After celebrating two homely Estonian and Ethiopian Christmases we decided to meet the New Year in the wilderness. It was a 15-minute drive from the city limits complemented by a 3 km-long hike toward the caves in the mountains of Damota. We wanted to spend the New Year’s Eve by ourselves.But planning ahead turned out to be useless as on many occasions before. When reaching our destination – the cave – we discovered that they had started charging an entrance fee just weeks prior to it. The fee amounted to half of our security guard”s monthly salary.We decided unanimously to save the money for smarter spending purposes and march on. Darkness was quickly approaching and our search became a little bit nervous. But the nature was indescribably beautiful. We had been joined by children from the whole surrounding villages and a number of very important-looking mountain dwellers, some of whom were probably cave entrance fee collectors.
Because of the wonderful surroundings I was taking pictures with my camera until the moment daylight was gone. Time was running out of finding a beautiful spot. Two of our fellow Estonians had been going ahead of us faster. Annika and Hildana had also gone in their own direction, hoping to find a more private spot. After a short while we heard exclamations. “An even better place than the caves!” Voices seemed to have come from the valley. We climbed down the steep slope towards them. Of course our local not-so-wanted escort crowd never left following us.
It seemed that our plan to spend the New Year’s Eve by ourselves had turned into a toal failure. Finally, however, I remembered the Ethiopian hospitality and took a bag of finely ground coffee. I asked them to use it to make coffee for us and gave them about a quarter of the money we saved by not having bought the cave tickets. In a brief moment we were already at the campsite Annika and Hildana had discovered. This place was like a “miracle of the evening”! A little creek flowing down a small slope formed a small bathing pond just below.
Just beside the pond there was a flat stone that was tailor-made for our New Years”s feast. We made comfortable seats for ourselves around it and began counting the number of our curious visitors hat were just about 20 metres from us. There were 12 of them and about the same number of village children. It was too dark to take a picture of them. We were joking and waiting for our fellow Estonians Olav and Norman.
We had also given them flashlights to help them find the way but our reunion before sunrise seemed very unlikely. Quick arrival of darkness signalled that we need material for the bonfire. But the surrounding forest was far from helpful apart from offering some dry leaves.
Our unacquitanted security guards began to diffuse and only two guys with strange headscarfs remained to wathc the strange “white creatures”. After 10 minutes time we were suddenly confronted with a pile of dry firewood and a 12-13 year-old girl starting the fire bymaking rapid movements. In the true Ethiopian way this girl became heal our fireplace overseer. But the men remained at a distanceand sat til the end of our “Own New Year’s Eve!”
About an hour had passed when the long-awaited coffee arrived. I forgot to tell the most important thing to the coffee maker: No salt!!!Since none of us drinks coffee with sugar, I forgot to mention that detail. Salt is used instead of sugar in the mountains, because the price of salt is 15 times lower. Fortunately, we had also asked for tea and salt is not added there. At least our uninvited guests got a good cup of coffee as well as Laur, who finds coffee with salt drinkable. Since our dinner party had increased significantly, we began to worry how could we all share the food in such a way that we would not be left hungry. Our bags were filled with boiled eggs, meat,and a biscuit cake. Such a low-key diet had turned to be a New Year”s Feast in our minds by 9 pm!
We had already offered our food to enjeras when we heard Olavi’s and Norman’s voices.The whole sky was still pitch black and we could only hear the voices and see the flashlights. Finally Estonians were united as a family plus some 12 unknown guests so that we could spend the last two hours firing couple of fireworks “on our own”.
Bisrat had taken them along so that we could have the usual New Year’s noise. Large pipe a lot of rubbish, but no real fireworks whatsoever. It seems that the plastic shiny rubbish coming out of fireworks is more important in Africa rather than the fireworks themselves. Since our home was 8 km away we set off on our way back. As long as we had had light from the fire we could only notice a lot of stars above us, but the moon had slipped our attention. Now that we were finally totally unaccompanied our whole company was illuminated by the light from the moon. The light was sufficient and the way home left a deep imprint in our minds, though not quite enough for good photos.
It was a memorable night for all of us in between the two years.
MERLE
