Some sunsets just mean more.
Our hike in the Simien Mountains had been a grueling battle before it started, and would be until well after it ended. We had faced down the notorious Debark Transport Mafia (which is another story for another time, and an almost unbelievable one at that); learned to communicate in a certain sense with our Scout, a gun-toting, Amharic-speaking, spry old man in sandals; and walked for most of a day down a rock road through a freezing cloud, mysterious mountain people staring at across field and down from high cliffs, all the while resisting our scout’s insistently frantic attempts to convince us to hitchhike back to the previous camp.
We reached Chenek camp, the end of the trail, and the clouds miraculously parted to reveal a grand vista all around us. We were surrounded by towering cliffs and hanging valleys, with lower cloud still roiling between them. In the distance there were rock formations too various to believe. The layering of the land was stunning: thousands of feet below us there were tiny farming communities on inaccessible plateaus which were themselves thousands of feet about the river valleys below. The utter complexity of the land was astonishing. It felt as though a whole world was visible to us, outlined crisply in the cold mountain air.
We sat down to a much-needed dinner of hot mountain food, but quickly jumped up when we saw that the mountainside behind us had suddenly turned bright orange. Mallika sprinted over the hill and yelled that I needed to come- right now. The sun was making magic with its last few minutes. It was softening the sharp hillsides and bathing them in gold and purple. It was transforming a world that had been so hard to us into one of utter beauty. And though it was gone in just a few minutes, part of us will always still be in that hill, basking in that sunset. The Simiens are a tough place, and it’s very obvious that the people there make hard lives out of the hard earth. But, for a moment, the earth had given a few thousand people and baboons something perfect, and we were lucky enough to be two of them. MH