Lost city found in Ethiopia

by Sean McLachlan on

One of Africa’s most interesting countries has just got a new site to visit.

An ancient Muslim city thought lost for a thousand years has recently been discovered. A team of French archaeologists have found the location of the medieval trading center of Gendebelo.

While Ethiopia is famous for being the second oldest Christian country in the world (after Armenia), about half of the population is Muslim and the two communities have lived side by side for centuries, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

Gendebelo was part of the more peaceful exchange, acting as a focus for trade between the two cultures.

The archaeologists puzzled out the location of the city with the help of an old manuscript that an earlier researcher had found in the Muslim city of Harar, where it was being used for wrapping sugar. The manuscript told the tale of a 16th century Venetian explorer who had found the ruins of Gendebelo in the desert and gave vague references to the city being “the place where mules are to be unloaded and camels take over.”

That was enough for the archaeologists, who realized the explorer meant the escarpment that marks the borderland between the rough highlands and the arid Danakil Depression. It was here that merchants who used mules (the Christians) and those who used camels (the Muslims) met for mutual profit.

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The French team was able to pinpoint the site as being a medieval city now known as Nora. It’s been abandoned for years except for the mosque, which is still used by local farmers. Legends say that in ancient times the people of Nora were so rich that on his wedding day one young man paved the road to his bride’s town with injera bread. Allah grew so angry at this conspicuous consumption that he destroyed the town with a rain of ash.

The ruins of Nora are a bit out of the way for modern travel, but planned excavations will almost certainly reveal some fine remains, and the town may become a new tourist sight. In the meantime, one great Muslim center of civilization, Harar, is still very much in use. The city is in the eastern part of Ethiopia and is considered the fourth holiest sight for Muslims after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The people of Harar are majority Muslim, but there’s a large Christian population too. Both speak Harari, a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew. Jews also used to live in the area, but they fled to Israel and other countries during Ethiopia’s civil war in the 1980s.

Harar was founded more than a thousand years ago and is still enclosed by a city wall, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Besides the walls, there are three mosques dating to the tenth century, and the house of the French poet Rimbaud, who lived here when we was working as a gun runner and hanging out with the local governor, who was the father of Haile Selassie. Another weird sight is the nightly feeding of the hyenas.

Have you been to Ethiopia? Tell us about your experiences in the comments section. I’m taking my wife there for our tenth anniversary and I’m open to suggestions of places to go!

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The Gossip Girl Tour of New York City

by Annie Scott on

Remember when we told you about the Gossip Girl Tour of NYC? Well, as a fan of the show and a New Yorker, I went ahead and took the tour.

It was pouring rain, but undeterred, about 86 of us piled onto a coach for $40 apiece. We were hosted by an adorable redhaired actress named Meghan, who definitely talked the talk and walked the walk, and dressed much like one of the faux Upper East Side denizens. She cheerfully and enthusiastically recounted favorite moments from the show, asked trivia questions, and did a stellar job of keeping track of everybody when we took little trips off the bus to places like Henri Bendel. She pointed out restaurants and bars which were shooting locations, and we walked the grounds of several spots like “Constance Billard School for Girls” (actually The Museum of the City of New York, pictured).

Highlights of the tour included fun tidbits like the fact that the real girls who attend Marymount — across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — really do eat their lunch on the steps of the museum like Blair and Serena, pretty spots in Central Park, shopping at Dylan’s Candy Bar and a shot of agave-based frosting from a trendy bakery on the Lower East Side. For tourists, this tour really does take you all over the city and show you some very cool places to revisit on your stay, from trendy nightclub Butter to famed Ukrainian diner Veselka.

The pack consisted mostly of Gossip Girl-ishly dressed young ladies in their late teens and some parents, and I brought along a non fan with me (he has no particular aversion to the show, he just doesn’t watch it) to see how the uninitiated would handle the tour, as most of my New York friends said they had actually never seen it — would he be bored? Well, the next day he sent me this:

“One of the most compelling parts of the whole tour was the creative and engaging delivery of our host, who made every effort to recant the plotlines while untangling the web of characters and places along the route into a living map of the city and the show its self. While the tour was a bit long at three and three quarters hours, there wasn’t a moment where our host wasn’t actively engaging the attendees. It was a great way to be reintroduced to my city.”

He now considers himself an expert on all things Gossip Girl. The tour even included clips of the show played on video screens at the front of the bus (see gallery).

Lower points for New Yorkers would be photo ops at places like Grand Central where we just felt like we were in the way, but for an out of towner, that’s an important stop. It was a lot of fun, even as a resident, to see the heavenly little havens where shooting takes place — it gave us both a lot of respect for Gossip Girl’s location scouts. Really, you’d be driving down a regular east side street and suddenly there would be a storefront or apartment entryway that looked like a dream — they were almost invariably filming locations.

If you’re not into piling onto a bus with 86 people, you also have the option for a more personal Gossip Girl tour by limo. The tour is $180 per person for a minimum of five people and includes a guided tour and lunch at a restaurant used in filiming the show.

Click here to purchase tickets!
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Bowermaster’s Adventures — Swine Flu and Tokyo

by Jon Bowermaster on

The direct flight from New York to Tokyo is one of the longest, thirteen hours and forty-five minutes, looping across Canada and the Bering Sea before paralleling Kamchatka and the eastern islands of Japan. It’s a long way to travel for humans and viruses alike … though I have to admit I hadn’t thought about the latter until we touched down at Narita International Airport and found among the departure cards we needed to fill out included one labeled “contagion.”

Alex Nicks and I have come to spend a few days filming tuna auctions at Tsujiki, the world’s largest fish market – all under one open air roof are sold four hundred different fish species (700,000 tons sold each year, taking in $5.5 billion a year) and employing 60,000-65,000 wholesalers, accountants, auctioneers, company officials and distributors. The next few days promise to be fun and wild, thanks to the constant whir of all those people focused on the matter at end: selling and buying big fish.

But when we land at Narita, even before we could stand and stretch after the long flight, the plane was boarded by a dozen Japanese men and women cloaked in blue surgical gowns, caps and masks. We were instructed to stay in our seats as one of the insurgents, carrying a portable thermographic imaging gun to detect fevers, pointed in our faces, clicked the trigger and quickly assessed whether or not we were swine flu carriers. As the besmocked team moved aisle by aisle through the plane one of the stewardesses whispered that they recently quarantined eight passengers who arrived on a Northwest flight “for five days.” While I have no idea what that encompasses – locking them in a small airport room, sliding sushi and water under the door? – I’m certainly hoping it doesn’t happen to us.
They are clearly looking for symptoms of flu, including coughs and colds. A week ago three Japanese were quarantined upon arrival in Tokyo after testing positive in preliminary checks. They were a high school teacher in his 40s and two teenage boys who had been on a school trip to Canada where they visited Ontario on a home stay program with about 30 other students, taking part in various programs hosted by a local high school in the town of Oakville. They were isolated upon arrival, on April 24, and are still recovering at a hospital near the airport.

Looking down the aisle as the blue-gowned, therm-armed team does its job I wonder if that’s our fate too? A couple days ago thirty-seven passengers and two flight attendants on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles were detained overnight for similar reasons. They were released after tests revealed that an ill passenger was not contaminated with the new H1N1 influenza A strain, or swine flu.

Cleared after one hour, they gave each of us our very own face mask and sent us on our way. When we finally arrived in downtown Tokyo I spot random individuals on the street wearing white surgical masks. Taxi drivers, worker bees on lunch break. One thing I note is that it’s different here than in China, where many of the half billion city dwellers wear masks every day to keep away heavy airborne particulates created by coal burning, auto exhaust and general, everyday pollution of the air.

In Japan, as neat and orderly a country as you can find, it appears they are concerned only about swine flu. Stopping into a drugstore I ask the manager how the sales of masks are going and he says “about 50 percent higher than usual and we are running out …. If this keeps up, it’s going to be a very, very good year.” I think he was talking about his pharmacy’s bottom line.

Listen to Times Online’s eco-holiday discussion today!

by Brenda Yun on

The Times (UK) is launching a new series of online chats with a discussion on green travel this morning at 8 a.m. EST (1 p.m. London time). Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith, co-authors of ‘Clean Breaks’ the new Rough Guide to eco-friendly holidays, will answer questions on green travel.

Richard Hammond, the founder of www.greentraveller.co.uk and the co-author of Clean Breaks – 500 new ways to see the world’ will answer questions and recommend fun holidays that tick the right green boxes. Hammond also wrote an article about 10 green trips for The Times last week, which was based on his Clean Breaks book. He wrote a second article for Times Online on the ‘opposition’ – his five favourite green travel guidebooks.

Jeremy Smith, the former Editor of The Ecologist and co-author of ‘Clean Breaks’ will also be on hand to give advice. They will be joined by Steve Keenan, Times Online Travel Editor and Ginny McGrath, Times Online Assistant Editor.

To join the discussion, go to http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/green_travel/article6741434.ece.

Road trip through Namibia

by Kraig Becker on

The travel section of the Times Online has a great article today about a 3000-mile road trip across Namibia, the south African country that falls along that continents Atlantic coast. The 15-day journey sent author Holden Frith across stark, yet strikingly beautiful, landscapes in a country that has wide open spaces and remote regions that few visit.

The article offers a long, and very detailed look, at Firth’s journey. He breaks down his travels on a day-to-day basis, and gives an excellent description of not only where he’s been, but the people he encountered and the amazing things that he, and his traveling companion, saw along the way. For instance, in the first few days in the country, they visited a region known as the Giant’s Playground, where strange rock formations stretch for miles, and appear to have been stacked up by some unknown force. From there, the journey continues through such places as Fish River Canyon, one of the wildest and deepest gorges in the world, and past the Sperrgebiet, or Forbidden Zone, which is off limits to tourists because of the number of diamonds that can still be found there.

Each passing day of the road trip seems to reveal some new, and intriguing, location that gives us a glimpse of Namibia’s appeal to adventure travelers. Whether it’s exploring the remote and arid Namib Desert or driving the Skeleton Coast, so named for the ancient shipwrecks that litter its beaches, the country offers hidden wonders at every turn. And while the majority of travelers to Africa head to Kenya or South Africa to go on a classic safari adventure, Namibia has plenty of unique experiences of its own, and since it remains squarely off the radar for most travelers, there aren’t the crowds that are common elsewhere.