Annemarie:
My image of Africa before I left the UK was probably of largely hot, dry grassland and thorn bush, punctuated by Acacia trees and perhaps alternating with some Gorilla Mist style landscapes and dense equatorial forests frequented by Attenborough and his peers looking under rocks and plants to “take a glance at those fancy ants.” Yes, you can tell the films I’ve seen by this hopeless list. So, I didn’t predict dahlias and arum lilies, or fuschias and sunflowers, but they’re here. And as we move from the hills and mountains of northern Kenya into the barren black volcanic rock landscape of southern Ethiopia we travel through a huge range of other variations. I try hard to capture them and some of the people we see from the car window as we move. It’s a bit like fishing really, I set a fast film and shutter speed, select ‘burst’ mode and open the window when things start to look interesting and just shoot. I’m not very good. Often as not I get a great picture of a very boring shop-front or a bush, missing the goat herder and his charges or the children playing in the river, but now and then I get lucky. The pictures here show some of our journey north – from fields of golden barley and distant hazy blue Mount Kenya, to scrubby thorn bush, volcanic ‘plugs’ and dark rocks; from shops and huts with red mud walls and pointed straw roofs to homes with painted walls and roofs of grain bags, fertiliser sacks and swathes of bright fabric in huge domes, bound down with rope and thin branches. Camels appear in their hundreds between the herds of thin cows and goats. We see whole families of donkeys being driven down the road and sometimes just running along on their own. And then we arrive for our first night in what feels very much like a wild west border town: Yabello and this is it, this is Ethiopia.
