The great escape

Now, let me say first off that I loved Ethiopia. It is the most fascinating country I have been to, with an incredibly distinct culture and history. But it was a tiring country. After surviving the 2 day bus journey I came down with a second lot of travellers diarrhea and this one continued for days. So rather than going to the south of the country as planned, we decided we had to get out. Jason spent a couple of days doing the walk to the Hilton (for the airline office) whilst I lay around feeling sorry for myself. Meanwhile we also visited the hospital in an attempt to find out what was wrong, and get some antibiotics.... this proved a useless exercise with the high point being when the doctor asked in stilted English "Do you have a fever?" - I don't know! Maybe you could check???! With only two more days to wait until the flight, we decided I would live and hopefully Tanzanian medical care would be more helpful. So on Monday 23rd we set off from 18 degree weather in Addis in the middle of summer, landing in 30degree weather in winter in Tanzania. Ah, how good it was!

Feeling bouyed by escaping Ethiopia we quickly purchased a ticket to Zanzibar and were soon on a tropical island paradise! We heard lots of warnings about the touts in Zanzibar from other travellers, but after Ethiopia where spending 60seconds without being hassled was cause for celebration we hardly noticed there were any here. Also, antibiotics are available over the counter. Luckily my ill stomach seems to have remained in Ethiopia and we are now firmly ensconced on a beautiful white sandy beach beside azure waters, with nothing more to do than complain about the hideous prices. (Bit of a shock from eating for $2 a meal, going to $10 each!!) I think we'll be here awhile...

Two days of self imposed torture

Now, if you are ever considering should you spend $10 for 2 days on the bus from Lalibela to Addis Ababa or should you spend the $120 for the flight, I'll make it simple for you - fly!!! Why are you even considering two days on the bus. Unfortunately for us, no one shared this wisdom and after much debate we decided to do the bus trip. Why???? Why????? Why????? It was two days of pure hell. The road was as windy as a pile of cooked spaghetti and a bumpy dirt track to boot. What made this worse was that Ethiopians have weak stomachs and every other person on the bus was throwing up. The plastic bags were going up and down the aisle at lightening speed. This is before you consider that being Ethiopia there is about 5cm of leg room so your knees are decapitated and they fit 5 people across each row (with people in the aisle as well, despite the fact this is illegal).

Day one of this was hellish, but it's even worse when after a nights sleep in a flea infested hotel (for $4) you have to force yourself to get up at 4am, queue with two hundred people for the gates to the bus station to open, push past women and children to avoid being trampled in the rush to your bus only to do it all again. I never thought I would be so grateful to see an African city in my life, but Addis looked beautiful!!

Gondar gut... and those castles as well.

It's been awhile since we've updated the blog, partly because ehtiopian internet doesn't like blogspot.  We've now remembered that we can email blogs in... but we can't edit the times and dates, so these will be appearing out of order, my apologies.  Hopefully we can fix it up in Tanzania.   We have now been in Africa for 2 months and I suppose it's only fair that one of us got food poisoning in that length of time, but it doesn't feel fair at all.  We have been eating a lot more local food in Ethiopia and due to not being able to either speak or read Amharic a lot of time we convey 'no fish' and leave the rest up to chance.  In this way we ate a quite nice local dinner our first night in Gondar, it was injera (big sour pancake thing that all food is served on and eaten with) with some meat thing (don't ask what type of meat I don't know).  It was very tasty and enjoyable but I spent the next two days with liquid gushing out of both ends, which we've named the Gondor gut (this beat out Ethiopian evacuation as the name).    So despite this being our fourth day in Gondor it is the first day that we have really explored.  This is a really lovely town, built around the old crumpling walls of 17th century  palaces and churches which are still in use from the same era.  In the 250 years that Gondar was the capital of Ethiopia there were 7 castles built within an area the size of a couple of city blocks.  It was a very different experience to see these castles in the middle of Africa, as goats graze within the compound walls, people mow the lawns with sickles, and the streets around the outside teem with people, taxis, minibuses, donkeys and horse drawn carts.  Not to mention the touts (everyone one of whom has two people wanting to go to the simien mountains tomorrow!).   The other very noteworthy thing about Ethiopia is that it is the birthplace of coffee, and so the cafe culture is king.  There are hundreds of little cafes serving excellent coffee and cakes and nothing else (this has led to some slight embarrassment as tables have been vacated for us in what we assumed was a packed restaurant at dinner time, to discover they don't serve food).  It has however been fun eating cake again!!

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Oh my gosh it's a mattress!!!

Ok, so maybe this wasn't the most interesting thing about Bahir Dar, but when you've been sleeping on foam for two months (3cm when camping, and about 10cm in hotels) a real mattress is an absolute treat, and led to some excellent nights sleep.

The real draw card of Bahir Dar though is the various monastries which are found on islands on Lake Tana. Everyone in Bahir Dar either seems to have a boat or a minibus and depending which either wants to take you onto the lake or to Gondar. We decided to just go through our hotel and organised a half day on the lake with three girls we had met from Israel. This however doesn't include the entry fee for each monastry and aftre the first couple we began to feel they were a bit similar. You would never guess from the outside that these round mud brick buildings are churches built in the 14th century (although the roof had to be replaced with tin as water was leaking through destroying the paintings). Inside our beautiful paintings depicting various biblical scenes, some of which are definitely unique to Ethiopia. The one where some saint is using a snake to climb a building was certainly interesting.

As after a couple o fthese churches all five of us felt they were remarkably similar we decided to us e the boat to trip to see the start of the nile (the blue nile, the white nile starts in Uganda), which was a very pretty area.

The other nice thing about Bahir Dar was being adventurous with the food, and trying some interesting dishes. Possibly I'm biased because of what came later, but I'm just not that much of a fan of Ethiopian food.

Is that a goat?... no, it's a whole herd of goats

We arrived in Addis Ababa on May 31st.  We were a little worried about getting the visa as everything we'd read said you can only get a 30 day visa and stupidly our flight out was 32 days away. But we decided to give it a go and ask at the visa office... we're not sure she understood exactly what we wanted, but we were given 3 month visas for the same cost as the 1 month without any fuss whatsoever.

Addis Ababa can be summed up quite well by the sight of a herd of goats crossing a ten lane highway in the middle of a city of 3 million people.Where they were going I'm not sure. Despite the size of the road there were not that many cars, and a lot of transport was done using packmules, ox/cow/donkey/horse drawn carts.

Addis is probably one of the safer African cities, and despite needing to be aware of petty theft violent crime is pretty much unheard of. Instead the city is full to bursting with beggars, which was a little overwhelming. However, these do not necessarily target foreigners, rather everyone gives what they can. It is an amazingly religious country and priests (or something similar) abound blessing people as they are touched on the forehead by an ornate wooden cross which they then kiss).

We are beginning to feel a little homesick, or at least missing the peace and quiet of a park or just anywhere you can be alone and not hassled, approached, talked to etc. We hadn't realised how much until we went to the Sheraton to use the ATM and ended up spending an hour sitting in the peaceful garden without being approached once!!

From there we attempted the journey to Bahir Dar. We were assured this would be an 11 hour bus journey (the worry being Ethiopian buses are not allowed to travel after dark so if it took too long we could get stranded somewere for the night). Up at 4:30am we were on the bus soon after 5am and on our way shortly after sunrise or 6am, or 12 o'clock local time... but lets not go there.(Ok, just briefly time here is such that sunrise is 12 o'clock, and sunset or 6pm is also 12 o'clock. This I could possibly cope with but locals know what farangi time is so you never know which time is being quoted at you). We were stopped just outside Addis for a check point. We think they were checking for bombs or something (due to the fact they spent quite awhile under the bus and went through everyone's bags). Jason was on the top of the bus opening his bag for the police, when searching a different bag they found 'something' and Jason was nearly thrown from the roof. It was not promising when the bus reversed up a side street and a few policeman with rather large guns (rifles I assume) boarded and made sure everyone stayed sitting and quiet. (This was a painful prospect due to the fact the gap between the seats was 5cm too short for my legs, and about 15cm too short for Jason... kneecaps being slowly amputated by the seat in front is not particularly fun). There were however moments of hilarity as one of the policeman fancied himself as a comedien and frequently had the bus in stitches, before becoming serious and scaring them into submission. No one felt a need to translate any of this for us though. The only English translation we got was "No problem", to which we asked then why have we been sitting here for 3 hours!!! The police did occassionally target individuals and take them off for questionning, they also checked everyone's ID (Except ours). Evetually they picked on one person to stand up and then started beating him off the bus, onto the ground where they kicked him about a bit more. Obviously convinced he was the owner of the mystery bag.It turned out that there was a gun in his bag.We were then on our way to Bahir Dar.

We saw many interesting sights, amazing views, armoured tanks and local villages. Surprisingly we made it to Bahir Dar that day although about 1 hour after sunset and as the lights of the town became visible a spontaneous standing ovation was given by the bus passengers, making us think we weren't the only ones worried about a night in the middle of nowhere