Ethiopia

After a short layover in Khartoum we arrived in Addis Ababa. It was kind of gray and rainy!! I was rather excited for this since I'd been living in a desert where it doesn't rain and I hadn't seen clouds in weeks. It was a little chilly for me, Micol made fun of me...Buffalo boy was chilly in mid 60 degree weather. The weather confirmed that my parents are going to have to meet me at the Buffalo Airport with an Eskimo outfit it they expect me to walk outside the airport in the lovely December weather.

The city seemed very modern, yet very old at the same time. Buildings were new, yet very run down. The road plan provided for a very spread out city where the suburbs appeared nice and the downtown appeared not so nice. I knew going to Ethiopia there would be a lot of poverty, but I wasn't prepared for the type of poverty. There were lots of people suffering from polio and lots of amputee war veterans. At one point, two kids came up to us and asked for money for food. We gave them 1 birr each (about 8 cents US) and they were some of the happiest kids I had ever seen.

So what did we do??? Well we spent a bunch of time sitting in cafes eating and drinking, went to the largest market is Africa, saw a movie and walked around. Food was pretty cheap and beer cost about 60 cents US. Apparently the coffee was very good and the tea was ok to me. The tea was mostly camomile tea. Burgers were very common there and was primarily what cafes served if you didn't want National food. The National food, especially the bread, was much better than any Ethiopian I've had in DC. In DC the bread is like a gooey napkin that you eat the food with, but in Addis it tastes delicious and makes the food so much better. The market was interesting, a little unnerving because you always had to watch your pockets and make sure nobody pick pocketed you. Like most of sub-Saharan Africa, pick pocketing is a real problem, but unlike most of sub-Saharan Africa, there is very little violent or gang related crime in Addis. We spent a couple of hours just wandering around the market taking in the smells and sites. Getting to and from the market was interesting. We took a mini bus taxi. They stop at specific destinations and a kid, between 14-18, leans out the door of the van calling out where they are going to as they pull up and then collects your money. Now on to the movie, we saw Bedazzled; yes the Brendan Frasier movie. Not something I would normally see, but it was the only movie in English and the Amharic (official language) movies didn't have subtitles. Well we missed most of the first half of the movie, even though the people working at the theater said it started in 30 mins. As we're watching, the film all of a sudden stops and the lights come on, I'm thinking great what happened, but I was wrong, nothing happened it was time for intermission. It was a real theater like intermission. A bell rang, people left for the bathrooms, men came in and sold pop and doughnuts and other snacks, a bell rang and then the movie started again. I was pretty happy we at least got there before intermission so I could learn that it happens. The tickets were 16cents US so even though we missed most of the first half we got our money's worth.

After a couple of days in Addis, we decided we had to leave. We tried to go to Lalibela, but all the flights were over booked so instead we decided to rent a 4x4 and a driver and go to Awash Natoinal Park for two days. The drive there through the Ethiopian countryside was beautiful. We drove through the park for 8 hours, walking some of the time with our game scout. We saw Oryx, Warthogs, Monkeys, Baboons, Crocodile, Dik Dik and tons of birds. I took a picture of a tribal herder carrying his Kalashnikov and then got yelled at by his tribesman who had the same gun, thankfully our game scout resolved the situation. The tribesman wanted money for the picture. After this little adventure we kept walking through the palm tree jungle to the volcanic hot springs. Once there I swam in one of them, it was really hot, almost beyond jacuzzi hot, so hot that I was red when I got out, but my skin felt great and it was the cleanest I felt since I had arrived in Cairo! The water was so crystal clear and the surroundings were so green and tropical, I loved it.

After driving through the park we arrived at our hotel, well not really hotel, but where we were staying the night. We had a camper trailer, not the luxurious kind, but a extra large pop-up like one, in the middle of the African savannah. There was a lodge with a restaurant and they had a table set up for us. It was sadly one of the most, if not most, romantic dinners Micol and I have ever had. Our table was right one the edge of the patio overlooking the Awash River Gorge, it was late enough at night that we could only hear the river and see tribal camp fires, but the ambiance was great. That night it rained like crazy, massive downpours and thunderstorms. I was loving it and so were the people of Ethiopia, they've had a prolonged drought that is cutting into food and energy supplies. It rained so much that most of the park roads were barely navigable the next day so we just drove back to Addis.

We arrived back in Addis about 8 hours before our flight was supposed to leave, we tried to catch an earlier flight, but they didn't have any so we walked to a cafe and sat there for a few hours and then headed back to the airport for a 5 hour wait until takeoff. Looking back on the trip I can definitely say that Addis and I and I think Addis and Micol have a love/hate relationship, but overall Ethiopia was pretty cool and I def. want to go back and explore more of the countryside and some rural towns.