Leaving Dilla, I pass a grubby white milestone showing 400 km to Addis Ababa. I roll quickly down the hill out of town and my tyre bursts as I hit the uneven surface of a bridge at the foot of the slope. I begin to remove the wheel on the roadside and soon a crowd of a hundred silent faces has encircled me. No one says a word as they stare and twenty minutes later I pedal slowly up the oncoming hill. I am riding to Awassa, across the final folds of the Rift Valley’s southern shoulder. At the crest of each hill I stop to photograph thickly forested slopes rippling into the distance beneath a glowing quilt of amber fog. The land is lush and the air damp with mist. As I ride young men shout out “Faranji, Faranji, I Love You”, and others, “You-You. Fuck You.” Kids swarm around the bike whenever I slow and old men stop and lean on their sticks and stare as I pass.The thick mat of mottled grey and white cloud that has swamped the highland skyline begins to thin, and marble over, as I descend towards the valley floor, and wispy rays of lemon light gradually tear the stormy mass into a brightening patchwork of blue and white. I catch a glimpse of Lake Awassa shimmering far across the flats and I pedal gently through an avenue of tall Cedars, past tired donkeys carting mountains of cut grass, and join the broad, palm-lined main-street of Awassa. Shiny hotels and tall, mirror-fronted office blocks form orderly lines beside clean paved-streets. The rags, and the mud, and the run-down wooden shacks that have boarded the road since Moyale seem distant here, and I feel clean, as I come back to my room, for the first time in weeks.
Out of Awassa the road unfurls straight and flat across green plains, past glittering valley lakes. The maize is tall and strong here and vast herds of long-horned cattle are led by boys with sticks, to drink in murky streams. Much of the land is being ploughed and young men in vintage Arsenal shirts drive yoked-oxen through the slow churning earth. I am heading to Ziway, another lakeside town, and the hundred kilometers fall fast as the helping hand of the northerly wind spins the wheels from behind. As I near town, I ride past a horse-and-trap and watch the young driver eye the bicycle with curiosity. From behind I hear a cry for speed and then his whip slap the horse’s side. The horse bursts past, and the young driver looks at me proudly. We are racing now and I pedal hard. The driver’s whip cracks down again and again and the blinkered horse’s hooves beat harder and faster on the tar. I reach forty kilometres an hour, and start to pull away, and ride smiling into town.
I head north from Ziway and the valley walls begin to loom in the distance. On the roadside, neat cactus hedges encircle clusters of straw-roofed huts, and stone graves, painted blue and red, topped with metal crucifixes, are dotted amongst the grasses. The white milestones fall like dominoes as I ride across the flats and Addis Ababa is drawing nearer. At Mojo I turn east and follow a busy, narrow, highway towards Debre Zeyit. I pass crowds of beggars sitting outside the iron gate of an Orthodox church, huddled under rugs. The traffic is thick now and ahead a flock of pink-headed crows with pre-historic wings circle a dead dog lying on the asphalt. I sleep at Debre Zeyit and set off early the following morning, with only fifty km to Addis Ababa.
I can see a crowd of high-rise towers in the haze ahead. Behind, dense green forest sprouts across the Entoto Hills, overhanging a sprawling mass of corrugated shacks that glitter as they rebound smog-cloaked rays of sunshine. I follow the highway into the city and climb up Churchill Avenue, past an imposing Obelisk, bearing the Red Star of Communism on its tip, towards the Piazza. The streets of Addis Ababa are crowded. Spindly little girls in torn dresses, with crosses hanging from lace around their necks, dash towards the bicycle, drawn to a white face like rain to the ground. They mime hunger and I stare back. I pedal slowly on, past ancient beggars with swollen feet, and raging madmen, and beautiful women in tight jeans and crop-tops. I find a room in an old hotel and take a long shower and sit down to write, beneath an old wooden veranda, with a cup of black coffee.
