My days as a paper-boat pirate over, I had to make do with the motorboat.
This was the ‘third largest lake in Africa’, Fantahun reminded me, starting of again on one of his tourist speeches memorized from a textbook.

Third largest it might’ve been, but it looked deserted. The boat cut a lonely furrow through the calm waters; a few pelicans swam about in the distance ogling curiously at us; a hungry looking fish-eating eagle circled pensively overhead.

A hulking carcass of a concrete structure lay by the lake. An excavator worked busily in the midst of it, its steel mandibles working purposefully somewhere within the skeletal frame.
For an instant it seemed odd that it was actually bringing the construction to life.
“Big hotel they finish soon” I was told.

We sailed through the mist, and the islands became clearer. From afar they had looked dark and foreboding, up close they were just small and friendly oases of greenery.
A monk wrapped in a yellow cloak, his arms hidden away within its folds stood silently by a couple of beached papyrus (‘tankwa’) boats.
A prominent board at the pier announced and warned: “Ladies not allowed!”.
The small banana shaped island less than half a kilometer square, housed around a dozen monks, and they all lived a life of celibacy, and spent their time studying the word of God.
I walked with Fantahun through a dense thicket of coffee bushes and mango trees. Colorful birds jostled with butterflies, flickering between bushes in a riot of contrasting shades.

Lake Tana hadn’t always been such a peaceful place.
Sometime in the mid 16th century a great battle had been fought on its shores between the Portuguese army and an Ethiopian warlord from the east going by the name of Ahmad Gragn ‘the left handed one’. On that day, the Portuguese were routed and their leader (the son of a famous Mr.Vasco Da Gama) beheaded.
Gragn then proceeded to plunder and pillage the churches around the lake.

Since then many churches and their treasures had been moved to the more inaccessible islands of the lake (Gragn was later defeated by a joint force of the Portuguese and the Ethiopian Emperor Claudius).

We walked up a sloping path, past a pigpen and into the area of the monastery.
Here I met the chief monk -- a tall bearded man, in a well-tailored gabi and tinted glasses.
And best of all, he spoke perfect English.
He had lived on the island since he was 20 years old, and spent most of his time in the monastery’s library reading religious scriptures written in Ga’ez (an ancient language used in religious scriptures, and in a way similar to Latin and Sanskrit).
No modern entertainment, no women, no contact with the mainland, yet he seemed very chirpy.

We took a quick tour of the church and the monastery’s museum. “It’s a pity,” he sighed, a lot of the frescoes had been damaged by rain and flash cameras. But, a restoration program run by the UNESCO was restoring the paintings.

A cherubic winged St.George combated the demons. But amazingly St.George and all the other angels were black and sported Afros, and even the bearded Jesus looked suspiciously Ethiopian.

It wasn’t that the Ethiopian church had undergone a black revival movement; this was how they had known the scriptures and God, right from back in 300AD.
Christianity wasn’t something that had been taught to Ethiopians by missionaries.
To them Jesus, the angels and the bible itself were all inalienably Ethiopian. It contrasted sharply with the very Anglo-Saxon looking angels that littered the churches in neighboring Kenya.

In passing I asked the monk about his sunglasses, weren’t they bit too fashionable in the monastery? “Too many flash cameras, they hurt my eyes!” he said laughing gently “But I cannot wear style glasses like yours…” pointing out my Police shades. Oh, the perils of facing the modern flash camera!

We pulled away from Kibran Gebriel, the serene looking monk still sat by the papyrus boats. For a change, even Fantahun had stopped gabbing.

I had read an old Australian newspaper at the hotel, left behind by some discerning tourist – the headlines had screamed:

“Suicide bomber kills 5”
“Cost of blackout estimated at above $1Bn!”
“New SARS case turns up in Singapore”

In a rather resigned way, it had then made sense to me.
But here on the island, just a few kilometers away, a world could’ve passed by and none of it would matter. Things would go on -- business as usual.
I left feeling unusually upbeat about the world.