Our last Harar

Using Addis as our base for the last few weeks of our grand African safari, we established ourselves in a somewhat shoddy hotel with patchy internet, leaking bathtubs, and located above a 7 days a week discotheque, that throbbed through our earplugs into the wee hours of the morn.

When gorging on pizza, chocolate croissants and our daily M&M fix of macchiato and mango juice, got old, we ventured east into a barren, desolate landscape of swirling dust, acacia shrub and one mule towns. We decided on the mysterious town of Harar for our last Hurrah.

Harar is a tiny walled city, of 368 alleyways, a maze of mosques, markets and mayhem. Famous for its markets, it was the commercial meeting point of Africa, India and the Middle East. Today it still contains one of the continents largest camel markets, drawing people in from Somalia and Djibouti to buy and sell these ships of the dessert.  Perhaps more importantly Harer, in the chat centre of Africa and southern Arabia. Chat or qat are the leaves of the shrub Catha Edulis, and chewing them produces a mild high, it is 

illegal in most countries, but wildly popular in such places as Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen, to name just a few. After sampling chat in Addis, on our first day, I really don’t get what all the fuss is about, and I certainly don’t understand how the entire afternoon in Harer is spent by almost every one, young and old, laying around chewing bitter leaves, green spit dribbling down their chins. Judgements aside chat is an important export commodity for Ethiopia, and chat planes fly daily to neighbouring countries like Djibouti, freshness being of paramount importance.

We spent some days wandering the maze of Harar and purchasing gorgeous smelling, organic coffee to take back to Finland.  Like humankind, coffee was also born in Ethiopia, and the legend goes that the coffee berries were first discovered sometime between the 5^th and 10^th centuries, by a goat herder, who noticed that his goats were leaping around like hypoactive kids, after chewing on the berries. Unfortunately Ethiopia does not make the most of exporting coffee, and most coffee is exported as  green beans to the west and then processed into coffee, meaning that Ethiopia misses out on the majority of the profits.  Increasingly, however, coffee is being manufactured here, and to support that, Juho and I bought up big, having to buy another suitcase to deal with the excess kilos.

There was another reason, other than coffee and chat, which brought us to Harar: Hyenas. Harar is famous for its ‘hyena men’, who feed hyenas meat, straight from their hands (and also from their mouths!), outside the city gates each night. Juho and I went to view this spectacular occurrence on our last night, taking with us a guide, who looked as if he were 12 years old, but was probably closer to 19. Our guide informed us that hyenas and Hararians were on friendly terms, and nobody, not even a Faranji (foreigner), had been bitten by a hyena in Harar, ever.

After observing hyenas from a distance in the Serengeti, I have to confess I was not a fan, finding their sloping backs and skulking nature creepy, to say the least.  That night in Harar, however my view was altered. The ‘Hyena men ‘, begun by calling the hyenas to come forward, they sung out to the hyenas, in a high pitched tune, not dissimilar to the hyenas own calls. Our guide told us that each hyena had a name, and that the ‘hyena men’, were calling them in by their names.

The hyenas approached tentatively, darting forward to snatch the meat offered to them by the hyena man.  They seemed shy and skittish, but grew more confident after the first few nibbles, and soon everywhere we looked were hyenas. Juho and I were invited forward onto the mat for photo opts, and to feed the hyenas if we were game, we were not. Hyenas are massive! The jaws of a hyena are incredible strong and quite capable of crunching through thick bones. It was a terrifying and exhilarating experience to be so close to the hyenas, and I have a newfound respect and affection for this animal, who received such a bad image from the Lion King. 

Tonight we fly to Istanbul, farewelling the African continent.  Looking back through our thousands of photos, it seems we have had quite a remarkable journey. Many people have asked us “what was your favourite place”, and this is a difficult question to answer. Juho says Malawi, but for me there is no favourite, I loved and loathed things about each place we visited.  There is one thing I am sure about though, apart from the consistent awfulness of the buses, and the repetitive blandness of East African cuisine, Africa is a remarkable diverse continent, a land of contrast and contradiction.

If I had to sum up the essence of Africa, to me it would be in the spirit of a colourful, bustling market, or the chaotic, exhilarating pulse of a bus station at 5 in the morning. Africa is completely different from any other place I have visited, and very much misunderstood and misrepresented in the west.