20 February 2008 - Chilga

Chilga is a word that will forever be etched in my mind.

It all started fairly innocuously. We had a pretty difficult day of cycling yesterday. It was our first real introduction to Ethiopia – and our first real introduction to her hills. The morning comprised of gentle rises in amongst construction work on mediocre roads. The heat rose with the sun and we collapsed in some little town for an extended lunch break.

This lunch marked our first introduction to Ethiopian people. In Egypt we were always followed by a dozen eyes, in Sudan we were largely left to our own devices, and now, in Ethiopia, it appears that we will be swarmed by hundreds of children… always.

We stopped at a little restaurant on the side of the road for a lunch of enjera and chiru (Ethiopian local dish of pancake and sauce, which sounds a little more exciting than it tastes). Immediately we had an audience that comprised of 30-odd children edging closer and closer towards us. Two hours later saw me well-fed, a little more relaxed with the circumstances and with a hand on my shoulder and another playing with my hair.

After lunch the climbing started. We went up, then down, then up, up, up. No really, it was pretty demanding cycling aggravated by the dusty dirt road and trucks that suffered no qualms in pushing you off the road.

It was at this stage that Grant started feeling a little worse for wear and commenting that he needed us to stop fairly soon. He wasn’t that vocal though and so no-one took it too seriously until his lunch was revisited a few hours later. He was being a soldier, but we needed to stop. Fast. Food poisoning is something that never seems to leave us.

Camping isn’t an option in Ethiopia. There are always masses of people and we have been warned about wandering hands. We stopped at the next village which was a tiny place nestled into the foothills of a mountain. With only one “hotel” to choose from, we moved into the spot that beats all previous accommodation records.

This place was really pretty awful!

Words don’t do justice to the dirt. There was an amateur drainage system that ran right through the alleyway that was the entrance to the accommodation. This drain was overflowing, contained everything imaginable and posed a fair challenge to a cyclist and a bicycle who attempted to leapfrog his/her way over the stepping stones to our rooms.

We each had a little room that was big enough to fit a bed and a bicycle, at a push. It had no ventilation to speak of, and to make matters worse, the rooms were directly in front of a generator which was pumping diesel fumes into the room. This amounted to Gareth and me waiting for the generator to go off before we went to sleep – no easy feat when you are shattered from a long day of cycling and the damn thing is still going past eleven…! Every five minutes I would hear a “Didi, are you awake” from Gareth in the neighbouring room… the kind lad was making sure that I didn’t pass out from carbon monoxide poisoning…

The toilet – consisted of a room constructed from wooden logs with not much effort in making the walls solid. The result was a relatively public experience made worse by the stench, scattered toilet paper everywhere, and goatskins hanging from wooden beams…

The shower – consisted of a kind woman with a jug who poured water on us as we rinsed our arms, legs and faces.

Dinner – dinner was good being pasta with some form of sauce, a few cokes, and endless water.

All this time, Grant was confined to his quarters. We drew lots for who would truck it with him and Ollie drew the odd bottle cap.

But back to Chilga - All this is merely important in describing the state of our minds and bodies this morning. We weren’t exactly chipper; we had suffered a fairly dodgy night and were reeling from the effects of yesterday.

Chilga is a mountain that saw us climb from 600 meters to 2400 meters in the space of only 20 kilometers. Chilga is actually the ever-receding town on the top of this afore-mentioned mountain, and is a town accessed via a badly deteriorated rocky road. We started climbing at 8am and finished 28km later at 3pm. We had an average of 5.5km per hour. It was madness. It was like climbing Natal’s infamous Sani Pass into Lesotho… only it went on for longer.

It was also very hot. I was soaked through, and gratefully accepted a push from an enterprising young boy who earned a marginally faulty compass and a few pencils for his efforts! My legs were burning, and today was one of the few days where I did some solid stretches pushing my bike because I simply couldn’t cope with the sheer effort needed to get me, my bicycle and my kit up that awful hill.

Finally in Chilga I am now resting in a relatively decent hotel. But to be completely honest, I am nowhere. Today I broke through a new level in my physical capacity!