Lalibela

We love Ethiopia. The coffee is strong and bitter, the injera tibs is our favourite food (unusually it is even better in its home country than in New York), the landscape is beautiful and the people friendly. Unlike what one sees on TV the country is quite fertile. Most people live in the highlands which are cool. The famines which seem to be most people's expectation of the country happen in the eastern lownlands. We spent a few day exploring Addis and getting our car fixed - properly this time - before heading up to the north to see the ancient rock-hewn churches. Lalibela where the greates concentration of these 13th century churches are found publicizes itself as the 8th wonder of the world. It is a fairly remote mountain town which lives up to its publicity. Christianity spread south through Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia around the 5th century AD. It was later largely supplanted by Islam in Egypt and Sudan while Ethiopia - the land of Prester John - hung on to its own version of Christianity. The churches are carved out of the bedrock, many of them from a single piece of rock. They were built over decades, with the exception of one which was supposedly built overnight by a queen with the assistance of angels. She had probably been chewing a lot of khat, the regional stimulant.