Blog - Bahar Zaf

Lake Bishoftu warms with the sun, just rising. Its surface thickens - coppery - and over it, water birds paddle silty circles; stirring thin black trails like tendrils of incense in a traditional coffee ceremony. They’re feeding on insects we can’t see from our balcony over the cliff. But the activity from up here becomes an artwork. We’re waking in Bishoftu (previously Debre Zeyit), 40kms from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, above one of the country’s deepest crater lakes. It’s one of a chain of five - 7000-year-old volcanoes actually - that loop through this town to give it its

July 20, 2019

Travel, Travelsong

Natural treasures: A day-trip through the Ethiopian highlands

In the ethereal sunlight that blesses early mornings in Ethiopia’s high country, we walk a path under rare giants in the grounds of a monastery 700 years-old. African sandalwood and juniper, red-flowering kosso and heavy-limbed figs mark our way through ribbons of incense to the church and meditation cave of a great saint. If these old trees could talk. They couldn’t possibly tell the full history of Debre Libanos – one of Ethiopia’s most fabled holy sites. But, rooted as they’ve been to this cliff edge for generations - drinking from sacred falls and the minerals of ancient bones –

December 17, 2018

Addis Diary

Daytime hyena

Yesterday, a hyena broke into a kindergarten in the middle of the city. The children spotted him in the morning; still and scared beneath a large bush in the playground - and they scattered, screaming. My brother-in-law, an engineer also known for a good eye with a hunting rifle, was called in to shoot the animal. “But I left it to the other Italians because I felt ridiculous using a gun in a kindergarten in the middle of the day,” he told us. “It would have been reckless.” The kids wanted the nocturnal creature to see the light of another morning but

December 10, 2018

Addis Diary

Ethiopian hustler

Addis Ababa is a city hustling. In the open markets, the messy intersections, the ‘blue donkey’ minivans and in the coffee shops of Ethiopia’s gritty, bulging capital is the effort and enterprise of at least 6 million people. When I open my gate in the morning and close it at the end of each day, I see a man without legs making leather sandals in a tin shop across the street. Next to him is a tailor; an old fellow pumping the peddle of his antique Singer machine under a makeshift plastic roof - and beside him, a family who

November 22, 2018

Addis Diary

Singing with their hands

Full-lung singing and the wild clapping of a hundred small hands are heard well before stepping through the tall metal gates of Jerusalem Inclusive School. In a small compound - on a cobbled back road in one of those outer suburbs of Addis that wind coolly into the Entoto foothills - students shake off the early chill with song and dance as the last of their classmates arrive. What’s unusual is that the children are also singing with their hands. Just over half of those making all the noise are actually deaf or disabled - and sign language is part of

November 20, 2018

Travel, Travelsong

Child’s play: Easy adventures in the safari capital

Just inside Nairobi National Park - in the red dirt and quiet hour of nearly-noon in wild places - our daughter Tula stands enchanted in the company of an elephant named Sana Sana. The elephant, herself a toddler, is so close we run fingers over her paper-crinkle skin. We count her eyelashes and puffs of dust from her footsteps stain our socks earth-red too. “Her name means ‘very much’ in Kiswahili,” says one of her keepers. “Because she took very much effort to rescue.” We’d come to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an elephant orphanage just 7kms from the city centre, to show

Bishoftu: Going slow in Ethiopia’s Sunday town