Day 34–Awasa to Addis Ababa (260 km)

01.02.2012

Jules writes:

After a fantastic breakfast of fresh fruit, Dad and John finished packing their bikes while Shan and I went round the corner to the Lewi Hotel, which had some fantastically fast, fantastically free wifi, where we uploaded the previous weeks blog posts. That accomplished, we headed back to our hotel, loaded up and left town. We had been advised by Anton, the father-in-law of my step-cousin (yes, quite a tenuous link, I’ll admit) who is currently living in Addis, that we should take an alternative route to the city, which avoided a lot of the really bad traffic.

This proved to be great advice, as the alternate route took us through incredible landscapes, dry and dusty, up passes that offered unparalleled views of the Ethiopian Highlands. Along the way, we were amazed to see the number of donkey carts along the road being driven by children who could not have been much older than about eight. As we drove through one particular town, we were bemused to see that almost everyone in the town was wearing pink in some form, from dresses, to pants, T-shirts, even many of the donkeys. Clearly the whole breast-cancer drive has really taken off in this village.

We arrived in Addis at around 2 o’ clock, and although we didn’t have an exact address for the Swedish Embassy, we reasoned that it should be near the Canadian Embassy, which we did have on the GPS. We stopped in for lunch at a shopping centre just past the embassy, where we met Lance, who was Ethiopian, but had been raised in the USA, and had now decided to return with his family and settle down in Addis. We ate at his restaurant, which was probably one of the first that we have seen since leaving SA that was not riddled with spelling mistakes. It was great to meet someone who had decided to return to his home country after many years abroad to be a part of the rebuilding and development process.

After our meal, we called Anton, who lived only a few minutes away. We follow his directions straight to the house, where we were welcomed by him and his wife, Agnetha. We chatted with them for awhile, and then headed to unpack. Agnetha had just returned from Cape Town, and she had brought up a parcel from Mom containing some new riding pants for dad, which were much appreciated, as the jeans he has been wearing were definitely not going to be sufficient to handle the cold weather that we will be expecting in Turkey (which is apparently full of snow at the moment, and will not be much warmer by the time we get there).

That evening, our hosts took us out for supper to a traditional Ethiopian restaurant, situated in an old mansion that used to belong to a member of the nobility. The evening was phenomenal, with more food than we could possibly eat, local beer, tej (honeyed wine), superb coffee and live music that accompanied some truly incredible dancing, representative of each of the different regions of the country. As John commented “Riverdance has nothing on these guys”. We returned home, contented and replete and were all soon asleep.