BLUE NILE FALLS, Ethiopia - The Blue Nile
brought me to Africa in 1973. To locate its source -- Quaerere caput
Nili -- had been the hope of many great captains and geographers of
the classical age: Herodotus, Cyrus and Cambyses of Persia, Alexander
the Great, Julius Caesar, Nero. The first Briton to make his way to the
source, perhaps in search of the Ark of Covenant, was the Scot James
Bruce. I had been enthralled by the writings of Bruce and of Alan
Moorehead, whose book "The Blue Nile" swept me into a world
beyond the pages of "National Geographic". I started a
correspondence with Moorehead, who lived in Switzerland in the late
1960s, and before he died he sent me a note urging me to travel to
Ethiopia to see firsthand the stories he had told.
So, in 1973 I made my way to the Ethiopian highlands and the Blue Nile,
and found myself standing on a mist-swept palisade transfixed by the
150-foot-high Tissisat Falls (smoke of fire), more popularly known as
the Blue Nile Falls. They were the most glorious display of falling
water I had ever seen.
James Bruce, in his search for the source of
the Nile, came upon the falls in 1770 and described it thusly: �The
river ... fell in one sheet of water, without any interval, above half
an English mile in breadth, with a force and a noise that was truly
terrible, and which stunned and made me, for a time, perfectly dizzy. A
thick fume, or haze, covered the fall all around, and hung over the
course of the stream both above and below, marking its track, though the
water was not seen. ... It was a most magnificent sight, that ages,
added to the greatest length of human life, would not deface or
eradicate from my memory.�
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Deirdre Allen Timmons
Ethiopia's water authority briefly restored the flow of the
Blue Nile Falls so that an IMAX film crew, its post seen at
forefront, could film the area.
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When I first stood before the immense manitou of the Blue Nile Falls,
watching the water spout and bloom like gargantuan brown mushrooms and
the mist shape and move like a timelapse sequence of clouds, I was
struck by how accurate Bruce had been and how little the sight had
changed in more than 200 years. The other great waterfalls of the world
-- Niagara, Iguazu, Victoria --are all now pocked with hotels and
tourist boutiques and scenic flights. At the Blue Nile Falls, however,
there was nothing save the raw, deep voice of nature and an architecture
supported by the brilliant beams of rainbows. I had no reason to
consider they might ever change.
Return for IMAX film
My return to The Blue Nile this year was pulled into motion
with a call from MacGillivray Freeman Films, the IMAX film producer of
"To Fly," "Everest" and others. The company was
co-producing a new IMAX entitled, "Mystery of the Nile". The
concept of the film was tracing the waters that slake and fertilize
Egypt from the headwaters of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, through the
Sudan, across Egypt and into the Mediterranean at Alexandria. While the
White Nile is the longer of the two streams that join in Khartoum to
create the Nile proper, it is the Blue Nile that contributes about 85
percent of the water that powers Egypt, and most of the precious silt
that nourishes its banks. If the Blue Nile dried up, or was dammed or
diverted in a significant way, Egypt would die.
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The IMAX film planned on featuring several key scenes at the Blue Nile
Falls, the grandest cataract in the whole of the Nile system, and the
producers asked if I would codirect. So, in October, during a scout for
the film, I chartered a Cessna and winged up the Blue Nile towards the
falls. As we wound up the brown, serpentine ribbon, I was anxious to
figure out how to film the falls in the IMAX format in a way that would
do them justice.
But anxiety turned to anticipation as we
approached. Early October was the best time to see the falls, just after
the rains, and I knew I was in for an aerial treat.
But as I gazed downwards something was wrong
� the falls were but a shadow of how I remembered them � instead of
a blazing curtain of water half a mile wide, only about a third of the
basaltic lip hosted water. The rest, it seemed, was rolling down a giant
canal to the west of the river, into a massive concrete spillway. What
had happened to the great falls? The plane circled with my nose pressed
against the window, stunned at the sight.
I spent the next two days meeting with local
officials securing permissions for the shoot. When I finally made my way
down to Tissisat it was Sunday, and the falls were as I remembered, a
plunging diadem of water slinging mist into my face.
The scenes envisioned for the film included
lowering rafts over the wall of the falls, rappelling down its side, and
sending over a �ghost boat,� an unmanned, unrigged raft, as the
British Army had done in 1968 during an attempted descent of the river.
The falls were full enough to make this all happen, but I was curious as
to why a few days earlier the falls seemed to be a fraction of this
Sunday�s volume.
Flow diverted by hydropower project
Yohannes Assefa, our local outfitter for the project, did
some digging around and said that a new $63 million, 450 megawatt power
generating station called Tis Abay II was just gearing up, diverting
water on weekdays, but not yet on Sundays and holidays when there was
less demand for the power. This news was disturbing.
More than 90 percent of energy consumed in Ethiopia is derived from
biomass fuels and is almost entirely used for cooking, and the use of
these fuels has resulted in massive deforestation and soil erosion. Only 4
percent of the population has access to electricity. Yet Ethiopia, which
sits atop a mile and half high plateau, has huge rivers and canyons
hurtling off all sides, offering vast hydropower potential. But the only
reason to compromise the Blue Nile Falls, one of the great natural
wonders of the world, would be to tap into power cheaper and faster. An
hour flight in any direction reveals scores of deep gorge alternatives.
I didn�t quite believe it, and when back in
the United States Googled the Web and searched to see if there were
any further explanations. But I could find nothing ... just a slew of
travel companies offering tours to see the singularly splendid falls in
the coming weeks, the traditional high season.
Fearing the worst, though, I scheduled the
falls scenes for Sunday for when we returned a month later. But when we
arrived mid-November, a week prior to the shoot to make final
arrangements, I was shocked beyond shock. It was the Sunday before the
scheduled shoot when I walked up the familiar path to the palisade
overlook of the falls and saw almost nothing there. A thin ribbon of
water scraped down the cheek of the dark cliff that once was a
breathtaking spectacle, and an icon for the Ethiopia.
The country�s paper currency, the one birr
note, proudly showcases the falls in spate; posters of the falls plaster
offices and restaurants around the country. Yet the falls were gone, 90
percent diverted into this new power scheme built by Chinese and
Serbian contractors. The river was redeposited a few hundred yards
downstream after pouring through penstocks and turbines, but it had left
the great falls bald and sallow.
Impact on locals, tourists
This seemed a crime against nature, against aesthetic sensibilities,
even against local economies. The village women and children who sold
calabashes, weavings, sodas, trinkets and walking sticks to tourists
complained to me how their livelihood was suffering. Tana fishermen
carped that the lake was being drained to keep diversion flows steady,
and lower lake levels were exposing fish hatcheries, reducing the fish
population.
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Deirdre Allen Timmons
Surprised locals watch the restored, albeit temporarily, flow
from the Blue Nile Falls.
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Back at the hotel I kept running into angry Western tourists who had
spent hundreds of dollars and sometimes hours of flying to witness the
Blue Nile Falls at their best and now felt snookered. Tourism, which had
dropped to a trickle under the radical socialist regime of Mengistu
Haile Mariam in the 80s, had been coming back under the new
administration of Meles Zenawi, and the Blue Nile Falls was a top draw.
But no more. Before constructing the diversion dam, the Ethiopian
government hired consulting firms from France and Britain for the
feasibility study. The study concluded that, unlike other hydropower
projects with big dams, Tis Abay II would have �negligible
impact on the environment, and that it would be economically very
attractive for investment.� Somehow, though, the project sailed to
completion without the cognizance of any international environmental
watchdog group, or any journalists. This was the first season the
diversion project had been put into full effect, and the first time
tourists were discovering that what they had come to see had vanished,
gone with manmade legerdemain.
And it put the film in a dilemma. The conceit
was more about the historical aspects of the water that flowed to and
fed Egypt, though it imagined the spectacular falls and scenes of modern
adventurers recreating some of what the British army had done. The film
could change its concept and take an environmental stance, exposing the
stealing of the falls by short-sighted, power-hungry bureaucrats. But
the falls were just plain ugly in their current state, not an IMAX
moment, which is a scene of preternatural beauty shown in
high-definition large format. So, we devised another solution. We called
the vice minister of water resources and explained our film and its
purpose. And after much negotiating he agreed to close the dam for us
for four hours to film the falls in full.
We spent the week filming the rapids above the
falls as planed. At one point, though, our team was arrested and the
boats confiscated as we floated down a 400 yard section of the river
about 20 miles above the falls where the Blue Nile has yet another
recent diversion, a low height weir that allows regulation of the water
flow from Lake Tana, its source. A few hours after appealing to
the local police commissioner, everyone and everything was released, but
again we had stumbled into a little-known scheme that was altering the
balance of nature.
Falls turned back on, briefly
At last, on the given day, we gathered at the falls, and watched it rise
to its previous levels. It was as breathtaking as it had ever been. We
filmed our scenes of rappelling, roping boats over, and pitching an
empty raft down the plunge, all fantastic, but somehow tinged with
melancholy, knowing it was not quite real. Some lucky tourists wandered
over to the viewpoints and were delighted with the falls, not knowing
what they were beholding was a scene not available in a few hours time.
A few days later we wrapped the Ethiopian
portion of the film, and I boarded the Ethiopian Airlines flight back to
Addis Ababa, the capital, where I would connect with an international
flight home. As we took off, the pilot circled over the falls, as he had
done for years to show off his country�s greatest natural asset to the
tourists on board. But as he dipped his wings, and I looked straight
down to the where the Nile makes its greatest plunge, there was nothing
there. Just a cold, gloomy empty cliff.
The second chapter of the book of Genesis
refers to the rivers that flow through the Garden of Eden: �And the
name of the second river is Ghion; the same is it that compasseth the
whole land of Ethiopia.� The Blue Nile, sweeping out from Lake Tana in
a wide loop, does indeed encompass the ancient land of Ethiopia. Though
today the fountain of this paradise is turned off, and the garden of
grasses, reeds, leaves, and lush trees and plants once showered with a
perpetual spray from the falls, are now brown and dry, edenic no more.
Richard Bangs co-directed "Mystery of
the Nile," scheduled for release in the fall of 2005, and was
recently editor-at-large for Expedia.com. He also is co-founder of
Mountain Travel-Sobek, and author of 13 books. His latest is
�Adventure Without End.�
