Axum is yet another former capital of Ethiopia, a rival to Gondar and Lalibela, where an emperor began to build a new Jerusalem about a thousand years ago, carving churches into mountainsides. But evolving from about 400 BC – as they’d say in this devout country – Axum can claim historical and religious supremacy. Not only did the Queen of Sheba have her palace here, but this, after all, is the site of the monastery of St Mary of Zion, the resting place of the Tabot, aka the Ark of the Covenant. How do we know? Fittingly, it’s a matter of faith: no outsider can actually get to see it.
Axum today might be a place of pilgrimage, but it is also, frankly, a bit of a dump and should be deleted from the non-Ethiopian non- Orthodox tourist’s to-do list. The atmosphere is as flat as the plain it’s sited on. Sheba’s Palace ruins, tick. The museum, tick. Yawn. The stelae field, tick. The church built by Haile Selassie; if we must. Yawn. Travellers’ websites bemoan the dreadful hotels – ‘which is the least bad option?’ – but no one actually advises avoid.
Avoid Axum.
Axum is the sort of town which inspires a wishing one’s life away, tomorrow is another day, tough it out, counting the hours until leaving, attitude. Yes, it has intermittent dim street lighting, a delapidated cinema, and several banks, but there’s something forsaken about it. Of course it’s safe to walk to the bar says the hotel receptionist, offended.
Heading back along the broken pavements I sense that I’m being followed. I’m right. The boys are under five feet tall and about 10 or 11. They are curious: what’s my name? Am I American? Oh. Which football team do I like? How old am I? When I stop in front of a tiny shop, they stop too and hover at the doorway. It isn’t hard to guess the man behind the counter is telling them to go away. ‘They’re with me.’ Where did thst come from? Hungry, unable to stomach any more indigestible local meat, I’ll have biscuits for dinner. I ask the boys whether they want some: they hesitate over the strawberry wafers and the bourbons.
Ten minutes later the three of us are sitting in the dictator-baroque hotel bar, tucking into bourbons and watching English premier league football and drinking. Fanta-like Mirinda for them. They both go off to the restroom to wash: at home, they don’t have a bathroom, they don’t have TV, they’re too poor, they say. They usually lurk outside bars and shops to watch anything. Their sing-song English separates every syllable, with very unEnglish rolling rrrs. ‘Not brrrot-hers, frrrr-ends.’ No, their mothers won’t worry about them being out. We exchange email addresses; apparently every child at school has one. The game transfixes them. The shop sells footballs. For 50 birr. What time am I leaving tomorrow morning? Inspired like so many of their countrymen by the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, whose sudden death stupified the nation, one wants to be a teacher and the other an engineer. Shocked that I am unmarried, they say will pray for me. ‘When you’re marrrrr-I-ed, you can come back to Et-eee-ooo-pah and adopt us.’
The following morning, they are waiting out by the road, with the same desperate, patient hope seen in labradors hanging around dining tables. 100 birr is probably what I would have spent on the rip-off birr-a-minute hotel Internet access – in every other hotel outside Axum it’s been free. On our way back to the biscuit shop to get the footballs, they ask if I can pay their rent instead.
UrbanHunterLondon 