How our choice of transport changes what we see

I would never have understood Ethiopia if it hadn't been for the planes.

Let me explain. Ethiopia is just too big and too mountainous to get around easily. And I only had three weeks to see the country; which I don't think is enough. Given my time again, I'd spend a whole week in Gondar, a week in Axum and a week in Lalibela.... but anyway, that combined with the fact that Ethiopian has advantageous domestic fares if you have an Ethiopian Airlines international ticket meant that I flew a lot more than I usually would.

Looking down, I saw the mountains on the way to Gondar. High, wrinkled, rough mountains. Mountains in brown and fawn and yellow, dry already.

But I also saw tiny round compounds. I saw precarious terraces carved into the slopes. I saw fields dotted by bright yellow roundels of haystack.

On the plane to Dire Dawa, I saw an immense slab of desert cut by braids of dry rivercourse. I saw high mesas carved out by fast rivers with cliffs falling away on every side. And on top of nearly every mesa was a village, small houses and fields doing their best to ignore the fact that their world is flat, and that a hundred metres from your house the bottom drops out of it.

I have no idea how people get to these villages, though the fact that one of my scouts in the Simien mountains walked just in his flipflops might be indicative. (Another walked in wellies, and shot up mountain trails like a goat on acid.)

I would never have seen this so clearly by any other form of transport. Ethiopia looks dry and scrubby and deserted; but what's striking is its fertility, and the intensive use that Ethiopian farmers make of the land.

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Get on a bus, and you see something quite different. If you can see anything at all - because you're probably sandwiched in between a young professional with a big black laptop bag and her hair in tight braids, and a family with two babies clambering all over everyone in the bus. (Though at least no one will be standing up. That's a relief.)

You see school students dressed in bright shirts - burgundy, neon green, yellow and pink - streaming along the road in their hundreds as they come out of school in the late afternoon. You see Ethiopia's future in their satchels and their smiles. You see ox carts and bajajes and minibuses, and the occasional landcruiser, and savant donkeys who know their way home and trot with firewood on their backs and no apparent master.

(You see a minibus with drips of blood all over one door. Someone says "one man killed.")

You see long ribbons of bright grey road. Chinese made road. Very good road, but where you can't drive fast, because of the ox carts, donkeys, schoolchildren, cows.

This Ethiopia is different. Though equally interesting.

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I wish I'd been on the train. Not the glitzy Chinese-run train that runs from Addis to Djibouti, stopping only in (well, 11 km out of) Dire Dawa, but the little local train that runs from Dire Dawa to the Djibouti border, through the bush, stopping in every tiny village.

But that was a train I didn't have time to take. I'm sure I would have seen another aspect of the country.

Choosing your mode of travel isn't a simple choice, as Rome2Rio suggests. It's a complex choice; because even if you don't actually believe that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive", to travel in a particular way will give you a particular appreciation of your destination. Choose carefully, then. Choose well.

Ethiopian trees

Many travel writers wax lyrical about forests. Fewer are the lovers of individual trees. But some of my best memories are of trees; a grove of cedars just outside Hemis-Shukpachan, in Ladakh, silent and sacred; the tilleuls de Sully in France, planted by Henri IV's great minister of state, four hundred year old sentinels; a great banyan tree in Phimai, Thailand, which shelters temples and tearooms under its spreading tendrils.

Ethiopia is full of great trees. In Harar, one Muslim shrine is almost entirely swallowed up by a huge tree, the pockmarked green plaster of the shrine held in gnarly root-claws. Almost all Harar's shrines are shaded by a tree; and that's something, I've been told, that applies in Somaliland, too. Trees here have immense power; they are not quite sacred, but they are certainly numinous.

In Gondar, a massive fig tree stands opposite the entrance to the castle. Under it, now, there's a bar, and a billiards table, and benches for sitting in the shade. It is immense, an entire eco-system to itself. It was, my friend informed me, the great tree of the town, the place of the court before the castle was ever built. I drank a beer under it and felt refreshed, inspired by the tree's long history and huge growth.

Later, someone told me it was also the Hanging Tree for Gondar's malefactors, and the first thing the emperor Fasilides did when he came to Gondar was to hang the town's rebellious nobles from its branches.

At both Debre Berhan Selassie church, and Qusquam monastery, the compounds surrounding the churches are full of ancient, high pine trees. The air seems cool and green under their shade, and while tall, turretted walls protect the interior, it's the trees, not the wall, which create the feeling of isolation from the world's busy concerns. At Debre Berhan Selassie, lammergeiers wheeled overhead, and settled in the swaying tops of the highest trees.

Axum has its own great trees, one in the Piazza, and one in Da'Ero Ela; huge, spreading fig trees with benches set out below them, that dominate the open spaces around them. In Piazza, a funeral stopped at the tree, while the priests circumambulated the coffin and chanted; meanwhile, the owner of a little coffee stand started up her brazier, blowing on the charcoal to get it going. In Da'Ero Ela, camels sneered as they passed at the boys playing football there.

But my favourite tree in Ethiopia was not one of these great ancient trees. It was an acacia, I think, thick of trunk but balding on top, overhanging a street in Dire Dawa. Under its stunted shade were two bright umbrellas, and under the umbrellas were bright plastic stools, and a little stove, and two charming ladies, and half the population of the street, or so it seemed; and I sat there, doubly shaded by tree and umbrella, and drank hot, sweet, cinnamon-laden tea.