The Simien Mountains

A few weeks ago we took a long walk through Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains National Park with four of our closest Peace Corps friends—Joe, Laura, Mike, and Zach. We also went with a team of Ethiopians: a guide, a guard, three cooks (it seemed excessive to me too), and four mule handlers, who led three mules and made sure our stuff got from campsite to campsite. In five days we walked sixty miles at high elevations and over difficult terrain. In the early mornings, we’d come from our tents and see ice in the mountains. At noon we’d be in tee shirts, smearing on our third layer of sunscreen, and downing our second liter of water.

Mentally, the trip was a lot like Peace Corps—highs and lows in rapid succession. One minute we’re climbing a hill at a snail’s pace while an elderly Frenchman cruises by the group singing a robust rendition of “Frère Jacques.” I think: There’s no air here. We’re going to need to stop and call in whatever the Ethiopian equivalent of the National Guard is, and by the time they get here we’ll just be little blue-lipped shrunken heads with baboons gnawing on our femurs, and our parents will have to have funerals with closed caskets, and Peace Corps will have to pull out of Ethiopia, and I’ll never get to eat cheese again. The next minute we come to a peak, and the Frenchmen is out of sight, and I look down on the vultures flying hundreds of feet below us, and think: Stupid birds, we are the true kings of the mountain! We the true sky gods!

Our trek was through the park’s highlands, meaning we started at around two miles above sea level and climbed four peaks over two-and-a-half miles high. One of the peaks we had to climb twice and another one of them was Ras Dashen—the highest mountain in Ethiopia—which sits at fourteen thousand nine hundred and five feet. [Note: The peak looks nothing like the mountain on the Dashen Beer label. Also, it’s pronounced Dejen by locals.]

The park is incredibly beautiful. It’s difficult to describe, especially to someone like me who grew up with Riverview Elementary’s sledding hill as my frame of reference for words like high, steep, and climb. The Simien highlands are unlike anywhere I’ve ever been because they are literally mountains on top of mountains. You stand at two miles above sea level at the edge of a cliff that drops over a thousand feet, but it doesn’t drop into the sea or the desert. It drops into more mountains and the mountains continue all the way to the horizon. It’s a little bit like looking at a mountain range from an airplane or as if someone took the Cliffs of Moher and put them on top of the Rockies.

Our first two days of walking were my favorite. These days stretched mainly along cliff edges. On the left we’d have these spectacular views, and on the right we’d see antelope hoping around and baboons foraging for bugs. Over parts of the walk we’d smell wild rose bushes or oregano or St. John’s wort.

The last three days were less about beauty and more about getting to the top of Ras Dashen. Just about every step of the forty miles we walked in those three days was straight up or straight downhill. The views were still spectacular, but perhaps the most interesting part of this section of the hike was seeing what happens to your body at altitude. It wasn’t just fatigue. I’d experienced that before hiking in Colorado. It was a strange pressure over my lungs, and my mind working on a basic, brain-stem level. Step with right foot. Step with left foot. Also, I got nosebleeds.

When we made it to the top of Ras Dashen, it looked like it had two peaks. Nothing too dramatic just a big pile of rocks on our left and, to the right, a seemingly-bigger pile of rocks. Our guide insisted that the pile on the left was the highest peak in Ethiopia. Our guard Yeyu, who held a considerable sway with the group, said that he had always thought it was the pile of rocks on the right. We stumbled up to the peak on the left and then made the long hike back to the base camp, Danielle’s feet covered in blisters, my knees aching from the climb down.

That night, after our guide turned in, our friends sat around the campfire and talked to Yeyu, who couldn’t speak full sentences in English. He told them in Amharic that we definitely did not climb Ras Dashen. Ras Dashen is somewhere else, inaccessible from our current camp.

Again, it was a lot like Peace Corps. You set out with a definite goal like—teach the British Council’s phonics course to your students at the CTE. You complete the goal. But then when you sit back and think, you start to wonder to yourself: Did I actually do anything? I taught the course, right? It sure feels like I did something. Yeah, I did. But, did anyone learn anything? Did I actually teach anything? And the students who did learn something will they be able to use it in their classrooms? Will they even become teachers or will they quit and start driving taxis and opening shops? To live in Ethiopia is to live in confusion and doubt. Luckily for us on the hike, Joe has a watch with a GPS on it and he was able to tell us when he got the readings back that we climbed to fourteen thousand nine hundred and five feet—the often-quoted height for Ras Dashen. Yeyu was wrong, or we misunderstood his Amharic, or maybe he knows about an even higher peak somewhere else in the park—which I’m not ruling out as a possibility.

On the top of Ras Dashen, Joe had us perform a dance he made up to this song. He filmed our dance to send to his brother. The song chops up a truly absurd interview William Shatner gave about Star Trek and mountains, putting auto-tuned clips of it to a beat you can dance to. At the song’s climax, Shatner says, “Why do I climb the mountain? Because I’m in love.”

Our dance was just about as absurd as Shatner’s interview, but our guide Dejen (who shares Ras Dashen’s local name) was transfixed. For him the song was like a spiritual experience. The final day of our trek, I walked next to Dejen while we climbed one mountain to get to another mountain to get to our car going out of the park. The girls were both renting mules for the day (Danielle says she felt like Mary being led to Bethlehem), and we were moving a pretty fast pace trying to keep up with them.

“Why do I climb the mountain?” Dejen said under his breath.

We’re going to have to call a helicopter to get us to the car, I was thinking.

“Why do I climb the mountain?”

It might be able to land just outside of that town.

“Daniel, why do you climb the mountain?”

[Gasp] “Uh?” [Gasp]

“Why do you climb the mountain?”

“Brugh.” [Gasp]

“Is it because you’re in love, Daniel?”

I often find Ethiopian taste annoying. They love the kitsch and corny. Celine Dion and Michael Bolton and Valentines Day cards with puppies in baskets. And they don’t love these things in an ironic, hipster way where they’re kind of winking at it. They love these things at face value. Coming from a culture that excels in satire and parody, this innocent taste is almost unbelievable.

Sometimes, though, I envy Ethiopians their capacity for taking things seriously. I hear the Shatner song and hear something valuable only because it is so ridiculous. Dejen, whose named after a mountain and spends most of his time climbing them, hears a mantra. He may be the only person in the world, who has listened to that song and had the kind of experience Shatner was ambitiously trying to inspire in the original interview.

The trip gave us adventure and beauty and time with some of the best people in Ethiopia. What else could we ask for in a vacation?

Check out our photos of the trip.

For some more beautiful pictures and a great day-by-day description of the trek, check out Joe’s blog.