Should I Stay or Should I Goh?
Or - How to Get a Rodent to Walk on Your Balls (Gratis)
By ASH Smyth
November 2021
For this, you will need:
1 plane ticket to Ethiopia
2 Americans and 1 New Zealander (an Ozzie will do, in the unlikely event that NZ travellers are in short supply)
1 no-horse town
1 driver who is too polite to say anything bad about any of the accommodation options
1 inept hotelier (aged around 16 for best effect)
1 evening meal consisting almost exclusively of raw meat
Some souvenirs made largely of animal by-products
1 already irritable bowel
Begin by flying to Addis Ababa. If this is a bit rich for you, do not worry: a similar experience – and with your animal of choice! – can be had almost anywhere in Africa, and much of Asia too.
Take a couple of days to acquaint yourself with Addis, thereby enabling every scheming brigand to size you up, offer you a cut-price room in his hotel, and then suggest you might be interested in a trip ‘down south’ (not – this once – a dirty metaphor). He will tell you of things tribal and show you a few photos of bare-breasted women, and you will start to think about how people might treat you differently at the Royal Geographical Society if they couldn’t tell you apart from Wilfred Thesiger. (Hopefully, you reflect, they would not try to bury you.)
Head south, after much wrangling over price ($30 per person, per day, which will soon enough turn out to cover almost nothing), deep into the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region. Which is all one place. After several days of discovering that tribes-people know far too well what’s good for them when it comes to posing for tourists, you arrive at Jinka. There is a rather picturesque sunset over the airfield, or over what you assume must be the airfield (given the number of cows on it and the complete absence of planes), and you think it would be nice to sit and have a quiet beer. The speed of the sunset this close to the equator – never much over 15 minutes – provides an excellent excuse to drink very quickly: which in turn produces the useful side-effect of giving you enough courage to find a place to eat, and sample the various delicacies from a menu which you can neither read (especially if the locals have tried to translate it into English) nor understand when it is explained to you (especially if the locals are trying to explain it in English).
Check into a hotel, in this instance the elite Goh Hotel, hard by the airstrip. This is a handy extra, in case there is an outbreak of civil war or your room-mate turns out to be
a) boring
b) a sex pest, or
c) prone to horrendous nocturnal farting
Remember – as you always must – to clarify what you are getting for your money (70 Ethiopian Birr). At the Goh, you are getting mozzie nets, electricity, and showers with hot water. Hot? Are you sure? Yes, you are. How are you so certain? Because you are a smart traveller, and you have asked no fewer than three times. Besides, the young lady from NZ is willing to share a room, which makes all the mod cons a bargain for only ETB35 each. While you consider the maths, idly flicking the light-switch, the hotelier seems to be reminded of something and nips out sheepishly. He comes back moments later, to inform you that the electricity is ‘off’ for the time being, but yes, of course, it will be on when you return. Ask if this might not effect the operation of the water-heater. He will say it might, but you can put on the heater now and when he flips the fuses – in due course – the water will begin to heat.
Grab that beer or two, pausing only to play a quick round of mosquito Centurion (which the Americans will win, of course, having the itchiest trigger-fingers), and now it is time for dinner. Today being a day with a ‘Y’ in it, you will doubtless be told there is only ‘fasting food’. Having been in Ethiopia for at least a week now, you will be too acclimatised to attempt any kind of humour based on this logico-linguistic fallacy. And just as well, since this evening it will turn out that it’s not a fasting day, and so you can – at last! – try the legendary kitfo. (Yes, it is a little tin dish of raw meat; no, I assure you the semantic echo of ‘catfood’ is strictly coincidental, sir.)
Wash down the catfoodkitfo (ETB15) with a couple more Ethiopian beers (ETB10), taking care to avoid the Bedele Special: you have already made one 'Special' midnight trip to the bathroom this week, and a second might look like carelessness in the eyes of the New Zealander.
Stroll back to the Goh, and strip down for a shower (killing a few dozen mozzies while you’re in there). Ah. No light. No hot water either. Did you forget to put on the water heater? No, you did not. Then where is the [chosen expletive] hot water?! Come to that, where’s the cold water?!!
At this juncture, ‘words’ may well be exchanged between you and the young man at Reception. Not to worry, he will smile cheerfully: the electricity can be restored at the fuse box. There, light! And the shower? It’s not working? No. It’s. Not.
An extremely elderly flunky will now be despatched to see about the problem. You will be slightly perplexed as to why he heads straight to the other side of the compound, and not to the bathroom with the shower in it… but you have read your Lonely Planet: Ethiopia & Eritrea, so you are fully aware that things are different in foreign parts and that what might seem to you like patent stupidity and/or extraordinarily effortful inefficiency is of course actually just A Cultural Thing.
Once the ageing servant has filled the cistern on the roof – with a small plastic measuring jug – and the water has heated itself (miraculous correlation to the throwing of the switches in the fuse-box), and you have had a tepid shower in the half darker, and muttered even darker imprecations about bills, hoteliers and involuntary discounts, you slump onto your bed, wrestle with the mosquito net, and feel damn good about the fact that there’s nothing like a good night’s sleep…
It is 4am and you are wondering why you are awake. Just before you crashed out you recall chuckling as your guts competed with your companion’s over which could make the most ominous rumble; but all seems fine in that department. Then you hear it. A scrabbling and scraping somewhere over by the wall. Confident (don’t ask me how) that no-one is making improvements to the decor at this early hour, this is an unappealing sound, with even less appealing implications.
In fact, the sound seems to be coming from beside your rucksack: specifically from the side-pocket in which you have stored your souvenirs (more specifically, a necklace made out of evidently unwashed pigs' knucklebones). You have no flashlight, because you are an idiot and a snob and used all your old camera batteries to run your Minidisc player because you just couldn’t hack three weeks in Ethiopia without a little Mozart. So you sit, and you listen to the scratching. It’s noisy.
After you-don’t-know-how-long (the total darkness of an African night makes time-telling tricky), the sound seems to fade a little, and then change. It no longer sounds like a massive rat trying to chew its way through German-designed alpine equipment. No, now it sounds like a massive rat trying to climb up a bed-sheet.
If you have ever aspired to hear the patter of tiny feet, fair dos. If you have ever hoped to feel the patter of tiny feet, well, then let me be the first to suggest you urgently reconsider. You don’t need to have seen 1984 to recoil at the footfall of a rodent between your outstretched legs. Anticipation is all, and knowing that you did wear pants this evening (if only because you were even more concerned about what the fleas might do to you) is not much of a consolation.
You think of yourself as an adventurous sort, naturally, and hope other people consider you a man of parts. You would very much like to remain a man of parts, but (Bear Grylls, eat your heart out!) there is now a rodent standing four-square on your scrotum (gratis). You are 100% convinced that if you move so much as a hair – on your head, or anywhere else – matters might get much worse. You can see nothing, not even the net that is all that separates you (and what makes you you) from the Bollock-Devouring Beast of Jinka; but you could draw an anatomically precise diagram of the little bastard, starting with the ten tiny claws that are currently poised upon each of your nuts.
In the darkness, you consider your options, trying not to be distracted by the sound of your own pubic hairs curling. It occurs to you that maybe this was what high school physics was all in aid of – working out what kind of weight/size this animal might be, judging by the pressure being exerted on your huevos (something about force divided by surface area, wasn’t it?), and whether the tensile strength of the average mozzie net would enable you to hurl the bugger against the wall before he realised what was what and decided to make a serious impression on les objets sphericales. While you consider all this, you realise you're quite glad you can’t see anything.
Time will pass. Maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour. And then the knacker-nibbler shifts his weight, turns, and walks off, without so much as a thankyou, or a cuddle.
You take a few seconds to consider what just happened, and whether it technically qualifies as a sexual encounter. And if it does, were you complicit?
But enough philosophy. Hearing, once again, the scrabbling of claw on cloth, and realising it’s not on your bed this time, you face an altogether different dilemma. Three nights ago you vomited noisily right next to this young lady, and you are quite frankly astonished that she’s been willing to share a room with you again, even to save money.
Should you wake her? It wouldn’t look good in a fairy tale… not least because fairy tales tend not to include foul-mouthed, flame-haired antipodeans who’ve been on the road (and the sauce) for 8 months. Still, considering the reaction likely to be provoked if the vermin tries to do to her what it just did to you, you reckon the risk is probably worth taking.
She takes it in good humour – or as good as it gets when you’ve just been woken up at 4am – and you spend quarter of an hour cheerfully recounting the saga and throwing used batteries (which you’ve now found because she has a torch, smart lass) at the pile of rucksacks. Then she goes back to sleep, leaving you staring at the ceiling until it gets light, and wishing you could feel a bit more like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.
There follows a legal dilemma. If you choose to murder the young man from Reception, there will probably be consequences. Have you checked the Ethiopian legal code? What do inmates of Ethiopian jails make of foreigners? Is it a pie? Is it the pie? These are all things you might want to consider.
Because your water won’t be working (nor the lights, it being pre-dawn when no-one could possibly need them), you wash over at the Americans’ room, where you are steadily talked down from your murderous delirium. You breakfast (ETB20) and impotently (almost lit.) pay the room bill, as everyone knew you would despite all your mutterings of indescribably-uncomplicated vengeance.
As you leave the premises, traumatised and ever-so-slightly itchy, you will notice the sign on the main gate: Goh Hotel – your satisfaction is our profit. With a grim smile, you deduce that they will soon be out of business.
NB. No real persons, living, dead or anywhere in between are represented in this article – least of all the author. It is a work of total conjecture (which I have since had checked by my GP).
