Week 35 - Jul. 7th - 13th
day 239 - day in Addis Ababa
day 240 - day in Addis Ababa
day 241 - Addis Ababa to Bahir Dar
day 242 - day in Bahir Dar
day 243 - day in Bahir Dar
day 244 - Bahir Dar to Lalibela
day 245 - day in Lalibela
Week 36 - Jul. 14th - 20th
day 246 - Lalibela to Gonder
day 247 - day in Gonder
day 248 - day in Gonder
day 249 - day in Gonder
day 250 - day in Gonder
day 251 - day in Gonder
day 252 - Gonder to Sudan border to bush-camp
Sounds like a cat caught in a blender
Now I try to be a patient person at times. Often it works. I've been on 40 hour plus plane journeys where delays and long layovers have dragged out the days only to get to the end and realise that they've lost my luggage. At the time I just shrugged my shoulders and told them my address for delivery when they did find it. I've spent hours waiting in line in various places watching everyone else around me losing their minds and shouting angrily while I hum quietly to myself and wait patiently for my turn. But keep me from my sleep and that's when I get really REALLY cranky!I wasn't entirely sure what it was at first. Three thirty in the morning is never a good time for a tired person to be woken up in their smelly, dirty, cold and rain sodden tent and when the source of the sound was a nearby loudspeaker blaring out what sounded almost like inhuman torture experiments I was quick to lose my patience. Try to imagine the most awful, horrendous, cacophonous, raucous karaoke singing you've ever heard and then try to envision something much worse than that. This racket sounded like a mentally deranged stroke patient howling himself discordantly to sleep whilst banging his head upon a wall and holding a loudhailer.
It was Sunday morning and the din was evidently religiously motivated. Quite why any Christians would think it somehow holy be wailing and bawling to the entire neighbourhood when they should be trying to sleep is anybody's guess but these horrendous vociferations continued well into the late morning when the offending pious nut-job evidently got tired and finally ceased and desisted in his torturous howling at around 11am. This awful spectacle repeated itself the next day as well, on Monday morning, though I've no idea why, didn't he get his point across on Sunday? Perhaps it's revenge for the Muslims waking everyone up with the call to prayer each morning but that only lasted about ten minutes so wasn't quite as galling. I took a brief stroll around the area on Monday morning after trying in vein to get to sleep for about seven hours. The source of the noise was a man with a loudhailer standing next to a bloody and disturbing picture of Jesus nailed up to the cross and he was standing next to a pile of money which the locals seemed to be happy to contribute to despite the fact that he wouldn't shut the hell up when they donated. I wanted to give him a note saying 'I would like to pull off your head and do unspeakable things to the hole' but I didn't know how to translate that into Amharic.
By this time I was getting thoroughly fed up with Gonder. I don't mean to be negative but at the time I hadn't slept more than 2 hours in 48 hours and I don't much care to be kept awake in the dead of night by a sound that is marginally less entertaining to me than overhearing a loved one receive open heart surgery in the forest with a pointed stick and no anesthetic. Other than the ungodly racket coming from the crazy preachers the rest of Ethiopia was still proving to be enjoyable although I would have preferred a hell of a lot less rain. It was rainy season here and due to the very high altitude of the country (Addis is roughly 2400 metres/8000 feet above sea level) the rain was the cold and miserable type as opposed to the delightfully warm type that I danced around like a twerp under when we were in West Africa. I consoled myself by having another slap-up feast of cheap Ethiopian cuisine, always a cure for the blues. Besides, soon we would be leaving for Sudan.And so let's retrace our steps through the rest of Ethiopia!
We got em! Well...most of us did anyway!
Summer and Gav had managed to obtain most of our Egyptian and Sudanese visas from their respective embassies in Addis Ababa without incident. Notice I said 'most' just there. Sadly not every nationality was quite so welcome at the Egyptian embassy and we now knew that when the truck left Addis it would not be carrying any personnel that were from the continent of North America. For some strange reason the Egyptian embassy in Addis had told us that Americans and Canadians would have to wait 28 days for their visas to be processed. This was despite the fact that it only takes a couple of days to get them at any other embassy in the world, and only a few minutes to get them at the airport in Egypt. Not only that but Sudan wouldn't grant anybody a visa unless they had proof of onwards travel, which would need to come in the form of a shiny new Egyptian visa. So you can see the conundrum facing our North Americans. So Sarah, Katey and Dan had to fly from Addis Ababa to Cairo and hang out in Egypt while the truck made its way through Sudan. They would follow us north out of Addis and hang out with the truck while we toured northern Ethiopia and then return to the capital to fly. The Saffers (i.e. South Africans: Paige and Jess) also joined their best friends on the flight as well although I still think that they wanted to escape the harsh journey through Sudan after Gav had told them how awful it was going to be just to make them feel better (he told us it was great there!)But this little SNAFU meant that Summer, our only American on board, also had to leave. This presented a problem due to the fact that Americans were also not being allowed into Syria at the current time. In other words if Summer flew with the others to Egypt she would still have to leave again and fly over Syria at great expense. So Summer instead took the opportunity to leave the truck and head home, ready to return in Turkey when the trip was almost at an end. So Gavin was suddenly thrust into the job of being both our driver and our tour guide. I suspected that we would be making a lot more fishing stops, if it was up to Gavin he would convert the truck into a boat and circumnavigate the entire African coast while holding a fishing-line out the window. But fortunately our needs come first and so fishing stops were purely incidental. For the time being we still had Summer and the Canadians & Saffers with us and our first stop after Addis was Bahir Dar, a small town on the edge of Lake Tana.
A visit to the nearby Blue Nile Falls was the main reason for stopping here. I should point out that there was nothing blue at all whatsoever about either the Nile or the waterfalls, they looked more like the chocolate waterfalls from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Still they were an impressive sight nonetheless. We spent a few nights there before heading off to our next destination: Lalibea.Lalibela was a place I'd never heard of before but its status as a UNESCO world heritage site certainly proved the significance of the place. Lalibela is the site of a number of old monolithic churches, a collection of rock hewn structures carved out of the rock itself. These buildings weren't built using bricks or multiple stones, they were carved out of the rock itself which is quite an achievement. Though not nearly as old as the ancient monuments we would be viewing in Egypt and the Middle East they were still an intriguing sight. These old churches, which are still in use today, are also situated in amongst some very spectacularly scenic mountains which we admired during the drive from Bahir Dar to Lalibela. After spending a couple of nights there we drove on towards our final stop in Ethiopia: Gonder.
The joy of binge drinking!
Gonder was a place where we spent quite some time, six nights in fact. The main reason for spending this time here was to allow some of the group to head off into the Simian Mountains for a two night/three day trek around and over the peaks. I declined to join them, yes you read that right I didn't go along and no I haven't gone insane! My official excuse was that it cost too much but the fact that it would have been utterly frigid at 4000 metres and I didn't have any cold weather gear to wear may have also contributed to the decision. Some of us did go on a half day trip to the mountains where we were able to take in the beautiful views and go for a short walk before returning to Gonder on the same day.Heading out into the mountains wasn't the only thing to do in Gonder however. The nearby Fasilides castle, built for the then Emperor of Ethiopia in the 17th century, was an pleasing distraction and of course there were also plenty of opportunities to stuff our faces with that wonderful Ethiopian cuisine that I love so much. The most reckless pastime I chose to partake in however was when several of us: Me, Sarah, Phil, 'Spots', Paige & Jess, embarked on what was intended to be a tour of the local brewery where we would finally be able to find out just how hard it actually is to organise a 'piss up in a brewery'. Predictably it turned out to be not very hard at all, so I can in all certainty say that you would have to be a cretin of epic magnitude not not be able to organise a piss up in the Dashen brewery in Gonder, Ethiopia. Other breweries I cannot comment on but that particular one I can.
We wanted to have a look around the factory floor, something that we had heard from vague rumours that we would be able to do. We thought we were getting somewhere when we decided to sit down and have a drink or two. Now when somebody goes out drinking for a 'drink or two' they really mean dozens and dozens of drinks. In this case we really did only have a few glasses of beer between us. The only thing was that each glass contained about seven pints. In London: four pound fifty will buy you a pint at a fancy club, in the Dashen brewery it will buy you two seven pint beer dispensers with their own tap at the bottom. This was of course a dangerous situation to be in since despite only having small change in our wallets we each had enough money purchase enough booze to drink an overweight and particularly hardy bull elephant to death.
I have no memory of getting home! I do vaguely recall the time Sarah, 'Spots', Paige and Jess left early, leaving only myself and Phil to consume yet another one of these gargantuan behemoths of a beer by ourselves. After that it gets hazy. I was reported to be present in body but not in mind later that evening when Gav gave a little speech at dinner for the benefit of those who wanted to visit the Simian Mountains but my first memory was that of waking up in my tent, though fortunately hangover free and without any vomit stains decorating my sleeping quarters. Maybe I would drink less if it lead to more disastrous consequences regularly but I never seem to throw up or get hangovers no matter how much I drink. Would you call that a blessing or a curse?
Over the next few days the group started to diminish in size as the temporary exiles from our group made their way back to Addis Ababa to catch their flights to Egypt, leaving a mere 15 people on our truck to cross the border to Sudan.
Sudan here we come!
We finally left Gonder and headed towards the Sudanese border. It would have been an uneventful drive if it were not for the fact that Gav managed to get himself arrested for a driving infraction that he did not even commit! When we reached a small Ethiopian border town (who's name I forget) and were ready to commence our crossing into Sudan, Gav had to swerve to avoid a complete and total imbecile who was walking along the middle of the highway in front of the truck. The idiot had to dive out of the way and several of us watched him as the truck clearly missed him by a mile. But sadly the foul, treacherous opprobrious scumbag had reported us to the police who then accosted us a couple of miles down the road and ordered us to turn back. We found the malingering deviant lying on the ground, feigning his injury and pretending to be mortally wounded and in agonising pain. The police told us that all these problems could go away with a simple fine that of course would have been payable to the perfidious degenerate now lying in front of us pretending to be in indescribable anguish. Gav naturally refused and the police placed him under arrest and led him off to a small dirty room that was probably used as a pig pen when there weren't any people to fill it. The fine started out quite high, around $40-50 to begin with but he refused to pay when they even conceded to reduce it to a more manageable sum around the $10-20 area. Good on him I say, the idiot didn't deserve a penny! After waiting around and kicking our heels for a few hours the police eventually agreed to lowed it to a paltry fee, around $5-10, and the desire to get on with our journey overwhelmed our desire to refuse to cave in to the demands of injustice and Gav paid up and was released from his capture. Predictably, the vile sleazeball who fabricated his injury took the money and leaped up from the ground to run off, without any kind of limp or handicap at all, to the local pub with Gav's money. Quite a quick recovery indeed!But at least we made it to Sudan. We drove for a short while before finding a place next to the road to set up camp for the night, our first bush-camp in months.
And our first campfire in months as well, hallelujah!
No comments:
Post a Comment