Day 33 – Yebelo to Awasa (296 km)

31.01.2012

Jules writes

After striking the tents and eating what must have been the oiliest omelettes and French toast ever made (I think we could have run one of those hippie Volkswagen buses for a month on the amount of cooking oil we could have squeezed out of our breakfast), we packed the bikes and hit the road. There was no fuel in the town, but we did manage to find some about 100 km further along. I am quite impressed at how easy it has been to find petrol, we haven’t once had to buy black market fuel (usually dirty, expensive and watered down).

We were headed for a city called Awasa, the largest town in the South of Ethiopia. There were definitely more people along the roads, and the houses and small shops along the road seemed to never end. I am pretty sure that we travelled for more than 100 km at one point without ever being out of sight of a dwelling of some sort, almost as if we were driving through one long continuous town, complete with herds of cows, donkeys, sheep and goats threatening to dash across the road at any second, which made for slow riding. Riding through one of the towns, I saw an driver with a passenger on the back clip the back leg of a donkey crossing the road, equally inattentive, which sent the bike down onto the tar, and a very miffed looking passenger. The donkey seemed fine, and just kept walking.

Steven woke that morning with a good feeling. As a ground squirrel, he didn’t want much from life. He and his mate had managed to raise three fine litters, all of which had gone on to establish burrows of their own. As he scurried between rocks, his only thought was on what he felt like eating for breakfast, maybe a crunchy beetle, or some berries that had managed to make it through the winter. As he sniffed underneath a fallen log, he heard a faint rumble in the distance. He had heard it before months ago, but this time it seemed different. Louder. More menacing. Uneasily, he decided that maybe he didn’t feel as hungry as he thought, and decided that maybe it might be best to get back to the burrow. But as he trotted along, it seemed to get louder and louder. He broke into a full sprint, dashing along the red earth, onto a strange black surface, the sound almost on top of him, filling his ears with a furious roar.

And then he was squished by a bike. My bad.

Dad also hit some kamikaze bird with his bike, so we are proving quite hazardous to small Ethiopian creatures.

We arrived in Awasa at around 3:00, and after looking around for a place to stay, we found a fantastic spot right on the lake. It was great to arrive with some sunshine left, and as an extra treat, a troupe of Colobus monkeys had settled into a nearby tree, and climbed down to eat raisins right out of our hands. As always, there was some work on the bikes that needed to be done, and so while Shan and Dad went off to do some shopping, John and I managed to fix the bolts on my bike and repair some minor damage to the cables running to the indicators, and started on changing the air filters, a very fiddly and messy job. We managed to catch the sunset over the lake, and then sat down at the restaurant for some more fantastic local food and coffee, before heading back to sleep on what were incontestably the most comfortable beds we have slept in since we left.