Arriving in Harar
Our flight left Addis at seven in the morning and we arrived in Dire Dawa before ten. We climbed into a cab and told him to take us to the bus station. A few kilometers from town, another car pulled us over. The driver asked us if we were going to Harar. He quoted a price many times that of the bus and told him no thanks. We told the taxi to drive on. The driver was insistent, telling us the buses were unreliable. We paid him no heed. As we drove off, the taxi driver's cell phone rang. Would we consider 200 birr? I said no, and the second car pulled in front of us and roared off towards town.
Dire Dawa was markedly different from other towns we had visited. There were signs of city planning and the buildings had a slight colonial air. We were soon at the bus station and into a white minibus bound for Harar. It was already mostly full by the time we reached the station, and soon we were heading down a sealed headed for Harar.
In Harar, we shouldered our bags and walked to the Tweodros Hotel, booking rooms on either side of the building. Ed's window overlooked a large football field. The guidebook said that hyenas would gather in the field at night to scavange for food. My room overlooked the street. The manager told us that occasionally the hyenas would come up the road into town. He also told us that there was no water in the hotel. Harar has long been a victim of water shortages. A project to pipe water from Dire Dawa is under development, but won't be completed until 2008. He told us that a man would fill the bucket after we checked in.
For lunch we had roasted chicken in the hotel restaurant. Ed's guidebook had praised it as the best in the city. After our meal, I shuddered to think of how the roast chicken was in the other restaurants. After lunch our hotel manager took us on a tour of the city.
He led us first to a chat market on the edge of town. Chat has fast become the second largest crop in the area. Harar is known for its coffee, but increasingly farmers are switching their crops to chat. The harvest is more frequent and the market is thriving.
From the market, we entered the walled city through the Buda Gate and began wandering through the narrow streets and alleys. Our guide led us to Ras Tafari's House, where Haile Selassie spent his honeymoon. It had since been taken over by a traditional healer, and a hand-painted sign lists the major diseases treated, including cancer, epilepsy, and paralysis.
We continued walking through town and ended up at Rimbaud's house. Although it is doubtful he lived there, the building houses a museum with photos of Harar and tributes to the poet, who lived in the city in the late 1800's. From the top floors, there are views over the city all the way to the Blue Chercher Mountains.
As our tour wound down we found ourselves walking on the outskirts of town, just outside the wall. A group of younger Ethiopians had gathered around a radio. Two danced to reggae, and as we passed they invited us to dance. I couldn't resist dancing to reggae in the land that had spawned rastafarians, and found myself joining them, to the delight of the people who had assembled.
In 1930, when Emperor Haile Selassie was crowned, he assumed subjects who lived beyond Ethiopia. In Jamaica where Marcus Garvey's "return to Africa" movement had started, many saw the coronation as the fulfilment of the biblical prophesy that "kings will come out of Africa." Identifying with Haile Selassie and the independant African state, Garvey's followers rejected European Christianity and created a religion of their own, whch they named after Selassie's pre-coronation name Ras Tafari.
After the song was over, I bid the other dancers farewell. We came across a group of women who smiled at me as I passed. I shook my head from side to side and they laughed as they passed.
Returning to the hotel I went to take a nap. Ed had bought a bunch of chat, and he sat to chew the chat with the hotel manager.
That night our guide took us to the edge of town to watch the hyena feeding. While the tradition was no more than 35 years old, there had been legends involving hyenas stretching back 7-800 years. According to legend, a famine had spread through Harar. The hyenas began to prey on people. A man had a dream in which he was instructed by God to make a pack with the hyenas by preparing a special porridge for them. He did so and since then the villagers and hyenas have been living in harmony. Unfortunately, in recent years, there have been reports of hyenas attacking the locals.
We walked along the edge of town to a small parking lot. Another tourist had come via 4x4, and his driver shone his headlights on the lot. Our guide introduced us to Durajit, one of the two hyena men. He had come out of a house with a wicker basket in his hand. Strips of meat lined the bottom. As he came into the lot he began calling out the hyenas by name. He sat in the pool of light and soon they began to appear on the edges.
He tossed out scraps and the hyenas came closer. He placed bits of meat on a skewer the size of a chopstick and held it out, feeding the animals from his hand. As the hyena came closer he held the stick between his teeth and fed them from his mouth. He then held the stick out to me. I crouched down beside him and took the stick. As the hyena approached I was surprised at how big they were, their heads stretching towards me on their long necks. The animals looked top-heavy as they reached towards the skewer.
The feeding lasted no longer than 20 minutes. At most, there were perhaps 15-20 hyena, and I could hear their laugh as they competed with each other for scraps. Durajit emptied his basket and walked back towards his house. The other tourist climbed into his car and it slowly backed up towards the main road. One by one the hyenas disappeared, swallowed back into the night.
