Readers' World: Ethopia's Old Town is seriously snapworthy

Allen Schultz spends some time photographing the ancient walled city of Harar.

At the end of a three-month working contract in Ethiopia, I decided to spend a few days photographing what I had seen in a magazine - the ancient walled town of Harar, in the eastern region of Oromiya.

Harar is the fourth-oldest religious, walled town in the world after Jerusalem. The town is roughly 1km² in size and there are only five gates in the existing walls. The Amharic dialect - Harari - is, I believe, so unique to Harar that even other Amharic people battle to understand it perfectly.

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The town consists of 365 lanes, called jugal. There are 82 mosques - originally there were 99, from the 99 names of God referred to in the Koran. And the five gates to the city being the five pillars of Islam.

In all of Ethiopia, only about 15% of the people are Muslim. The rest are Christian. Most are extremely poor. They are a very calm and non-confrontational people, very friendly and willing to help at any time - if they could only speak English.

Flying within Ethiopia is cheap - my return to Dira Dawa was only $132. I had to fly for an hour to Dire Dawa and then took a taxi to Harar, about 50km away.

I booked the earliest flight to Dire Dawa in order to maximise my time at Harar, knowing that I had to waste a day on my return to Addis, before my flight back to OR Tambo.

I had asked the taxi driver for the closest hotel to the old town, having learnt not to pre-book on the internet (usually, what is shown in the ads is not what you actually get), then took a short walk to the walled town. Wow! A total of over 500 images captured over the three days will testify to the excitement of this unique photo opportunity.

At Asmaddin Gate is the bread, vegetables and spices market, where the locals all do their daily shopping. I have never seen so many strange spices.

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Then there is the meat market, where youngsters charge tourists about 20 birr (about R11) to throw pieces of scrap meat up into the air for the yellow-billed kites. There must be a dozen well-fed birds either circling or perched nearby.

There are also the butter, cloth and khat markets. There is a market for the churches and mosques, a fruit market and even a raw peanut market. Near the vegetables in one lane at noon (hungry time), I bought some freshly boiled potatoes and some raw salt and ate this on the hoof.

One lane is called Makina Gigir - this is where the tailors are, and they sit in the lane with their ancient Singer sewing machines "girgiring" away. They make, fix and alter everything, even while the customer waits.

Another famous lane is the Magaraw Wiger, the reconciliation or peace lane. This is where you walk with your better half if there's been a tiff - the lane is so narrow that you have to walk very, very close to your partner.

There are a few lanes wide enough for traffic, the usual Bajaj taxis and a few old Peugeot and Fiat motor cars. The old main gate into the town is now a double-lane road through Duke Gate into Main Street.

The Assum Gate has had the wall next to it demolished to allow traffic through - the gate actually has some large steps on the outside.

Then there is the house of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, a timber building he built in 1880, which today is a museum. There are some old black and white photographs of early Harar, along with religious paintings and scripts.

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On Friday night, Testi, my favourite taxi driver, took me to see the hyena man, a local who has for the past nine years been feeding wild hyenas to earn a living from the tourists. He calls them and they appear like magic. He feeds them scraps of raw meat by hand and invites the tourists to do the same. His oldest hyena, Teki, is the boldest. The hyenas then wander off to go scavenging in the streets.

Would I go back? Oh yes, and better prepared too. Doing street photography in a rush is not easy.

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