Updated 10 hours ago · Taken at Omo River
David
Hochman, Contributor This story appears in the March 4, 2013 issue of
Forbes. Photographs byMichael Lorentz - Safarious.com
The road to the Mursi heartland is long and best tackled one obstacle at
a time. Just to call it a road is a stretch, really. Steve Turner, our
guide from Kenya-based Origins Safaris, estimates it has been five or
six years since the last vehicle drove this way. Far beyond any game
preserve or luxury camp comforts, we are on our way to visit the
“vanishing” tribes of Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley, one of Africa’s–and
the world’s–last great undiscovered places. The itinerary evolves as we
go along. Our tag-team pair of Land Cruisers galumphs down the scrubby
track at a hiker’s pace, and every hundred yards or so the vehicles stop
short, the doors swing open, and out come the drivers and guides to
stare blankly at whatever gully, tree or torrent is blocking our way.
It’s hot–84 degrees and rising at 10 a.m.–and the tsetse flies are on to
us. Judging from the overgrown ravine, or donga, between where we are
and where we need to be, I suspect Turner is being conservative on the
six-year time frame. “Let’s give it a go,” he says, and the forward Land
Cruiser creeps into the hole, instantly getting stuck. Turner gazes
down at the scene with his hands on his hips. “Right,” he says. “We need
to start digging.” Turner warned me this would not be an easy trip.
Even in our age of global everything, the 15 ethnic groups inhabiting
the hills and banks along the Omo are so cut off that they have no
written languages or calendars (an Omo “clock” is a string with knots
tied to indicate the number of sunsets before a gathering or ceremony).
Intrepid foreigners first contacted tribes like the Mursi, famous for
their dramatic clay lip plates, in the 1930s but even now Turner’s is
the only company touring the Omo River itself. When I first e-mailed
Turner asking for details on the expedition, he wrote: “Having been to
Africa before, you’re already oriented, but do remember that you
probably have never been anywhere quite as remote and inhospitable as
the Omo River. If you are inconvenienced by spartan accommodations,
intense human contact or are apprehensive in unfamiliar situations, then
I’m sorry but this expedition is not for you.” When I informed him
that, actually, this would be my first trip to Africa, he replied,
“Prepare to be uncomfortable.” In many ways I was pleasantly surprised.
In addition to Turner, we had the expertise of a second guide, Michael
Lorentz (Turner is his on-the-ground operator). Lorentz’s Cape Town
safari company, Passage to Africa, is highly regarded among a
well-traveled crowd for putting together unusual tours. The company
declines to release the names of its guests, but claims a customer list
of primary players from Wall Street, billionaire Silicon Valley founders
and Hollywood A-listers. Typically Lorentz flies to his clients’ homes
months in advance to blue-sky each detail: private helicopters, teams of
porters, the works. These aren’t adrenaline-thirsty backpackers but
“travelers’ travelers,” who understand that the greatest luxury today is
returning with the most unique experience. This experience is
certainly a whopper. Already several days into a ten-day trip, our small
traveling party has been pushing from dawn until evening’s first
mosquito bite, observing ancient customs, rites and everyday activities.
Some are beautiful, many are absolutely harrowing. Our first day
buzzing upriver in the Omo’s only motorized boat, we encountered a group
of exuberant young Karo tribesmen on the banks, adorning themselves
with white body paint and clay headpieces. Our charismatic translator
and tribal ambassador, Lale Biwa, explained that 42 boys were about to
join the ranks of the Karo elders. Turner remembered he had a stash of
ceremonial ostrich feathers and presented them as a gift, which got the
boys leaping and whooping euphorically. A few minutes later, skinny old
men wielding long green sticks (and AK-47s; they’re ubiquitous in the
Omo) began lashing hard at the boys, chasing them uphill to the nearby
village of Dus. There they joined a few hundred others and danced
jubilantly into the night. The next day, as a goat was sacrificed in
honor of our arrival, we were told we were the first outsiders to
witness such an event. Given the realities on the ground, we may not be
many years before the last. Next summer the massive Gilgel Gibe III
Dam is scheduled to begin operations several hundred miles upriver. The
controversial project will more than double electrical output in
Ethiopia, where less than two percent of the rural population has
access to the grid. But it may displace as many as 200,000 indigenous
people who rely on the Omo’s natural flood cycles, and whose land may
now go dry. Most locals we meet are unaware these changes are coming.
That the end is near in a region once inhabited by some of our earliest
ancestors (Australopithecus walked these very river banks) is only one
reason to visit the Omo now. It is also a place that challenges the
traveler – at least this traveler – like nowhere else. “You always need
someone with a Plan B,” as Lorentz says. There is the day boating up the
Omo, for example, with crocodiles splashing everywhere in the
cocoa-brown water, when our outboard motor goes dead. Two things pop
into your head: there is no rescue boat anywhere nearby, and this is
definitely not a Disney ride. “Don’t give over to phantom fears,”
Lorentz says discreetly, sensing my anxiety. “If we need to, we’ll drift
downriver steering with an umbrella as a paddle.” From the moment our
chartered Cessna landed at a ragged airstrip near the
Kenya-Ethiopiaborder, practically everything we’ve seen has tested my
First World sensibilities. How does a Westerner respond to a Dassanech
ceremony celebrating female circumcision? Or to learning that a child’s
good or bad fortune is determined at birth by reading the intestines of a
goat or cow? Or to a practice known as mingi, which holds that children
considered “polluted” (even a chipped tooth can do it) must be
abandoned or killed to prevent further bad luck. As the sun sets on
these ancient and bewildering practices, it is difficult enough for
visitors simply to behold what is. And so we take photographs. In a
perverse way, it’s why we are here. My fellow travelers, each of whom
paid $16,000 for the trip, include an executive from a Silicon Valley
tech firm and the wife of a Starbuckscofounder. But here we are just
paparazzi. At a bull-jumping ceremony that is part of the Hamar tribe’s
marriage rite, I take more than a hundred photos of a boy running naked
across the backs of cattle as his female cousins are ritualistically
whipped to spur him on. Another morning, Lale asks a Nyagatom woman to
remove her Western-style top so we can photograph her artful scars. At
sunset one night in Dus, Turner arranges a dozen Karo tribespeople on a
ledge over the Omo so we can shoot their exotic silhouettes. It is as
awkward as it sounds. Think Vogue as edited by Joseph Conrad, and made
even odder by the fact that we must pay for photos. Adults get 5 birr,
around 25 cents, and children get 2–around 10 cents, though disputes do
arise. Figuring I was showing respect in a Nyagatom village by
photographing the fiercest-looking elder first–his ritual chest scars
signified he had killed an enemy–I found myself instead calling for
Lale’s help to negotiate my way out. After that encounter, I stopped
taking photos almost entirely When we finally get the Land Cruiser out
of the hole on the way to the Mursi (after the only towrope within miles
snaps like crepe paper), we Plan B an alternate route the next day.
Wake up is 4:30 a.m. at our surprisingly comfortable tent camp (private
bucket showers, European linens, a talented chef) for what turns out to
be an 11-hour travel day. Visiting the tribe is just as much of a rush
as the journey. The women of the Mursi pierce their lower lips as
teenagers and insert clay or wooden lip plates up to seven inches wide
to attract a spouse. One elderly woman wears a headdress of dried
corncobs. A young man has a ritual scar in the shape of a crown. Seeing
these remarkable adornments up close is shocking, awe-inspiring and more
than a little sad. Like so much else in the Omo Valley right now, it
forces you to face up to the otherness of traditions that are ancient,
unsettling and extreme. And to contemplate what it may mean to lose
them.
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