Day 36–Addis Ababa to Efeson (255 km)

03.02.2012

Jules writes:

After breakfast, we left our gracious hosts and headed out into Addis, heading towards Lalibela, the site of some magnificent churches that have been carved straight out of the side of a mountain. This proved trickier than anticipated, due to the confusion of Addis’s morning traffic. At one point we were hurtling down a highway in the complete opposite direction. When we stopped to ask someone to point us in the right way, some police officers happily stopped all traffic along the highway so that we could push our bikes backwards and turn around at the closest traffic circle.

We finally found our way out, and wove our way through the roads inundated with animals and people. After driving down a long hill, we stopped at a massive traffic circle. After a few minutes, Dad and John started driving back the way they came, and Dad indicated that I should stay where I was. Shan took off after them back up the way we came, and I waited where I was for about 30 minutes. When they eventually returned, John pulled up next to and explained that when he had stopped at the circle, he realised that he had lost the cover for the water pack strapped to his back, but they hadn’t managed to find it on the road when they searched for it. “Oh, you mean that blue thing on the ground next to your bike?” Problem solved, we rode on.

We were now driving through the Ethiopian Highlands, and as the road continued to climb, the temperature continued to drop, until it was quite chilly. Everywhere we rode, we could see people hard at work, gathering wood, threshing their grain, herding animals etc. We stopped for lunch in some small town, whose name I don’t think I knew even while we were there. Dad, I have increasingly discovered, is very single-minded, and so while the rest of us enjoyed our lunch, he disappeared to try and find a choke cable for Shan’s bike. He told us afterwards that while he was walking around, he had seen a woman, probably in her fifties, lying naked in the street, with one of her legs missing. Definitely not a good place to be destitute.

When he returned, he had a go at the cable, and as has been the case with most of our stops, loads of people crowded around, all trying to help, and we had to be quite forceful about the fact that we needed to leave, or they would have happily sat for the next couple of hours, with ten people all trying to get involved with a process that they didn’t necessarily know anything about.

The drive that afternoon was absolutely incredible, as we started to descend into the Great Rift Valley. I have heard people talk about drinking in a view, but in this case, we were practically drowning. Looking at those massive mountains, sheer cliffs and distant plains, it almost seems like the view is too much to take in, and no amount of staring does anything to diminish it. Photo graphs are especially inadequate at conveying a sense of the grandeur of this region, and I would strongly urge anyone to take this drive if they are ever in the country, it is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

We stopped at around 3:00 to fill up with fuel. Now, in Ethiopia, the pumps are not labeled in the same way as any of the other countries we’ve been through, with most offering Gasoil, Regular and Kerosene. When we had enquired a few days earlier, we had been told that Gasoil was just one of the main companies, so when we got to this station, and saw only Gasoil, we happily started filling up our bikes. After the second bike had been filled, the manager, who unlike the attendant, was able to speak some English came out and informed us that Gasoil was in fact diesel, a tank of which will do unpleasant things to a petrol vehicles engine. Seeing the chance of reaching our destination rapidly fading, we had to pump out the two tanks, and then take just enough fuel from the other two bikes to make it to the next fuel stop, about 25 km away.

That done, we headed off to the next town, where we managed to find a side-of-the-road petrol dealer, and try and get as far as we could before darkness fell. At around 6:00, we arrived in a town called Efeson, and upon stopping and enquiring about accommodation, we discovered that EVERY hotel was full, except for a dingy little place off the main road, which suspiciously wanted full payment before John and I had even gone back to consult the others. At one of the other hotels, we met an Ethiopian student named Waldish (not 100% sure of the spelling) who took us to a number of other places in the area, all full, and eventually we managed to wrangle a deal with the owners of one of the main hotels in town, who let us put our matrasses in an unused bar. Although we had space, it was all pretty Spartan, and feeling generally a bit out of sorts, we called it an early night.