Day 38 – Dessie to Lalibela (320 km)

Ethiopia

05.02.2012

Jules writes:

The morning was the usual: wake up, pack, breakfast, flat rear tyre on my bike.

Seriously, ANOTHER FLAT TYRE. ON MY BIKE. This is actually reaching the point of being a bit of a joke, although it took awhile for Dad to see the funny side. We drove up the street to a petrol station, where we managed to change the tyre in a record time of 50 minutes. It’s become a very streamlined process now, with everyone knowing exactly what to do. We had heard or read that the road to Lalibela was about 108 km from Dessie, we were looking forward to a nice short ride. We were now right up in the highlands, yet the road continued to climb, offering impossibly beautiful vistas over the peaks down into Rift Valley itself. As we got near the top of a pass, we pulled over for photos and leg stretch. A small group of young children came over to chat, or given the language barrier, hang out with us. One of the girls, only thirteen years old, was carrying a huge load of sticks on her back, and when we took a turn carrying it, we reckoned it must have weighed about 35 kg! We were all very impressed, and a bit shocked, as this was by no means the biggest load that we had seen being carried while in Ethiopia.

By this time, 108 km had come and gone, so clearly we were in for a longer ride than we had expected. For the astute, you will see from the title, that it was in fact 320 km. At the top of the plateau, we were able to make good time, as the roads were pothole-free and curved gently through small stone villages. We were back up to over 3000 m, so we were feeling the cold again.

Driving through a small town, we saw a sign for Lalibela off to the right, but according to the GPS, it was still ahead of us, so we kept going for another 10 km before it became apparent that we were definitely heading in the wrong direction. So, we turned around and arrived back to the turnoff, which to our dismay, led straight onto a dirt road that almost immediately began to wind steeply down the mountain, curving sharply enough to keep our speed down to around 30 km/h.

We continued along at this pace, until we mercifully met up with the tar road again leading to Lalibela. As we rounded a last hill and could see the town in the distance, the bikes in front of me pulled over to the side of the road. I had been having a bit of trouble with my steering, and when I had a look at the bike…

Another.

Flat.

Tyre.

This time it was the front one, but you would be surprised how little it matters whether a flat tyre is the front one or the back one. This now puts me at a grand total of seven flat tyres in the last week and a half. Unreal. We pumped up the tyre, enough so that I could drive into town. When I looked up, Shan’s bike a had toppled over and she was marching up the hill. Not sure what that was all about, I helped the guys lift her bike up and we did what we could for my tyre. When she returned, she explained that she had been feeling exceptionally nauseous for the last 25 km, and had had to go and park her biscuits somewhere, but didn’t want to chunder in front of the locals. As I have explained before, you are never alone anywhere in Ethiopia, so eventually she had found a spot where she lost her lunch to the utter fascination of a group of children.

We limped into town and found our hotel without any problems, where we were soon ensconced in some comfortable rooms. To our amazement, we discovered that for the first time in the last three weeks, there was not only a toilet, but toilet paper as well, something whose absence has been been a source of constipation, consternation.

We got to work on the tyre, which surprisingly took a lot longer than the back tyre had, due to our unfamiliarity with the admittedly simpler process. Eventually, the fading light forced us to abandon the task for the morning, and we headed across the road to a great little restaurant, where we met a group of other travels who were staying at our hotel, which included a group of four Poles, as well as Isiais, an Ethiopian who had moved to Poland and was back visiting his country, George, a German, and an Argentinian couple, David and Sabrina, who had decided that a radical change of lifestyle was needed, and had sold everything in Buenos Aires, house, clothes, appliances, and were spending two years traveling the world, their only possessions what they carried in their bags. It has been amazing to see the different adventures that people embark on, very inspiring.

Finally, after a wonderful evening, we strolled back to our hotel and were soon asleep.