Ethiopian Adventures, part I

We're back in Accra after two wonderful weeks in Ethiopia. Internet connectivity was pretty scarce and/or slow there, so we'll give you the big update now that we're back.



"Seven years younger" because Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar . . . it's still 1999 in Ethiopia. Big millenium parties are planned for this coming September!

We arrived in Addis Ababa late at night, so we’d booked a hotel online. The only hotel we were able to book online, though, was a pretty upscale joint called the Ghion, which is apparently a former palace modified by the government into a hotel (many hotels in Ethiopia are or were at one time government-run, and almost all of them, it seems, date from the late 1960s or early 1970s).

We weren’t staying in the palace part, I don’t think – our room looked more like the palace worker’s quarters. But the rest of the hotel was fabulous, with a great central location, a huge walled garden and a giant swimming pool, several restaurants and excellent service.

Here are some pix from the garden. Addis Ababa's skyline is much more modern than Accra's:



Here Jason perches on the edge of one of the walls around the huge garden. It had very old brick walls with a moat. I assume it was some sort of imperial garden -- they were rather short on details of whose exact palace it was or when.



The garden had, of course, a wide variety of plants and flowers, particular Abyssinian roses, which are like big rose trees. Lovely! Here Jason stands next to some weird plant that looks to my untrained eye to be related to the dandelion. Aren't you glad they don't grow like this in Canada?



After spending a day bumming around our hotel and its vicinity, we flew to Bahir-Dar to meet our tour guide. Everywhere we flew in Ethiopia, we took small Fokker 50 plane with twin propellers, like this one, which I shot at dawn at the Addis Ababa airport before we flew to Bahir Dar:



Here’s a shot out the window:



That was NOT the best seat on the plane; very noisy! In general, the small planes are noisier, flew lower to the ground, and we usually had a rougher flight than on a jet, as you might expect -- especially when we landed on a dirt runway! Jason endured the clutch of my sweaty hand with magnanimity during take-offs and landings.

In Bahir-Dar, we met our tour guide, Seyoum. He checked us into our hotel and then we were driven to nearby Lake Tana, where we took an hour-long motorboat ride. On the lake we passed dozens of Ethiopians paddling traditional papyrus boats in the other direction, toward Bahir-Dar:



They were almost all ferrying wood from the opposite shore, or one of the lake's many islands, to the town where it is either used as firewood or, I suppose, possibly to make charcoal. We later saw stacks of the wood for sale on the side of the road near the town.



The boats look terribly un-sea-worthy, but are apparently very sturdy (I suppose they wouldn't have become "traditional" if they kept sinking).

Seyoum told us most of the men leave their community at dawn and paddle for hours to reach Bahir-Dar by mid-day, when the wind picks up and it gets a bit rougher on the lake (we experienced this first-hand. I wouldn't want to be in a papyrus boat anytime, but certainly not in those waves!). Then they return to their home communities the following day.

That's all I have time for today. Tomorrow: where we went!