The Words
Added on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Horse herder
This journey across Ethiopia is a journey of mixed emotions. I feel that the country needs recognition for what it is trying to do against the enormity of poor PR it generally gets. When 6 million people are presently starving and the countries government seem powerless to control it, you can imagine how that affects the national psyche.
It has affected me. Nothing out here seems fair. None of it makes sense. Even though I travel quickly, what I don’t see I sense. What I don’t know, I feel. There is a great point about journeys like this that whatever it is that you do and how you do it, can be interpreted in many ways by all the motorcyclists in the world who read it.
35% of Ethiopians can read. The national gross income is $1000. The average age expectancy is 41. And yet, they cannot sit down to their meal without asking me to share it. They would rather go hungry than not show hospitality and the honour that is accorded to respecting a person who has travelled very far to grace their country.
There are values here that westerners have forgotten. It sounds like a sermon but aren’t real journeys about reflection? Isn’t that what the point is all about. It’s the greatest road test for any motorcycle and motorcyclist, it is also trying to capture that unfathomable element which pinnacles on the question ‘why?’ Anyone who asks that meaningfully has a point to make that has to be accessed in the field, away from the open plan office and that rather silly state of cynicism that keeps them in the office, and makes me want to be here.
