At the Lalibela airport, I was once again surprised at the ornateness, suburban-Ethiopian style. We had a new problem in Lalibela: a taxi and two guides waiting for us. Apparently there was a guide convention in Addis, because the guide Nebil had arranged for Lalibela was there, too. But he had sent a replacement, and Michael had also arranged a guide for us.
They said we would sort it on the way and also, “Don’t worry!” two words guaranteed to strike fear in anyone who has been traveling for a while. Mom and I were inclined to take the guide Nebil’s friend had sent. After all, we had made an agreement with him. But this was complicated by the fact that the guy spoke poor English, didn’t appear to know much about, well, anything, and oozed a sort of mucky, officious, demeanor.
Luckily for us, they came to an agreement amongst themselves by the time we dropped at our hotel. Heavens Guesthouse was wonderful: $15/night, a comfy bed and a semi-comfy bed for mom, a hot shower, a flower garden, and a good restaurant at the hotel next door.
We arrived late Saturday morning, which was really too bad. Michael had told us to try to see the Saturday market, because it’s huge and people travel for days to get there; it’s the only big market around. But, by the time we rested for a bit and ate some lunch, the market was mostly over.
Lalibela is along the sides of a valley, and as such, there are a lot of steep hills going everywhere. Also, King Lalibela was bugnuts. I don’t say that apropos of anything, I just think it’s important to get it out of the way as soon as possible. Mom and I decided it would be best (for Mom, although to be honest, I was glad not to have to tackle those hills) to catch a lift to the market. After browsing briefly at the deflating market, we went to our first rock hewn church.
So, here’s the deal. Over about 20 years, King Lalibela built about 10 or so of these churches. Considering the churches were hewn from the cliffs that would later surround them, that’s pretty damn impressive. No one is exactly sure how it was done. One argument is that Lalibela just hired approximately a quatrillion people. But, in some of the churches at least, the work seems too regular and fine to have been done by different people of varying skill levels. So maybe there were a few experts, supervising teams of garden variety workers? Or maybe Lalibela and his artisans worked at the speed you’d expect, but then angels came at night to help them out.
We arrived just in time for the Meskel festival, and after seeing our first church—interesting, not great—and the outside of Bet Maryam, we went to see the the start of the festival.
Here’s the story of the Meskel Festival:
Jesus died on the cross. This was not an unusual death, as it was a favorite method, and the Jews didn’t want any more to be made out of it than it was. So, they took Jesus’ cross (as opposed to all the other men’s crosses), and made it the bottom of a mountainous garbage heap. Some time, years and years later, a queen (the Queen of Sheba?) came to try to find the cross. The Hebrews wouldn’t tell her where the cross was, so she lit a fire of myrrh (or frankinsense?) The smoke from the fire lead her to the cross. The Meskel Festival is to celebrate the finding of the true cross.
Foreigners had a special place at the festival—guides pushed and shoved to get to get the tourists to the front of the crowd, with an easy view of the Bishop and the priests and the cross. The Bishop even told the tourists what time we needed to come the next day in order to get a good view of the burning of the cross. Mom and I both had problems with this, Mom more than me because I was also drooling over the idea of all the photos I could take on my fancy new camera (not good, but true). But if we resisted, our guide would just grab us and bring us through the crowd of people. People for whom this whole ceremony meant something—so we could stand in front of them and snap pictures with our fancy cameras.
After the pre-festival thingamajig broke up, we walked back to the hotel, looking at the artificial River Jordan built because King Lalibela had weird delusions of Jerusalem in Ethiopia.
