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Are they stealing my bicycle?
After a stage like the one of yesterday in the morning you are dazed a bit dwelling between a mix of euphoria and desire to stay under the blankets until midday.
I have to get up necessarily there is somebody getting my bicycle from the veranda outside my room!
The manager of the pension after yesterday dinner thought he could try my bicycle, it is him who got it and he goes round on the yard like when as a child you receive as a gift the first bicycle with the small wheels. We take a couple of ritual photos, we talk with the help of another of the itinerary and of the black out which has been going on for almost 24 hours, and he helps me clean the bike with the ‘utensils’ of the cleaning lady … I wonder how clean will have been the rooms afterwards …
Breakfast of spaghetti and injera in a place where tipsy people are finishing the preparation for a wedding … the spaghetti take forever … but are the first ones of Italian consistency.
This area of Ethiopia is densely populated, because very fertile, both yesterday and today there have been no stretches without people and houses along the road.
Translated in numbers, I have been asked a thousand times ‘where are you going?’ and then thousands of ‘you you you …’ from the children. I greet almost everybody like we used to do in the mountains, but here, at times, I miss the Swiss privacy. On top of a hill a group of children ran after me and the eldest, around 12 years, threw at me a piece of sugar cane of 40 cm, for those who have no idea it is heavy and it hurts, after some stones thrown but missed on previous uphill and a kick to the pannier, I got pissed off. I stopped. I pretended to chase him. He run away and fell down in a drainage by the road … Luckily the throwers are a minority, on another uphill, almost vertical, a group of children pushed me up … others clap their hands … almost all run after me with an irresistible curiosity for the panniers. Unfortunately many of these children work, and often they run after me cheerful with the utensils of their jobs, sickles, sticks, ropes, and two were nailing some planks with hammers … luckily they did not throw them at me. Many adults tell them off also because running on, and across, the road is dangerous, others laugh … Actually the thought of it in the evening is funny but when you are there pedaling it is another story.
At the beginning the stage is mountain then you go down to Hawassa, the first big city since I entered Ethiopia, and then a long false flat to Shashamane. At the beginning of Ethiopia there was flat spaced out by some mountain, now there are mountains with short flat stretches here and there. Shashamane is famous because in 1948 the Emperor Haile Selassie I, gifted two square kilometers of his personal land to the Rastafari Movement to favor the return of the rastas of Ethiopian origins who were in Jamaica or the Caribbean. I am in the same hotel where Bob Marley stayed when he came here … there is a museum of the Rastafarian culture … and a few rasta can still be seen even if I was told that the rasta who live here by now are very few. At the reception of the Lily of the Valley hotel there is the picture of Haile Salassie … not that of the present president like it is almost everywhere in Africa!
Today no table tennis tables, but many table football, in Hawassa I saw the first real footballs, before only balls made out of rags, at times carefully covered by a woolen sock.
I was stopped for the second time by the police since I left from Chongwe, the first was in Tanzania, here I was overtaking four carts pulled by donkeys … the real reason is always curiosity. The Ethiopian policemen are very precise in the kilometers directions.
A boy with round glasses and the face of an intellectual told me ‘here we used bicycles in the nineteenth century’ … the cars a few, the carts pulled by donkeys many, the bicycles rare.
Dilla N 6° 40.833’ E 38° 30.833’ – Shashamane N 7° 2’ E 38° 6’
108 km