For Mom, Love Steve

Okay, the background on the Hyena Men started a long time ago (I forgot my copies of the Lonely Planet to plagiarize.) Apparently there was this wide spread famine which led to both man and animals going hungry. Because of this the Hyenas turned on the people and started preying on them. One man had a vision and the next day he and the towns people created a sort of Porridge which they fed the Hyena and from then on there was an agreement between the two. Even today, there are festivals in which this same porridge is offered to the packs of Hyenas. One of which is used kind of like what we do with the Ground Hogs in the states. If the lead Hyena (usually female) sniffs but does not eat, its a sign of bad times to come. If she eats the whole bowl, that means a famine is coming. If she eats half, that means good times are ahead.

In Harar there are only two of the so called Hyena Men who every night set themselves outside the walls of Harar and call to the Hyenas for their feeding. They are known so intimately that the men know the Hyenas by name and call them individually to feed. Apparently it was featured by one of the major news players so now it is the main draw for Harar. With all that coverage, the Hyena men charge a premium, $50B per person, negotiable. For me that meant screw going to a Hyena feeding as it is now a tourist trap abused by the locals.

Still kind of interested in the Hyenas, I decided one night to take a stroll and to see what all the hubub was about. Basically, all I did is set off around sun down and walked on the road that runs along the outside of the walls. At first it was kind of spooky walking out in the middle of the dark night looking for a Hyena (okay, it doesn’t sound so smart now that I see it in writing, but at the time, it was saving me $50B, it was kind of like when I went Rattlesnake hunting in the tall grass around Millerton Lake carrying a stick and a flashlight, not brilliant, but something you have to do at least once in a lifetime), but I ran into enough people on the way to not worry too much. About half way through I started running into some Hyenas. Actually, they just walked past, pretty much doing their own thing. You can really see the difference because of the spotted coat and the way they scoot along with their hind quarters almost dragging. It took about two hours to walk around the whole thing and I ended up seeing a half dozen of them. It was unfortunately too dark for photos and they scooted past pretty quickly. I just wrote it off as having seen the Hyenas and then I could get on with life.

The next day I ended up moving from the party hotel where I was staying and moving into the tourist hotel. It is the primary tourist hotel because its claim to fame is that at night time some of the rooms look out over a field which the Hyenas roam at night. I ended up getting one of the double priced “Hyena rooms” partially because it was a “Hyena” room, but also because it had an actual sit down toilet, and it was clean. The other hotel I was staying at was pretty much a shit hole so my stress level actually dropped quite a bit moving into the more expensive but clean room.

That night I got to witness the Hyenas coming out and the whole town dog rivalry. Basically, at sundown, the local dogs pack up and get ready to defend the city against the Hyenas. They do this by barking all night long. The Hyenas retaliate by screaming/laughing/howling all night long. It’s pretty interesting the first fifteen minutes but after that it takes a lot of control to not start screaming out the window to shut up. It also would seem kind of retarded as you are paying twice the going rate just to see the thing that is pissing you off.

I had taken a walk down to the field earlier when I saw some waiters out feeding some of the Hyenas. When I walked out there, one walked up to me took a sniff, found out I had no food and walked off. After that, I had a plan.

The next day I ran into a guy named Ben (actually it was something like Binelea-something.) He was from Austria, no not Australia, Austria, home of Mozart, Hitler, Arnold Schwartzenegger and skiing. Anyways, we decided to take a stroll out to the football field to do some up close research on how close you could get to these guys before they ripped your throat out. What we found out was that they were pretty much dogs. When we went out the field was scattered with Hyena bodies all taking naps. We could walk right up to them with out scaring them off. You could tell they were a little bit nervous, but I think that was mostly due to the kids throwing rocks at them, again not much different than the local dogs. I gave Ben the camera to take the first photo just in case the flash freaked them out and switched them into killing mode. Nothing happened so I got a few good photos. My camera is dying so it was having problems auto-focusing in the dark (can’t use my controls anymore so no manual focus.) What we would do is to wake up one of the Hyenas and it would walk a few meters and fall back down to sleep. We would just do this a few times until it was close to the street lamp and then popped off a few. It turned out to be mildly interesting, but definitely not the wild animal experience that it is pumped up to be.

So that’s the Hyenas of Harar on a budget.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 2:59 am and is filed under Ethiopia, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.