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| A scout on the trek between Gich and Chenek |
Journey across the Simiens, one of the world's most elevated and isolated wonderlands
My new companion on the mountain ledge emitted a croak and hopped a little closer. A momentary standoff followed as I contemplated a beak like bolt-cutters and talons the size of butcher's hooks. The ground dropped away for a vertical mile on either side of this slender promontory. This was no place for wrangling with a feathered brute. I shuffled back to let the enormous raven—twice as big as any I'd ever seen—scavenge from my picnic leftovers.
If you've ever wondered how Jack felt on that first foray up the beanstalk, you could do worse than to visit Ethiopia's
Simien Mountains. Looming high above the volcanic outriders of the Great Rift Valley, 670 miles north of Addis Ababa, the range is nature junked-up on growth hormones: a 37-mile-long basalt escarpment staggered between altitudes of 10,000 and 15,000 feet. The area is populated by supersize plants, boisterous monkey armies 500-strong and supersize ravens with a penchant for cookie crumbs.
It's not a place that has always welcomed outsiders. From 1983 to '99, famine and regional warfare snuffed out its tourism potential. Today, however, with Ethiopia's economy expanding amid a semblance of political stability, the country is becoming a relatively safe and accessible destination. It's often the tawny grandeur of the Ethiopian highlands, cradling Lalibela's rock-hewn churches and towering above the fabled tombs of Aksum, that most impresses visitors. And it's here in the Simiens that this region can be seen at its biggest and most sensational. Inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1978, it is a place that has been extolled by Unesco as "one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world." When I'd prepared to leave the scruffy, one-road town of Debark to begin a six-day trek of its high plateaus, I found myself wondering whether the hyperbole had left me expecting too much.
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| Trekkers on the escarpment rim above Chenek camp in the Simien Mountains National Park |
It was dawn on the second morning when the region took its star turn. Two minutes out of the Gich camp, one of three rudimentary camping grounds that punctuate the plateau, a few slender silhouettes on a nearby outcrop heralded the first of what would be many encounters with gelada, the shaggy-haired, vegetarian monkey that is one of the best-known species to come out of Ethiopia.
Even the most cursory research will tell you that you are bound to meet gelada in the Simiens, but nothing prepares you for their numbers. Gelada are known to live in the largest aggregations of any primate, and this group lived up to its billing and quickly grew. Soon I was standing in mute astonishment as a chattering mob of 200 or so monkeys headed toward us. The alpha males, sporting leonine incisors and rock-star manes, led the group toward the direction from which we'd come. The rest of the herd followed in a flurry of barks and snuffles, barely paying us a second glance.
