Maren Stoltenberg
and Kirk Melcher live in Cologne, Germany. Kirk, an American,
has been living there for about 8 years. Maren has lived there her whole
life, except for a couple of years in Berlin and one year as a Au-pair
in Australia. In 1999, Kirk climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with his two
brothers and spent time traveling through Tanzania and Kenya. Maren
has been studying Art History since last surface of what is to be seen.
Why have we decided to quit our jobs, pack everything up get up, give up
the security that most human beings strive for and go travel around the
world? Well ... to steal a quote from George Mallory, "Because it's
there!" Just for peoples' information, this trip is not to find
ourselves, or find the secrets of life, we just have the urge to experience
something new and adventurous.
The train
ride from Djibouti to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia ... what will this be for
a memory of a lifetime? At 2:00 am, the hotel manager woke us up and took
us downstairs where he had already organized a taxi for us. You just have
to imagine that the streets are totally dark and you can not see far out
of the taxi.
On arrival
at the train station, there are masses of people crowded around the
gate to the opening of the platform. Some were trying to get in, others
were sleeping or eating on the grounds around the gate. The taxi driver
of course did not have any change. Maren intelligently grabbed our money
back, which we have given him, until he found some change.
We pushed
ourselves through to the front of the gate with our big backpacks till
we got the attention of the station manager. Somehow, he had a system
of who he was allowing in and who he was throwing out.
There was
suddenly a mad rush to get in. People were pushing and shoving, trying
to get all there belongings inside the train station.
The caretaker
explained to Maren in French that all the tickets were sold out, but
there were some folding chairs on the train still available if we wanted
them. Of course we said yes. The guy then brought us inside where
we paid for our tickets, We were then shown where we would be seated.
We were
lucky to get seats in the so called "1st class" wagon. It was totally
dark and one could not see much. First Class is not our first class,
not our second class and not our third class ticket by western standards.
Maren had the guts to go back outside to buy a few sodas and water for
our trip while I watched the bags. Buy a lot of water beforehand.
A nice guy
"Hansen," an Ethiopian working in Djibouti, started speaking to Kirk.
He sort of explained a little bit of the trip we were to make, and later
looked after us.
A lot of
Ethiopians that work in Djibouti go home at this time of year because it
gets too hot in Djibouti. Suddenly, right before the time the
train was supposed to leave, people started loading into the train with
all their worldly possessions: chairs, bags full of pots and pans, clothing,
huge supplies of food, electric fans, garbage cans, and suitcases. They
stacked them above and below or just hung them from the ceiling above.
It was a crazy site.
One has
to realize that we were the only travellers on board. Outside
people were all sitting around: sellers are selling baguettes, soda, chai
and other things we were not too sure of. There were people going to the
bathroom right outside the train. It was a mad house. Maren
went to the bathroom on the train where it was pitch dark, and she could
not see anything, but that turned out to be ok; the toilet was absolutely
filthy, and stunk the whole trip. At around 6:10 the train started
moving with still people jumping in.
The sun
was coming up, so we were able to see outside. First, we went
through what must have been the slums of Djibouti, where people were sleeping
out by the tracks with garbage surrounding them.
Right outside
of town the train suddenly came to a halt. People
started jumping out of the train and started running away. Policemen and
soldiers ran after them, chasing them down. Some got away, but they brought
a lot back. They were trying to catch people who did not pay. At the same
time, the station manager who got us the tickets came through the train.
He seemed to know exactly who had paid and who not, and quickly started
picking out people and taking them off the train.
Outside
was a jail bus waiting to pack people in. There was actually a middle
age Arab couple with a friend, who also did not have a ticket. We do not
know what happened to them. We were relieved after the train started moving
again, but we also realised it was going to be a long train ride.
Along the way
we stopped at certain villages, where we kept on picking up passengers.
They were
loading the train with all types of goods: flour, spaghetti, cooking oil,
and other goods. They just sat all around us on the floor, or hung-on
half way outside the train. Sometimes armed soldiers or security
guards would come through checking out the situation. Some passengers
would leave with them, and then return, later. They were bribing their
way to stay on the train. They were quick transactions.
Along each
stop, a women on the train would sell her goods to villagers along the
way. The villagers would also try to sell their wares every time
the train stopped. They sold mostly drinks consisting of tea and
water and donut like dough bread, along with goat meat. Outside,
you could see how the villagers lived. We saw one person skinning
a freshly killed goat. You could really see how poor these people
were. It was hard to accept how some people are forced to live these
days, in the “modern world”. On the train, people were sleeping in
filth all around us. Our impression was that the people were enjoying
the ride, and it was sort of a treat for them.
A girl named
Fiffy spoke to us. Saying we had to make sure that we watched out for our
stuff when the train stopped. She was really nice and caring.
She was an 18 years old Ethiopian living in Djibouti. What Maren understood
was that she had a French father who left the family and went back to France.
However it was not so clear to Maren exactly what the actual circumstances
were. The young girl asked us several times during the train ride
if we were ok.
The landscape
in Djibouti was mostly barren and uninhabited. Once in a while,
we would see a small village or a Shepard with his goats. The houses
were mostly made of piled up stones and thatched roofs like a thousand
years ago. Sometimes, the landscape was sandy, sometimes like the
surface of mars, with endless rock fields all over the place. On
the Ethiopian side you would come across kilometres of ant mounds purging
up from the ground.
At the Ethiopian
border, we were told that one of us should watch our stuff and the other
should do the immigration paperwork. There we a lot of forms
to fill out: one for passport information, another for our foreign currency,
another for our camera, and several more. Kirk went to fill out the
forms. He had to find an immigration officer in the second class wagon.
Along the way, people tried to reach into his pockets. One time he
just smacked a guy.
One thing what
the immigration officers saw was the Eritrean Visa in our passports.
This did not make them happy, because they had just ended a war with them
last year. We did not want to say that we’d really enjoyed ourselves.
After the
train started moving again, we noticed that suddenly everyone in the train
was chewing.
They were all chewing “chat”, a green leaf plant that supposedly
wakes you up like caffeine, but also gets you a little high. They
offered us some, but we politely declined. By the end of the train
ride, people had wads of this stuff in their mouth like a ball in their
cheeks. They sort of looked like Dizzy Gillespie blowing his trumpet
in a hot rif. Their gums and teeth were also all green.
The Ethiopian
landscape was similar to the Djibouti side. We also saw herds of camel
roaming the desert. The women on the train were constantly breast-feeding
their babies. They seemed to breast-feed them the whole way.
It was a beautiful thing to see.
At the Ethiopian
border, the drink man came on board with cases of Pepsi Cola, 7up and Miranda.
He was a hit. He was constantly selling. In Africa, the people
just love the fizz drinks. These drinks have taken over. On
the Ethiopian side Pepsi seems much more common, while in Eritrea and in
Djibouti Coke rules. Must be politics.
The whole train
ride, Kirk did not really sleep, he was nervously watching the bags, especially
where the laptop was. Every time we stopped the local kids jumped
onto the train. They seemed always interested in our bags.
Maren was able to sleep for short sections of the trip, but did not get
much rest, either. In the evening, the train got pitch dark.
We arrived
14 hours later in Dire Dawa. We’d met a man called Wendwessen,
whom we’d given a seat next to us on the train at the Ethiopian border.
He worked for the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia in Dire Dawa. He spoke
pretty good English. He had read Kirk's week old paper on the train,
which Kirk later gave to him. We asked him where the Continental
Hotel was in town. He said he would show us.
We were
especially happy when we got off the train. After going through
a sort of customs inspection, we walked out of the train station into hundreds
of people being kept back from guards with whack sticks. Wendwessen quickly
brought us through the crowds to the hotel. There he spoke with the
people and made sure we were satisfied with our room. He then said
if we wanted we could come by the bank tomorrow to meet him for lunch.
Later, we noticed that the room had no water. We then told the staff
and they offered us another room, but that room had no window or bathroom
door, so we declined. Then they said they would fix the water in
the other room. We were exhausted and fell right to sleep.
