"Everybody must get stoned."
- Bob Dylan

Say Ethiopia to me and I would have thought of Bob Geldof and speedy runners. After two weeks in the country those thoughts are still prominent.

Cycling through Ethiopia involves a crowd of up to 40 children running alongside you for a couple of kilometres after every village. At the same time they keep up a relentless shout of "YOU! YOU! YOU! YOU! YOU!" and "MONEY! MONEY! MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY!" Decades of foreign aid (epitomised by Geldof's impressive efforts) have produced a knee-jerk reaction in this nation: if you are white you are rich, therefore give me money. As I pass by they express their disappointment by hurling stones at me.

I am no longer a person, I am a mobile cash point. Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere.

The change from Sudan is drastic. It is not only cultural and behavioural, the dress of the people changes too. From flowing white galabeyahs and colourful draped robes to ragged mohican-haired children with necklaces of old keys, nuts, bolts, shells and whatever else they have found lying around. The men wear very skimpy shorts and tattered t-shirts, usually beneath a blanket gracefully wrapped over the shoulders. With a shortage of public transport the roads are busy with people walking. Women walk shaded beneath umbrellas, a strange sight. Men usually carry a stout staff across their shoulders as they walk. Barefoot people and donkeys vastly outnumber fume-spewing rattling vehicles. This is by far the poorest nation I have ever visited.

Poverty and the issue of money hang constantly in the atmosphere. Larger towns are busy with beggars suffering every variety of physical disability, skin ailment, disfigurement, disease and blindness imaginable. Most could easily be helped with basic medical treatment. There is a never-ending circle of people around me pleading for money. There are a lot of issues I am struggling to get my head round here. It is very, very difficult.

A man finds it very hard to believe that there are homeless people and beggars in England. However, he absolutely refuses to believe me when I tell him that many of them are white. Impossible, he declares.

Apart from the 'give-me money' consequences of foreign aid, the worst impact seems to have been on the dress sense of the population. In each village are large numbers of people sporting dreadful Titanic T-shirts emblazoned with Leonardo di Caprio and his irritating "please punch here" smile.

As I greet people the tradition seems to be to bow your head at the same time. My cheery greeting to a chap on a bicycle almost ends in disaster as (rattling fast and brake-less down a steep rocky track) he bows low and almost nose-ploughs into the gravel. I resolve to be more selective with my salutations in future.

The roads are awful, the mountains are huge, and the kids are almost unbearable. I am sick of this lonely, hard, exhausting, boring life. I almost cannot go on. I sit in the dirt, head in hands just wishing that the 80 staring faces (I counted them) would please, please give me a metre of space or a second of peace. Please go away. Beneath my sunglasses the tears flow again. The crowd stands and stares. I feel very alone.

I spend the night with a kind teacher. His English is excellent and he tells me of his work. He teaches Grades 1 to 4, has 150 students in each class with no textbooks or blackboard. The students in each class range in age between 8 and 30 years old (in the UK, Grade One kids are 4 or 5 years old). Many walk 20km to school every day. It makes me wonder what on earth I thought was hard about my PGCE teacher-training course last year! Oh yes, the government has not paid his $90 monthly salary for the past three months either.

The long, hard slog pays off and I make it to Gondar in time to meet my friend, Rob. It has been a hellish seven days, but Gondar is high in the mountains, cool and green. I am ill for the first time on the journey, lying in my bed-bug ridden bed, vomiting into a small plastic bowl and crossing my legs and fingers: for some unknown reason the stinking pit referred to as a 'toilet' is locked until dawn. I hope I can wait that long, the plastic bowl is already worryingly full...

Rob arrives, fresh faced from England and in search of two weeks of adventure. He has brought a new bike for me to replace the trashed Rita, bags of sweets and a splendid pair of Union Jack shorts! It is great to see him again: it was he who introduced me to many of the ridiculous concepts of Wildman behaviour that are helping to make this journey so ludicrous!

Being with Rob is a holiday for me: I even allow myself a Pepsi every few days! I eat tuna for the third time since New Year! I could get used to a lifestyle of such decadence! In search of a quiet evening beer we enter the innocuous sounding 'Bingo Club Bar'. A quick about turn at the sight of a collection of bored looking prostitutes sitting around in this unusually named brothel. The old bingo call of 'Two Fat Ladies' could have very serious consequences here!

In Ethiopia it is still 1994 (I'd better leave soon or I'll have to do my A-Levels again next year) and their calendar is very different to ours. In a rare moment of clarity Rob realises that the song was right: they didn't know that it was Christmas time at all. Their Christmas is in January!

I am in raptures as we cycle: Ethiopia is GREEN! There are trees and grass and all the colours and smells and sounds that go with the novelty of vegetation. Lush pastures and herds of cattle. It has been a long ride through the desert lands to get here.

Behind the obnoxious, rude, greedy, stone-throwing children is a beautiful, lush nation. There is no need to go hungry here. Management and education could make huge differences.

Abandoned tanks litter the roadside, testimony to a hasty military advance on Addis Ababa during the recent civil war.

Lalibela is Ethiopia's most remarkable sight. However, it is extremely remote and notoriously difficult to reach. Samuel Johnson wrote of the Giant's Causeway, "...worth seeing, but not worth going to see". I was concerned the same would be true for Lalibela. But whether carved by angels or by men, it is hard to imagine the devotion required to hew 13 entire churches out of solid rock and we decided we must make the journey. The churches are still in use today and are a heady blend of passionate chanting and humming, ringing bells, sweet clouds of incense and fervent praying by crowds of devout white-robed worshippers. The atmosphere, combined with the exciting mountain journey on the roofs of an assortment of different vehicles means that Lalibela was certainly worth seeing and worth going to see as well.

Travel bores are a uniquely dull breed, but please forgive me this next sentence on the relative pleasures of different rock-hewn spectacles: I simply could not resist it.... For natural scenic splendour give me Cappadoccia in Turkey, for sheer perfection of construction it has to be Petra in Jordan and if you are after spiritual atmosphere then Ethiopia's Lalibela comes out on top. Sorry.

We tackle the Blue Nile gorge: 1400 metres deep. The road is too bad and too steep to cycle up so we push the heavy bikes uphill for almost six hours. We set ourselves a ludicrous challenge of getting from Bahir Dah to Addis Ababa in just four days so nightfall sees us still plodding uphill in the dark. A few hours sleep by the roadside and we are back on the road by 5am, slogging upwards in the moonlight. It is like being trapped in one of those horrifying Escher drawings, trudging eternally uphill. But the end arrives eventually, a landmark point for me - I have outrun the Blue Nile river now, all the way from Cairo.

We camp after dark: it is the only way to avoid a ring of staring people surrounding you all evening. Suddenly headlights manoeuvre to illuminate our tent.... I hear the unpleasant sound of a Kalashnikov rifle being cocked.... Silhouetted figures cross the field towards us....

Rob urges me to "play the dumb foreigner.... quick, start chopping some onions! Offer them an avocado!" The curious policemen are friendly enough, think we are both are very weird and leave us alone to enjoy our dinner and a spectacular, eerie electrical storm.

Finally we reach Addis Ababa. We celebrate in a great bar where you have to order beers two at a time! The ride through the north of Ethiopia has been spectacular, irritating, exhausting, beautiful and confusing. I have been forced to challenge many of my opinions about poverty, begging, the role of foreign aid, the purpose and justification of my journey, the influence of local culture on the behaviour of individuals and my attitudes towards other people.

Ethiopia has asked a lot of questions of me and provided very few answers. It has been one of the toughest legs of my journey so far, but absolutely fascinating. I have a lot of things to get my head round as I pedal on towards Kenya and the Southern Hemisphere.

And to celebrate having ticked off the length of the Blue Nile, here's James Leigh Hunt...

THE NILE

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal sands,-
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.

Funny, he doesn't mention the hordes of irritating people trying to sell you rides on their feluccas...

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