Even Dervla Murphy had to admit when she went to Ethiopia at the end of 1966 that this wasn't a place where a bicycle was going to be much use for getting around, so she travelled through the highlands on foot, accompanied for most of the way by a loyal pack-mule called Jock. As you would expect, there's a lot of astonishing scenery, breathtaking climbs and descents, plenty of hardship and quite a few near-catastrophes on the trail — she's robbed several times, she and Jock both suffer repeatedly from accident, disease, noxious insects and hunger, and near the end of the journey Jock is so worn out that she is obliged, to her infinite regret, to trade him in for a donkey.

But, this being Dervla Murphy in her prime, she seems to have an unlimited capacity for laughing at her own discomfort and bouncing back from any difficulty. And she also has an astonishing gift for making contact with the local people wherever she is. Even in the poorest village she always seems to manage to find a family prepared to offer her their hospitality for the night, and whether or not they have a language in common, she's soon drinking beer with them, learning about their lives, and sharing their meal before bedding down on the floor of a hut, squashed in between children and goats. As in her other books, it's obvious that this kind of contact — despite the bed-bugs — is the thing that gives her most pleasure during her travels, and she starts fretting as soon as there's an interlude of "civilisation" in a town with a hotel or westernised teachers or officials.

Murphy only devotes a few pages to Addis Ababa and doesn't have much to say about the political situation at the time of writing, so this isn't a book to turn to for an analysis of the last years of Haile Selassie's reign, but it is a fascinating account of a region not many outsiders had visited in those days. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3269673.html
Dervla Murphy visits Ethiopia in 1966-7, walking most of the way from the Red Sea to Addis Ababa with a helpful mule who she christens Jock.

As an Irish citizen, she gets a great deal of help from the British Consul in Asmara (then of course a provincial capital, now the capital of the independent state of Eritrea) and the British Ambassador in Addis Ababa, both of them named Bromley (the ambassador had a dreadful tragedy in his past, but if Murphy knew about it, she did not mention it); and also dramatically from the eldest granddaughter of the emperor, whose husband (also of royal blood) was the governor of Tigray.

Ethiopia is a hugely important country that we should all pay more attention to. Its population is 112 million, the 12th highest in the world, and the annual rate of economic growth is between 7% and 11% (from the last decade). I changed planes there a few times in South Sudan days, and in April 2010 stayed in the city itself for three days due to connection problems with Juba. I found it fascinating to see a rapidly expanding and increasingly outward-looking society, with shopfronts advertising their wares in both Amharic and English (and this in a country that the Brtish never even tried to colonise). In those days, of course, the population was only 90 million, 20% less than now.

Dervla Murphy was there when Ethiopia's population was only 25 million (26 million if you count Eritrea) and the world as a whole was a bigger place. Even so, foreigners are not at all unknown - she hooks up with some English mountaineers and climbs Ethiopia's two highest peaks (both of which are apparently very strollable). But she deliberately goes through countryside and wild territory which are a bit more off the beaten track, sleeping in tukuls if villagers are hospitable, in the wild otherwise. She gets robbed three times - in one case, she helps the police lead a successful expedition to catch the thieves, but the other two culprits get away. More humorously, it turns out that her surname has odd local resonances - መርፍእ ["merifi’i"] in Tigrinya and መርፌ ["merifē"] in Amharic both mean "needle"/"injection".

Apart from thieves, the two sets of people she has most disdain for are the Church and international aid workers. She sees ancient heritage being ruined or sold off by its supposed guardians, and has some unpleasant experiences in monasteries. (Also the nastiest of the thieves is in fact a priest.) At the end of the book she is dismayed by the aid worker scene in Addis Ababa, feeling a complete disconnect with the realities of the countryside that she had walked through. It's a vivid portrait of a country at a time of transition.

Prince Mengesha, whose hospitality she enjoyed in Makalle/Mekelle, is still alive aged 91. His wife, Princess Aida Desta, died in 2013 aged 85. During the Derg regime, from 1974 to 1988, she was imprisoned in a small room in a prison in Addis Ababa. The prison was closed in 2004 and demolished in 2007; the headquarters of the African Union, where I spent some time back in 2010, was built on its site, funded by the Chinese. ( )

I don't know how I managed to leave this in "to read" when I actually read it several years ago. It is one book I would gladly read again. Dervla Murphy travels through Ethiopia alone, relying on the kindness of strangers and her impressive ability to drink people under the table and ride off into the sunrise the next morning. While this journey is physically taxing, and Murphy is robbed three times and often exhausted, she ends with the same cheerful optimism and quietly cynical love for fellow man that make all her books a joy to read. ( )

A very interesting account of travels throughout the Ethiopian highlands in the late 60s. This paragraph caught my attention "What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost-a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

Hope the people of the so called first wold get this message.

A very interesting account of travels throughout the Ethiopian highlands in the late 60s. This paragraph caught my attention "What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost-a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

Hope the people of the so called first wold get this message.