Horse Trekking in Bale Mountains

Horse Trekking in Bale Mountains

May 19, 2022 

I have always been fascinated by the idea of a long riding trip through wide open spaces…I don’t know why. Maybe childhood readings of Karl May, maybe the westerns movies…But most of my life I didn’t ride horses, it was a difficult thing to do during communism, and I mostly hiked on foot through mountains, eithr for pleasure or as a field geologist. 

Through a happy conjecture, Ethiopia offered me the ingredients to fulfill the boyhood dream…Riding has become my hobby for several years now, since Ana, who loves horses, convinced me to let her learn to ride. In Brasilia we both joined a club and learned to ride with excellent trainers! We kept it up and long trail rides are our favorite hobby, whether in Romania, at the Shagya Arab club near Targovishte, or here in Ethiopia, where we have our horses at the club of the Italian Embassy and ride the trails in the hills and forests that surround Addis Ababa. Researching about Ethiopian get-aways I happened upon an article on Bale Mountains National Park and the natural wonders it shelters – the endemic animals the amazing landscapes and its'…yes: WIDE OPEN SPACES… 

Putting the two together wasn’t even a conscious decision, I just knew I wanted to do it and Ana went along enthusiastically when I mentioned it. She leads a school project called “Wild Ethiopia” a book where the fauna of the Bale Mountains figures prominently. It was just as natural to approach my friend Frank Chapman who owns a tourist company specializing in hiking trips throughout Ethiopia and is also an enthusiastic polo player and owns his own string of polo ponies. He was very helpful, and we quickly set up the trip. We decided on the Easter weekend when Ana had a short holiday, and that we had to bring our own saddles (the Ethiopian saddles are very uncomfortable) and it remained for his local guys to find good horses. This was for me a major point. I am a heavy guy and I need a strong, well-fed horse while Ethiopians tend to starve their horses. After some back and forth we decided on a four /five-day itinerary and that was it! Packing wasn’t as easy as we thought. Temperatures vary a lot, from the higher 20s to below freezing at over 4,000 m and we can expect rains every day. And of course, as we are set to observe wildlife, we cannot wear flashy colors. Some old warm parkas were packed “just in case” and they proved lifesaving. Doina insisted we take some spare ponchos and again, they came in really useful. I couldn’t take my excellent Steiner binoculars or the satellite phone as they are considered military equipment are totally forbidden as the country is still nominally at war. I was really upset about this because Ethiopia is not a very safe country and we wanted to have some means of communication in case of trouble. Even if the security assessment said the area was ok, trouble can flare up anytime anywhere in this country. 

After an uneventful flight over the Rift Valley we land at Gobe airport which is in…Robe, some 10 km from Gobe 😃. The airport boasts two plywood barracks (one for arrivals and one for departures) and two porters with wheelbarrows which for 100 birr take your bags all the way to the parking area, just another empty field. Jaffar, our guide is there to meet us. He is one of those thin, ageless Oromos, not very talkative, with an intelligible English even if not fluent. We cram our bags and backpacks in an old Toyota and we start. The poor car is terribly persecuted…To start the misguided driver hits the battery with a hammer and then quickly runs to turn the key…it cannot make more than 40kmh or it breaks apart wobbling drunkenly on unbalanced wheels…it is a minor miracle we make it all the way to the Sanetti plateau. Bale Mountains represent the eastern edge of the African rift and are made mostly of volcanic rocks, sculpted by glaciers and differential erosion. This explains the amazing geomorphology of this area. Our trip takes us each day thorough a different type of landscape. That first day, we drive from the plateau down to around 2000 m to see a scenic waterfall in a tropical forest, with monkeys and lianas and one of the few villages allowed in the park. It is obviously a poor village, with small lots of barley or vegetables but it is unusually scenic, with woven bamboo fences and round houses – tukuls , with traditional thatched roofs. A much more picturesque village than the usual landscape: the ubiquitous unpainted galvanized metal sheets slightly rusty (more expensive but longer lasting than thatch) that seem to conquer the architectural space of Ethiopia making most of its villages some of the ugliest I’ve seen… 

Picture: Giant mole rat

From the sweltering tropical forest we climb back to the Sanetti Camp, in a freezing rain, where we spend the first night. The Sanetti Plateau, with heights between 4000 to 4300 and over 40 km long is the highest and longest plateau in Africa. It is covered by a very thin layer of soil, with a scrubby type of vegetation of wild wormwood and Cape gold and other everlasting flowers such as St John’s Wort, a shrub with yellow flowers. The soil is also home to countless mice and the endemic giant mole rats which in turn help maintain a population of Ethiopian wolves. Once expected to disappear, the wolves are making a slow comeback, with a population estimated at 700 individuals. From the car we see several of them. They are not very afraid of humans and allow us to watch them as they play and hunt mice. A white breasted eagle competes with the wolves for mice. In the puddles swim slowly the majestic blue winged geese. And that night, as we were ready to get in the tent for the night I see a hare...leisurely making its way through the camp. 

The first night is bad! It started raining and it is freezing. After a vegetarian dinner and a sip of bourbon, Ana and I play cards in the shelter of the Sanetti research station which boasts solar panels and therefore light…At around 9.00, when the rain calms down a little and bored with cards we go to bed in the minuscule tent provided by Mark’s company. I wait outside in the freezing wind and rain while first goes in Ana who lays on the ground the saddle blankets and the mattresses and then gets in the sleeping bag I hated during my Kilimanjaro trip (because it’s just a Procrustean torture instrument that doesn’t allow me to zip it unless I cut a good haunch off my shoulders). I then get in and wriggle in the sleeping bag I use now, and that is not much better. It is a bit wider, and Ana manages to zip it for me, but it is thinner, and I spend the first part of the night shivering until the atmosphere in the tent warms up a bit. It’s the only advantage of this awfully small tent! With my considerable size I have a hard time getting in and just ”filling the space” without crowding poor Ana. Much later Ana told me that first night was a torture for her, caught between my snoring, an urge to pee and the terror of the freezing cold. She decided to do nothing and just endure … Our guide, cook and 2 porters are Muslims, and it is Ramadan. So, at around 4.30 I hear the first murmurs of their prayers and breakfast (Suhur) and at 5.00 I get up for a cup of hot coffee and a wash at the surprisingly clean latrine of the camp. I wake up Ana at six with a hot tea and hot water for a wash, and after a very good breakfast we get busy to arrange the equipment. 

We meet our horses, and we saddle them. Our porters have never seen English or Western saddles and our horses neither. The Ethiopian saddles even with pillows and furs on them don’t have the spring and the elasticity of a good English saddle. We have brought ours from Romania and I didn’t spare the money. If you know how to ride, and you have the muscle memory that makes you move in harmony with the horse, then a good saddle is all you need to save you from back and spine pain, sore buttocks, stiff legs, etc. We rode each day for four to six hours and we never had a problem. Our horses are, of course, the local Ethiopian breed and they deserve a few words. These are small horses, rather ugly, with a big unsightly head, fairly short legs. They can be temperamental and are not affectionate and they don’t like people – and they are mostly right about that. But at the same time, they have to a large degree those special qualities that mountain horses share all over the world. Incredibly strong, with inexhaustible stamina, very sure footed and with a good judgement of the terrain. They will select the best path if faced with multiple choices and they have a sixth sense that tells them when the ground will break under their small hoofs, either because of the extensive burrows of the mole rats , or because they step on a dry crust of mud that cover and hides deep holes. They would always stop trotting or cantering and start walking in these areas, and sure enough, they would start falling into holes that at a fast pace would have broken their legs. My horse is a roan stallion called Dama and Ana’s is a dirty white stallion called Dirty White. The Oromos don’t actually give personalized names to their horses, they call them by their color. Ana’s horse is, in her description a “misogynistic SOB who wants only his own way!” Mine is strong and quiet and good tempered, he answers to light touches, and we are good together. Even so, I manage to fall off him several times which I generally don’t do! 

Unlike horses all over the world, which are saddled and mounted from the left , the Ethiopian horses are mounted from the right. We leave the camp at 8.30 am and we do that every day. It’s a cold, foggy morning with visibility 10 sometimes maybe 50 meters. We wear our warm parkas, wool hats, scarves, canvas hats, gloves and it is still cold but riding fast on the trail warms us up. Not much landscape to admire…I console Ana telling her that in one of my mountain hikes I had fog about 60% of the time and missed all scenic points…After 30 minutes, riding along well defined trails we stop. Through the fog that has lifted somewhat we see the Gebre Guracha lake and a camp. A beautiful, glacier lake, that reminds me a bit of Bucura lake, in the Carpathians. I take a beautiful photo of Ana, mounted, with the lake in the background. 

We descend in a wide, U shaped valley, a morphology characteristic of glacier landscape, which is funny, here in Africa. We disturb a group of hares, busy mating I suppose, and followed by a red Ethiopian wolf who was probably laying in wait to get an amorous hare. We climb up out of the valley and reach again the plateau. The rest of the day, we ride through this monotonous landscape, a wide open plain, covered in shrubs, with burrows of mole-rats every other step. Augur Buzzards and falcons, sometimes golden eagles can be seen on a higher outcrop, watching carefully if a rat dares to leave the hole for a walk... From time to time out of the scrubby vegetation rise the columns of spectacular Giant Lobella with their thousands of flowers and seeds. We go at a walk, careful. From time to time we see small herds of horses or cattle, alone, I suppose semi wild. 

There is little danger here of overgrazing and of cattle chasing out wildlife as it happens in most of the parks in sub-Saharan Africa. There are few cattle in this inhospitable land and not many grazing antelopes. They will stay mostly lower down, where the grass is more succulent and plentiful. This is the realm of the mole rat and of the Ethiopian wolf. We don’t follow trails, we just ride in the general direction of the next camp, Rafo. At noon we stop for a lunch and a nap quickly interrupted when I smell rain. Jaffar was already getting the horses and we quickly start riding looking at the approaching rain. We trot and even canter as much as we can without risking the legs of the horses and arrive at Rafo in the nick of time! Our porters, taking a shortcut, had arrived a few minutes earlier with the pack horses and our tent is already up when the rain catches us. The camp is down from the edge of the plateau, among huge outcrops of volcanic rocks sculpted by erosion in amazing shapes. It looks like giant children with great imagination played with the lava like plasticine. 

In a bowl where rounded outcrops come out of succulent grass, a few dirty tukuls mark the Rafo camp. It is more of a sheepfold. The weather doesn’t help us. It’s a miserable rainy afternoon, made bearable by a wonderful view of a canyon at our feet, and a fire in a small dirty tukul where our cook is making directly on the dirt floor some interesting dishes out of rice and vegetables. Very good cook in fact. I lost quite some weight during the trip without ever being hungry. That evening, in a break of the rain I ask Jaffar to take me to “the spot” or the “phone booth”. A 30 minute walk from camp, there are a few square meters, where if one climbs some rocks, by some fluke there is enough GSM coverage to send an SMS. I even manage to talk to Doina who was a bit worried after 36 hours without news. We are about 400 m lower in elevation here, at about 3,900 m, sheltered from the wind and the difference in temperature is significant! It isn’t freezing and in addition Jaffar finds two extra sleeping bags. And what bags! Filled with down, comfortable, and my shoulders fit in!! It is still a miserable, wet night, it rains most of the afternoon and night but at least I don’t shiver half the night. We play cards, gin rummy and macao and I keep winning, sorry, Ana! Next morning, Easter Sunday! But with only us Christians in this team, and Orthodox ones at that with a different calendar, it doesn’t really register! After a quick breakfast we take our horses by the bridle, and we climb up among the fantastic stone figures until we reach the plateau again. Our target today is Sodota Camp about 25 km away. We follow faint trails that skirt the edge of the plateau and go up and down the upper watersheds of creeks and rivers that flow ultimately towards the Web valley. It is a glacier landscape with the typical steep walls and flat-bottomed valley bed, like a canyon. 

We sometimes ride up and down very steep trails but the horses managed very well. At one point we skirt around a steep peak shaped like a cone, Mt. Wassame, at the watershed of the Muraro valley. We descend carefully along a small gully, sometimes leading our horses, until we reach the valley bottom and we transition to a different landscape and different vegetation. Tall Erika bushes, even trees grow among some lush grass that makes for a great pastureland and we see tracks of cattle. From time to time we see tukuls, or temporary shepherd’s shelters and small herds of cattle, driven by mounted Oromo cowboys. 

And it’s not the movies… Riding down the valley we also meet another, in fact the only other tourist we see during this trip. Even more original than us, Pierre, a teacher at the French high school in Addis, is doing the crossing of the Bale Mountains on a mountain bike! His guide is riding a horse in front of him. We don’t talk a lot when we meet now but we meet again in Gobe in the hotel. He also had a good a trip and biking was not too hard – according to him. But he seems to me to be in top shape, so don’t hurry there with a bike! We reach Sodota camp half an hour before the rain starts in earnest, dampening our exhilaration at a great day. The camp is at the junction between Muraro and Web Valleys. We are lucky that we can shelter in a hut, a refuge of the Frankfurt Zoological Society similar to the one at Sanetti camp. Its real luxury after the cramped humid tent. The card games are interrupted by passages I read aloud from Garcia Marquez to Ana, part of a school assignment. In the morning the sky is cloudy but no fog, it’s pretty clear, so we start after an early breakfast. Our next target is Addeley camp in the Harissa Forest and we travel all along the Web valley to get there, about 20 km. The Web valley offers us another landscape again. It is a wide, rolling, hilly area, with small creeks criss-crossing it, it’s like another relief within a relief. We ride through the open range sometimes following a trail, mostly just aiming towards some reference points known only to Jaffar, because he leads us unerringly to the best points to cross a ridge or a steep creek. Some ten minutes in our ride we see an Ethiopian wolf disappearing behind some bushes. We follow him and find him again. 

He is hunting mole rats. He jumps with all four feet in the air, and he darts from one hole to another concentrated on his hunt, not bothered in the least by our presence, although we are only about 10 – 15 m away. Jaffar points out he has a red and a yellow crotale in his ear, meaning he has been vaccinated twice. The faint trail we follow leads us to a waterfall and then, on the western slope of the valley, up and down smallish ridges, through pasture land. We disturb a large group of Hyrax at one point and they scramble up some rocks and hide. I see a few tukuls or shelters of the pastoralists and I know this is frowned upon by the naturalists and park officials. Jaffar is not very loquacious and I have to drag it out of him that the pressure of the population to graze in the area is very high and that park officials try to keep a certain control but…it’s a losing battle. I take a fall here. Upset with the backpack who gives me an unpleasant sensation I dismount to take it off. I forget (again) that Ethiopian horses are to be managed and mounted only from the right side and after I pass the backpack to Ana I try to mount from the left like all the other horses in the world. Dama is not a skittish horse but still…He jumps, my stirrup comes undone from the saddle and I take a hard fall exactly on the right shoulder which is already painful from a bike fall a couple of months ago…Not good for my shoulder and not good for my temper, for the next 10 km or so I am “a grumpy old man” and chastise poor Ana for wanting a backpack, Jaffar for riding too far ahead, the Ethiopians for doing everything different from the rest of the world! Can you imagine, they even have a different date and a different time, even! May 18, 2022, 14.00, universal calendar is actually May 10, 2014, 08.00 in Ethiopia…quite confusing at times!! 

The rain comes and dampens my temper…After we ride about an hour in the rain, we dismount and start leading the horses on a muddy, slippery track through the forest. I only realize later we have arrived at the Harissa forest as we cross the Erika belt, a wide area where the Erika bush actually grows into a tree and a forest. Slipping in the mud, still raining, we come out into a large clearing. And in the middle of the clearing, grazing peacefully, a small herd of Mountain Nyalas (a type of antelope endemic to Ethiopia)…Magnificent animals!!! I forget about being wet, muddy and with a throbbing shoulder…I contemplate the amazing sight and I also realize we have arrived at the Addeley camp. As we approach the camp caretakers take our horses to a paddock and show us to a shelter where a fire is smoldering. As we begin to unwind our porters arrive and build up the fire as everybody needs to dry out. I admire Ana, who doesn’t complain, just looks for place to get warm without becoming smoked meat! Addeley camp boasts a couple of large A-frames where tourists are supposed to set their tents and have a sheltered area to cook and wash and sit. We examine them to chose one for our tent. In the first, a group of baboons jumps up and runs away, but even if cleared of their clandestine occupants it’s clear it cannot be used, the ground is all squirmed away. The next one is worse…a warthog comes out running from a one of those deep holes where they make their burrows…the whole thing is ruined! So …back to wet grass, in the rain…and not a shovel in sight to dig a trench around the tent… Looking through the blurry binoculars Jaffa carries I see a wonderful male nyala. 

The male nyala’s have a characteristic mask in white and black and grey that gives them a grave expression. Ana takes her camera and goes photo hunting and comes back with amazing pictures of the nyala mating. It’s another wet night as it rains intermittently and water seeps inside the tent and wets the mattresses and sleeping bags but still, we manage to get a rest. At 4.30 as I hear the porters and Jaffar praying. I wake up and go and get a fresh hot coffee. This is a last, short day as we plan to ride to Dinshaw and from there to go to a hotel rather than spend another wet night. The ride through Harissa forest is simply amazing. It is Eden’s garden. We move slowly and most of the time we lead the horses on muddy, steep, slippery tracks and we meet and see game. I have never seen such a density of fauna. Maybe in Yala, in Sri Lanka but under different conditions. Here, every couple of minutes we meet an animal, almost face to face. We see a jackal crossing our path, a few steps further a Menelick Bushbuck…as soon as he disappears around the corner of a clearing a group of duikers scrams in the dense Erika bushes…And then a minute later we meet face to face with a group of warthogs, with many young ones…they look at us for some time to understand what it is they see (we were mounted) and they judge it better to retreat. Just a few steps further a huge nyala male looks calmly at us.

 We pass slowly in front of him as if on parade just to meet a large group of baboons…And the whole morning nearly is like this. As we come out of the forest we see in the distance the highway leading into Dinshaw. In spite of the light drizzle, the road is full of people, most of them mounted on horses and cars going to the market. And amazingly, the Animal Show continues. Out of the bushes growing in the pastures through which we ride come out other Nyalas, other warthogs, other duikers up to the very edge of the village. Just AMAZING!! 

It is time to say good-bye. The “almost dying” Toyota is on the road waiting for us and we load it up with our gear. I say a fond farewell to Dama, my strong, good horse. If I wouldn’t have a great horse in Addis Ababa I would have bought him. I generously tip Jaffar, the cook and the porters who have done a great job in difficult circumstances, always ready, always smiling, and helpful. And with that, regretfully, we left the wide open spaces, the rolling hills, the beautiful forest, the red wolves, the masked nyalas, the sense of freedom, the swing of the horses under us and stepped back into civilization.