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My Own Private Brigadoon

© Jane Stewart-Williams

Until I arrived in Ethiopia I was always under the impression that villages appearing out of nowhere were the stuff of dreams and light-hearted musicals. But, in the heart of the Simien Mountains I found my own little haven.

I had been in the country several days and already found it to be full of surprises. Growing up in the eighties when Ethiopia held the unenviable record for most famine-ridden country in the world, I was led to believe I was going to find nothing but barren lands and stunted kids covered in flies.

Admittedly, the remains of the war were all around. Burnt out tanks lined the roadside, and people warned of the dangers of unexploded mines. But, aside from this, I found rugged mountain ranges, towns filled with thousands of years of history, and a tourist trade that was struggling to get back on its feet after being isolated from the world for thirty years.

After a couple of days exploring the ancient capital of Axum, I found myself hitching south on a journey that looked on my pencil-sketched map to be no more than a hundred kilometres to the next town. Although I waited on one of the main roads south, it was hardly the M25, and it was unsurprising to find not one car passed in the space of an hour.

Eventually, I got a lift from a lorry, small and quite rickety. I spent the day standing behind the cab, clinging on as we hurtled around hairpin bends, while the mountains dropped hundreds of metres to the side. I was petrified, but at the same time exhilarated as the wind knotted my hair and the sun burnt my skin. However, it soon became clear that the town I was looking for was a lot further off than my map claimed.

Late in the afternoon, the truck stopped, and the driver explained that they were turning off down a dirt track to nowhere and they would have to let me off. My water bottle was long empty and I hadn't eaten since breakfast. A hungry night on the side of a road in the Simien Mountains was not something I looked forward to, so desperately I waited for another vehicle to go past.

After a couple of hours, and the realisation that vehicles didn't actually use this road, the truck returned. It was heading back to a village up the road for the night. Brilliant. I leapt back in the truck, and within minutes I could see the mud and thatch huts of the village.

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