on a whirlwind business trip to Addis Abeba and spent a beautiful weekend in the Ethiopian part of the Great Rift Valley which dramatically extends all the way from the Jordan River to northern Mozambique.

In 2018 our move to Kenya finally brought us closer to the indomitable Asterix village called Ethiopia. But tragically the Tigray War between Ethiopian federal government forces and Eritrea on one side and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front soon had closed our window to visit, with the Tigray forces at one point almost marching from their stronghold in the north to Addis. In early 2022 the window opened a little bit, when the hostilities were reaching a lower level after a series of negotiations.

So, in March 2022 my wife and me finally went. We started our tour in Bahir Dar, capital of the Amharic region. The airport’s glassy front, where our driver Getahun (meaning „you will be the boss in the future“) was waiting for us, was riddeld with rocket-sized bullet holes.  Quickly we headed off for beautiful Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. Our boatman to the auspicious Ura Midane Kihret church told us that we were his first guests since two years. The church had a huge entrance door made out of one piece of wood, hailing from a time when entire central Ethiopia, now mostly a treeless savanna, was covered by deep forests. Upon settung food on the peninsula we were welcomed by a magic world. A mossy path laid out with huge boulders led us to several wooden monasteries. We passed monks medidating in the bush, living from growing coffee and tending wild forest chicken (which were said to lay the most delicious eggs). Peace was in the air.

Later in the day, at the mighty Blue Nile Falls, we spoke to a farmer, who was drying corn by throwing it again and again into the warm air. His outlook on the war was gloomier: „War will start again with the first raindrop“. We were slowly coming closer to the end of the dry season. Nevertheless, we could not resist the allure of the Simien Mountains and drove further north, passing Gondar, the „Camelot of Africa“. The front line was now less than half a day’s drive away.

At the beautiful villages on the way, harvesting seemed in full swing. After midday we reached the colossal sentinels of the Simien Mountains. We were lucky to find Murat who would guide us on our three-day hiking tour along dramatic ridges with vertiginous drops, sheer cliffs and meadows of golden grass full of red-faced Gelada monkeys. Most of the former guides, Murat said, had become soldiers, no wonder, as there were no other tourists in sight. In safe distance I took photos of two Ethiopian wolves which seemed to follow us and which we had almost missed in this lonely landscape of rocks and ravines. At sunset, the Simien Mountains transformed into a fiery spectacle, as the sun’s golden hues painted the peaks. Deep below a lone trail of smoke was annoucing the presence of a tiny village. After lots of ups and downs we arrived on a plateau. Fierce winds made pitching our tent a challenge.

At night we had to cross darkness to reach a precious lavatory to brush teeth. Knowing that at least two Ethiopian wolves were close felt way more fearsome than war. Back in Gondar, where in the good old times, each year at Timkat, Africa’s biggest pool party happenened at the seventeenth-century pool at Fasilides’ castle, happened, our hotel was yawningly empty, a virtual ghost house. The receptionist was painting an ambivalent picture: His fellow Amhara had been heavily disappointed by Prime Minister Abiy, he stressed. Being too considerate to the Western countries, he said, Abiy had been too forgiving with the Tigray, who did not eben have his own Oromo under control. At the end, however, the receptionist was convinced: „Ethiopia will not disintegrate“.

The viewing terrace high above town provided great views on the castles of Gondar. A few months before, the receptioist said, the terrace had been a perfect vantage point to observe the clashes between the Ethiopian army and the advancing TPLF. Next to our breakfast table were sitting six Amhara militia, armed to the teeth with machine gun, feasting on Fir Fir.After breakfast the milita were posing proudly with martial gesture. Even the fountain, out of order since long due to lack of power, had to be briefly switched on. Afterwards they set off to the war zone in the north east where TPLF were trying to seize ground up to the Sudanese border to ease weapon supply from Sudan.

Slowly, on this peaceful sunny Sunday, the viewing terrace was becoming a catwalk. One couple after the other, each dressed to the finest, was climbing up from town below to pose. I met Fay who had come with her Chinese employers running a furniture factory in Gondar. Since Queen Sheba the beauty of Ethiopian women is legendary. Fay truly lived up to the legend and her very own name – and briefly became, after a chat about the dark days of the recent years, my photoshoot model.

For dinner, we had invited our receptionist to a restaurant in town, called Master Chef. We feasted on mouth-watering fish from Lake Tana, of course wrapped into injera bread. Later we listened to Ethiopian music at the Eniye Takele Club, way into the wee hours. As a week before Bahir Dar, not a bit of a curfew, contrasting numerous travel advice of Western governments.

On the road to Lalibela in northern Ethiopia the war came closer. At a checkpoint Amhara militia were about to virtually dismantle our car. A witty police officer saved us: „Tourists do not carry weapons“. The closer we got, the more war-torn the landscape became, strewn with the wreckage of destroyed tanks, burned-out vehicles and houses with collapsed roofs and dozens of bulletholes.  As we were reaching Lalibela, the sun was just setting behind the biblical landscape of the desert. Soon, darkness arrived and Lalibela lay dark, without light, except some generator-driven miserable lamps: Tigrayan forces had fatally damaged the power grid. At the end of the dry season Lalibela’s river Jordan was a mere trickle, and source water could not be pumped up from 1000 meters below for lack of power.

But here we finally were, happy and thankful, that we had finally made it to the Jerusalem of Africa, our ultimate destination. Again we were lonesome guests in our lodge, enjoying unbelievable Spätzle for dinner, thanks to the German wife of the Ethiopian owner. Under a high mountain, cool and bright in the clear air, the little town of Lalibela was quietly busy at sunrise. Hundreds of yellow water jerrycans had been placed on the street by the locals as beacons of hope that a water truck would arrive soon.

We set off for the center of war-torn smalltown Lalibela. TPLF child soldiers had destroyed government buildings (including the airport) and looted almost everything which had not been nailed down before, the lodge owner explained us, but left the churches unscathed. Good orthodox Christians as they were. Albeit power was non-existent and water was scarce, there was a sweet feeling of liberation and relief in the air. Each local we met on the street greeted us cheerfully as harbingers of a hopefully better future. It was a wonderful „first tourist“ experience which reminded me of my visit to northern Sri Lanka in 2009, shortly after the Tamil Tigers had lost the civil war.

Lalibela’s 11 rock-hewn churches, each one an unbroken body of stone, are close together, spread in two groups north and south of the river Jordan. Even when we were almost there, we first had to file through the gap in a rock wall to come out between a dug-out cliff, since all churches built underground, dug into the rock beneath so that they were completely invisible in a landscape of pink and ochre earth and rock. Only after winding steeply down a path the first and largest of the churches appeared before us, Bete Medhane Alem: the House of the Saviour of the World.

Some churches we visited were tiny, some darkly eerie, some elaborately worked and ornamented. Every was full of pilgrims and devotion. King Lalibela ruled a mere 20 years, so the story goes, ordered and completed the construction of all churches. Of course he needed the help of angels. Early next morning before sunrise we reached Bete Giyorgis, carved out of solid rock in the shape of a colossal stony cross, surrounded by a deep sunken courtyard. Although Bete Giyorgis was set a bit apart from the rest of the churches, we immediately felt like being at the spriritual heart of Ethiopia. It was one of Ethiopia’s numerous saints’ days and today of all days – was Saint George’s day! More and more pilgrims streamed onto the platform around the cross and into the sunken courtyard, their  white robes and shawls perfectly contrasting th pink and ochre colours of the church.

We joined the peaceful throng, soon entered the queue of devotees on the ramp into the courtyard. We dived into an ocean of devotion. Pilgrims crossed themselves, bowed, touched their foreheads then their lips against the stone, again and again. We could hear the priest’s voice inside the huge stony cross, and the muttered responses, and then singing, and nothing else. Not a baby cried. The sound of more chanting came out of a cave adjacent to the sunken courtyard.

The atmosphere was intense and sublime and we felt that pure travel luck brought us at the right moment to the right place. In the afternoon we climbed to heaven. After a strenous hike, sometimes passing vertical abyss, we reached Asheta Maryam monastery which sits like an eagle’s nest 3400 meter high above Lalibela. We meet with monks and priests. The elements had lined many of their furrowed faces. They meet here every day, after service, to have a chat and to drink malt beer which they happily offer us as well. They talk about the wild flashes  they saw while clashes were raging deep below in Lalibela. But actually, the say, they had never been affected by war, as the would live here in their very own world…