Ethiopia vs. Oman: Part 3 - Return of the Gimmick

Churches

Ethiopia

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this yet, but Ethiopia is a very religious country. It's pretty neat to be somewhere where people take their faith more seriously than in the US. The predominant religions here are the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (~44%), Islam (~34%), and other Christian denominations (~19%). Even including inactives, the LDS population is less than 0.01%.

Having said this, there are a lot of old churches all over the country. They'll be a church even in the smallest villages out in the middle of nowhere. The churches are pretty much all still in use, but some of the most historic are also tourist attractions.

For the warm-up, we visited two churches in Addis:

Saint George's Cathedral was built to celebrate defeating the Italians  after the Ethiopians defeated the Italians in the Battle of Adwa in 1896.

There's also a museum here, but for some reason, while you can take pictures inside the church, you can't inside the museum.

As will become a recurring theme, there were some pretty cool paintings / murals.

Ethiopian Orthodox churches are all laid out pretty similarly. There's an area for the men, an area for the women, and an area for the priests. In the middle (many of the churches are circular), is the Holy of Holies, which houses that church's replication ark of the covenant and only the priests can enter. By the way, Ethiopia claims to have the actual Ark of the Covenant as well up in a church in Tigray.

Our guide also showed us the different things used by the priests (all of which have a lot of symbolism behind them).

Then he insisted on taking pictures with Emma and I playing the instruments, but that felt super touristy and disrespectful, so I'm not sharing those.

We also visited the Entoto Maryam Church at the top of Entoto (the high point north of Addis). They wouldn't let us in the actual church, but there's a museum (which we declined to enter since they insisted on holding our bags at the front) and a large, empty house that one of the kings used to live in.

The real reason to climb Entoto:

The main event was Lalibela. Lalibela is home to rock-hewn churches from the 12th and 13th centuries (which are, amazingly enough, still operated as churches every Sunday). Lalibela is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (quite a few of those in Ethiopia, it turns out). In fact, it is part of the first group of 12 sites to be designated in 1978, along with some really obscure places like Yellowstone National Park and the Galapagos Islands. UNESCO recognizes eleven churches in the area as the part of the site.

In order to stay hidden from enemies, the churches are actually carved into the rock, meaning they are all either below original ground level or in the side of the mountain. The pathways between the churches are also below ground level. Like most things in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, there's a lot of symbolism inside the churches and about Lalibela overall. For example, Lalibela is symbolic of Jerusalem, so many of the things in Lalibela have Biblical names (the town's riverbed is even called the River Jordan). The story is that King Lalibela visited Jerusalem as a child and wanted to build a new Jerusalem in his domain (1) so his people didn't have to travel as far for a pilgrimage and (2) in response to the capture of Jerusalem by Muslims in 1187. The churches are also divided between earthly and heavenly churches.

One of the churches (Biete Medhane Alem), is believed to be the largest monolithic church in the world (all carved from one stone). A few years ago, they covered all the churches (except the Church of St. George which we'll come to in a minute) with pavilions because the stone was soft enough that the weather was wearing it away over time.

 Biete Giyorgis (Church of Saint George). This is the most famous of the churches and also doesn't need a pavilion because it was carved out of the harder rock in the area (which also means it must have been much more difficult to carve).

You can see how the church really is below ground level.

As my buddy Scott said in his Lalibela blog post (that's right, I'm plagiarizing now), don't fall in!

The churches were all really interesting, and I have way too many pictures, but to avoid giving one of the slide projector diatribes that we all had to sit through as children, I'll just include a couple of more.

Fine, fine, that was more than a couple. What can I say? I am that weird neighbor you had in the 1980s, who insisted on sharing 500 pictures of his trip to the Grand Canyon with you.

Bahir Dar (the place with the Blue Nile Falls nearby) is right on Lake Tana (largest lake in Ethiopia). Lake Tana has several monasteries on different islands and peninsulas. Given the time it took the boat to get to the peninsula, we only ended up seeing the outside of two monasteries (looked very similar) and the inside of one. However, I think we chose well since we saw the one with all the old, cool murals.

Hike from the boat to the monastery:

Monastery outside:

Monastery inside:

We also passed some of the small, very lightweight reed boats that the locals use on the lake.

Oman

I would guess one of the few places in the world that rivals Ethiopia for religiousness is the Middle East. You similarly see mosques even in the middle of nowhere in Oman. However, somehow, I don't have many pictures of those. What I do have is pictures of the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat. While the churches in Ethiopia seem to all be named things like House of the Savior of the World, House of Mary, Church of Saint George, the Grand Mosque is named after Oman's ruler - Sultan Qaboos (and yes, it's pronounced like the red thing at the end of a train). The Grand Mosque is just slightly smaller in many ways than the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi (which I told you about in May or June).

Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque
-Capacity: 20,000 worshipers
-Main prayer hall capacity: 6,500 worshipers
-Carpet: 2nd largest in the world
-Chandelier: 14 m height
-Courtyard: Nicely landscaped instead of all being marble
-Tallest minaret: 90 m

Sheikh Zayed Mosque:
-Capacity: 40,000 worshipers
-Main prayer hall capacity: 7,000 worshipers
-Carpet: Largest in the world
-Chandelier: 2nd largest in a mosque and 3rd largest in the world; 10 m diameter; 15 m height
-Courtyard: The largest marble mosaic in the world
-Tallest minaret: 107 m

But wait...the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque has five minarets (compared to four for the Sheikh Zayed Mosque) and may have larger overall grounds (unclear given lack of standardization in how they measure this).

Anyway, the mosque is still quite impressive:

Next time...random other things to compare. Hurray! Higher number: Charles blog posts arbitrarily comparing Ethiopia and Oman or Land Before Time movies? Only time will tell.

Patience is a virtue

Don't worry. I haven't fallen off the blogging wagon again (though I continually fantasize about jumping); just a really busy weekend. Look for a new post in a couple days. Cheers!

Ethiopia vs Oman Part 2

Time to continue my completely nonsensical comparison of Ethiopia and Oman.

Water features

Emma and I also visit Bahir Dar, which is on the south side of Lake Tana. Lake Tana (or, depending on who you ask, one of the rivers flowing into it) is the source of the Blue Nile (the shorter but larger of the two tributaries of the Nile that meet up in Sudan).

Best as I could understand, that is where the Blue Nile exits Lake Tana.

The Blue Nile Falls are about a one-hour bus ride from Bahir Dar. We took the earliest bus (6 am), which I highly recommend because then you have the falls pretty much to yourself (well, you and all the locals trying to sell you stuff along the path, but I bet that gets worse later in the day, too). There are conflicting reports about how frequently the falls are diverted through the large hydroelectric plant there. If you go on a day when the falls are being diverted or towards the end of dry season, the falls are supposed to just be a trickle (the guy at the hotel told me they call them the "Blue Nile Shower" then). This could also be pretty cool because you could actually get under the falls (I got close enough to get soaked in a poncho, but getting under them probably would have killed me) and check out the cliffs more closely. However, it's got to be a distant second to this:

Sorry, I couldn't resist jumping ahead...back to the hike. (stay tuned hike part, though, because the close ups are later). For context, we went at the very end of the rainy season and when the hydroelectric plant happened to be broken (first time major infrastructure being broken in Africa has worked to my advantage), so this is as good as it gets (1997 Jack Nicholson reference).

Here's the view during the hike. That's right, even the most boring part of this experience looks like this:

Then, you come over a hill and around a corner and...bam!

As cool as these pictures are, I promise it's better in person. I'm not sure it's possible to get all the falls in one picture. Most of my pictures are missing the falls on the far left. At first you just see two of them, and then you look to the right and realize they keep going.

Anyway, then you hike along the other side of the gorge until you come to a long suspension bridge.

Then, you can hike right down to the falls themselves (at least the furthest right of the major ones). My plastic farmer boots (known to all Ethiopians as "booties") were definitely necessary. Best purchase ever?

I know those pictures aren't great, but I think Emma has one of me standing on the rock outcropping right by the falls (where I couldn't take a picture because it was like standing in a Midwestern thunderstorm), so this is my public plea for her to send me that picture.

For some reason, I forgot that my phone can take video too until I was already 100 or so yards away from the falls. Given my horrible shaky cam, maybe the lack of many videos is for the best. (Side note: It only took me 9 months to figure out how to upload video to my blog!)




FYI, the guide book's directions were not great, so if you want to avoid the expense of hiring a guide, I guess you'll have to see it with me (or anyone else who's ever been...nope, you definitely need to bring me along for free)!

In Oman, there's the ocean, which is super clear, though my pictures aren't very representative of that.

As nice as the ocean is, the real water features of Oman are the wadis (aka awesome river valleys between the cliffs) and other random inland water stuff (e.g., caves, sinkholes).

About 1.5 hours south of Muscat is Wadi Shab, which is one of the most popular river valleys in Oman. On the way, there's a sinkhole in the middle of nowhere with a super deep pool of water at the bottom. How deep? Deep enough that we actually met a nut job who jumped in from the top (~80-100 feet) and didn't have any serious injuries (just a rash and bruising).

Anyway, back to Wadi Shab. My buddy Scott previously went to Wadi Shab (http://sehpayne.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/muscat-oman/) during his around-the-world adventure, and he raved about it. Somehow, his description (and I'm sure mine as well) came far short of the actual experience.

I decided to one-up Scott. He took his camera until the point where you have to swim to keep going. Given I knew I couldn't capture the best parts anyway and there were more people around because it was Eid, I just left the camera in the car.

Here's the pictures I took from the parking lot.

However, thankfully, other people take their very expensive waterproof cameras up Wadi Shab and then post their videos on Youtube. Thanks Youtube and random people!

This Youtube search also yielding the following piece of random trivia: The cliffs at Wadi Shab are awesome enough that the Red Bull Cliff Diving Finals (yes, this is apparently a real thing) were at Wadi Shab in 2012.

Anyway, here's the main spot to jump in during the hike.

Hiking Wadi Shab is a mixture of walking up the rocky terrain, hanging out in the pools (like the one above), and checking out the frequent palm trees. However, the really awesome part of Wadi Shab is the "cave" (or spot where a giant rock fell on some other rocks creating a covered pool) at the end.

First, you come to a spot where you have to swim to keep going. Eventually, you swim to what at first looks like a dead end, but then you notice a little keyhole entrance back into the "cave." Inside the cave, there's a waterfall, which you can climb up fairly easily thanks to the rope someone tied to an anchor point. At the top of the waterfall, if you curve around to the left, you come out above the pool in the cave where you can jump back in.

Confusing enough explanation? Just watch the video below, and it'll make more sense...




...well, maybe only slightly more. I don't know why everyone's videos of this on Youtube have been over edited and have random music attached. My roommate actually thought I was watching an episode of Glee. That's right, I'm now complaining about other people's videos when I didn't even take one of my own.

I know I said that was the end (and everyone else treats the cave as the end), but technically, when you climb up the waterfall, there's another pool up there, and if you climb up the cliff behind that pool, you can keep hiking up the canyon. Since I didn't bring shoes into the cave, I only went another couple hundred meters before turning back. Clearly, I need some sandals for next time.