Susan’s Place

Off to airport for noon flight to Lalibela. Usual two security checks with special bra-pulling and twanging.

Lalibela is bigger than I imagined, sprawling up the sides of hills. The setting is stunning, but driving through the town, the poverty is very noticeable. Small shacks, dirty children, women working on the road building.

Straight out to see the group of 6 northern churches. I’d never expected to be so overwhelmed - I thought we’d walk through streets to see individual churches, but no. We entered a site, got assigned a guide and a shoe-keeper and set off to complex. All 6 are cut into the rock, in a group below ground, with narrow water channels between, or else tunnels in the rock. Some are small, and one had beautiful frescoes. True believers think the churches were built by Lalibela in 33 years around 1181-1221 because when the workers stopped hewing out the rock to sleep, the angels worked all night. The function of the shoe-keeper is to not only look after our shoes, but also help us over the slippy bumpy stoney ground outside the entrances. The churches were not caves, but free-standing, and lit by windows shaped in different crosses like Maltese, Indian etc.

We had a quick turn around and went up to Ben Abeda, or Susan’s Place, a Dali-sequester jumble of walkways and platforms on a hilltop. Susan is an elderly Scottish woman who came out to help in a school after retirement and set it up. She recently featured on a Ben Fogle C5 programme. It was funky and a good place to watch the sun go down. We drank gin, predictably and I wish I’d had more as I have been awake since 4am being depressed by the election results. What a disaster for the country, more years of Tory mismanagement and a bad Brexit to boot.