Author: George Balarezo
Published: 2022
Pages: 242
Buy From: amazon
George Balarezo is an adventurer, university lecturer, engineer, and author who lives in Seoul, South Korea. He went on to cycle across Ethiopia-Africa’s most mountainous country and, as it happens, a repository for the continent’s richest cultural legacy. He’s assaulted daily by stone-hurling children, crashes a wedding party, scales a cliff with Ethiopian Orthodox monks, and sweats it out in the Afar Triangle-with the world’s highest average temperature, it’s earned its nickname of “hell on earth”-and witnesses the miracles of Ethiopian spirituality alongside murderers, cancer patients, and the mentally ill. It is a soul-stirring adventure that tests the limits of his sanity and gifts him invaluable life lessons that he is eager to share.Excerpt: I gazed out the airplane window at the land that would change
me forever. Curves of erosion shot upward, forming beige mountains whose summits sliced through a smattering of cotton-white clouds. At their feet lay an ocean bottom of yellow, which
gradually became dotted with tiny brown homes and paths that
swerved around these mountains with jagged peaks. No green
trees or bodies of water. The winter, bega, of 2019 had sucked the
moisture from the soil, leaving it lifeless and burned. Silver lines
of desiccated rock snaked along the valleys—dried-up streams
that probably meant that most water-dependent life had fled for
wetter lands. Intimidated by my glimpse of the uncompromisingly parched terrain I'd be pedaling through for the next month,
I let out a nervous sigh as goosebumps formed on my arms.
Ethiopia, here I come!
While on the plane, I chatted with a middle-aged man from
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, which was located in the central
part of the country. He had three children on three different con-
tinents with three different women. Our encounter must've been
predestined since my Korean name, Chunsam, means "spring
three times."
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