Gelada Baboons

Today was really cloudy. It would be nice to have warm, sunny weather and nice views while hiking up here, but what I really came for was the baboons, so I told myself that as long as I saw some I'd be happy with my trip to the Simien Mountains.

This morning Txomin and Nagore and I had some oatmeal and bread with peanut butter that our cook fixed for us, then the three of us left the camp at Bukit Ras with our guide and our scout. After an hour or two of hiking through rain and mud we stopped at a small village to meet a local family. Visits to ethnic villages are always a toss-up when I'm traveling. Every once in a while the villages are really authentic and really interesting, but more often than not they're the same villages that hundreds of tourists have been paraded through before. In Costa Rica last February I went to an “ethnic village” as part of a hike through the rainforest and the place was really nothing more than a gift shop with a dirt floor. Fortunately the village we went to this morning was very authentic and it turned out to be one of the most interesting ethnic village experiences I've had.

Most Ethiopian villages are made up of small round huts called Tukols. At the village we visited this morning we sat down on the dirt floor of a dark Tukol with a fire in the middle and a ceiling filled with smoke. An old Ethiopian lady put a crude metal pan on the fire and roasted some wheat kernals for us to eat. It's funny how so much communication is possible even between people who don't speak the same language and really don't have anything in common. Txomin was sitting on the side of the fire where all the smoke happened to be seeping over. He started waving it away from his face with his hands and the Ethiopian lady tilted the pan up at an angle to let all the smoke over to his side as a joke. Everyone had a good laugh about that and Txomin went ahead and moved to the other side of the fire.The whole day today was unusually cloudy and rainy, even for the rainy season. Usually the sky is clear and the sun peeks through the clouds for at least a few hours during the morning, but the weather just didn't want to cooperate today. We walked through the mud and rain and for hours didn't see anything worthwhile. To me the Simien Mountains weren't looking any more impressive than any other mountains I've seen and I was wondering if I'd see any baboons at all up here. Finally, only an hour's hike away from tonight's camp at Sankabar, we came across a herd of about two hundred shaggy gelada baboons.Once we finally found the animals, getting good views and photo ops of the baboons was easier than any other wild animal I've ever dealt with. The baboons are very friendly and I walked right into the middle of the herd, getting within inches of baboons before they'd finally shy away. Most of the herd was picking at the grass and shoving handfuls of it into their mouths. Some of the baboons were sifting through each other's fur and grooming each other. The grooming looked a lot to me like a medical doctor checking elementary school kids for hair lice. We spent more than an hour just wandering among the herd and snapping pictures. Getting so close to the animals meant great photo opportunities, especially when I used my telephoto lens.My favorite part of the experience was sneaking up behind a few different baboons that were grazing and getting close enough that I could have pulled their tails if I wanted to. I was seriously considering it, but my Ethiopian guide advised against it.After arriving in Sankabar we all had a quick snack and then got in our sleeping bags to escape the cold, wet weather outside. Like I said before, July is the rainy season in Ethiopia and isn't the best time for hiking. It would be great to be here in April or May when the weather is much better, but July is what I have to work with, so I'm making the best of it. I'm already more than satisfied with my visit to Ethiopia. I've seen the churches at Lalibela, the Camelot castle at Gondar, and now the gelada baboons in the Simien Mountains. On Monday I meet up with a tour group in Nairobi to start a three week African safari. I'm really looking forward to that. For the rest of my trip after I leave Ethiopia the weather is supposed to be warm and sunny. So far I've dealt with the rainy season everywhere I've gone, so it will be nice to not even have to think about that a few days from now.