Ethiopia Trip!!

Hey guys, this is a late blog post about the 9 or so days after Kenya and before America. It was an amazing trip that I did with a bunch of other volunteers from my group and we had a great time.

Our journey began on Tuesday as I flew out of Kenya at 10am with 2 other PCVs. The crazy thing was that we met an RPCV on our flight over. She was a Health PCV for the first 8 months of my service until her service was over and then she went back to the USA to go to grad school. She was working in Ethiopia for 2 months and had just gone to visit Kenya for a long weekend when we were flying back with her. She was really helpful as she helped us find a cab, our hotel and a place a stay at the end of our stay.

On our first day we didn’t do much except explore the capital and eat a delicious lunch with tej (honey wine). Eran, Jocelyn and I all walked around together to try and find sim cards for our phones…much harder than it should’ve been. We walked all around looking for phone stores but many of them didn’t sell the sim cards-only phones. At long last we found one and he told us he needed a passport picture of us and to see a copy of our passports. So then we had to go on another adventure to find a copier and a picture place. Eventually we did but we were running by the end of it since the guy at the phone store said he might close shop soon. We made it but something weird was going on with my phone so even after all that trouble, my phone could only receive texts and calls but never could successfully make them. Oh well, we got to see a good bit of the city throughout the whole ordeal. That night we were able to meet up with the 4 other PCVs that had flown over earlier in the day and we all slept very well that night.

We woke up at 6am so that we could try to catch a bus to Bah-hee-a-dar (spelling is phonetic). Wrong choice. We discovered that transportation is different than in Kenya. We had to preorder a ticket the day before. It took us 2 hours of our morning to figure out a new plan, buy tickets as well as in country flight tickets and decide on our plans for the day since we weren’t leaving the country until the next day.

Side note on transportation- It is very different than Kenya in a lot of ways. Long bus trips need preordered tickets; which is sometimes true in Kenya but usually only during holidays. Also, people wait in long lines-lines!-for the matatus! It was crazy! In Kenya if you wanted on a matatu, it was often a free-for-all but in Ethiopia, people actually stood in lines to wait. The roads we traveled on were actually nicely paved as well. Granted, take all of these comparisons about Kenya and Ethiopia (and ones I make in the future), with a grain of salt, because I got to know Kenya pretty well over the course of 22 months whereas I only spent 9 days in Ethiopia. And in Ethiopia, I was in more touristy places and we flew a few times. That was the other big difference in transportation-that some of the roads are so bad/it takes for-ev-er to travel on some of them, that in-country flights are fairly common there.

Back to day 2. Since we couldn’t travel very far we decided to take a day trip to Wenchi Crater. It took about 3-4 hours one-way to get there and since there were 6 of us, we just hired a vehicle for the day. It was a beautifully scenic trip. When we arrived at the crater we paid not only to get in the park but also to ride on horseback the 4 km down to the crater and back up. We hopped on our horses which were being led by Ethiopians and within 2 minutes, the rain started and got heavier and heavier. Our horses were quickly led to a ladies house nearby so that we wouldn’t get completely wet. The sweet older lady invited us inside the little wooden house where she instantly started making a fire in the middle of it. We sat around on the edge of the bed and a bench while she got the fire roaring. We were at 3000meters, in their winter season, soaking wet and fire was the perfect cure. All 6 of us plus all 6 horse guides as well as the lady and her grandson were packed into her house and it was perfectly cozy. We sat there warming up, not saying much as there was a large language barrier, for about an hour while the rain continued. They asked if we wanted coffee and knowing how big it was in Ethiopia in addition to how cold we were, we instantly jumped at the chance. The mama went through the whole coffee ceremony. She started by bringing out coffee beans; much lighter in color than we expected, and we realized the reason in color difference was because the beans still had to be roasted. She got a large pan and roasted the beans on it, flipping them constantly until they were black. Next she took out a small goblet and started to grind the beans using a large heavy stick to pound them in the goblet. She made it look so easy, smiling the whole time. She then started to boil a large pot of water in a coffee pot and eventually added the ground coffee to it. She mixed it by pouring a little into a cup and then back into the pot shortly after. It was a long process but then it was made and she poured some into all the cups for us to drink. She also had a little bit of salt-big grains-which she added to our cups to add a little something extra. Now I normally don’t like coffee, let along black coffee, but it was pretty awesome to be drinking coffee after watching the whole process in some random lady’s house in the middle of Ethiopia. We ended up spending about 2 hours in her house while the rain raged on until we finally had to head back to the capital. We never did get that ride down to the bottom of the crater but we saw it from the top and I enjoyed our random coffee experience much more. On our drive home, we got stuck for about 30min and ate a large platter of enjera with various sauces and vegetables on top with our first taste of Ethiopian beer.

We didn’t get much sleep that night since we woke up at 3:30am to drive to the bus station. After 45min of wandering around the bus station, staring at signs written only in Amharic, we found our bus. That was another unusual difference between Ethiopia and Kenya that we noticed. In Kenya whenever you walk into a matatu or bus stage to find the right vehicle going to your destination, you can barely walk one foot without someone coming up to you to ask where you want to go. Sometimes when you travel through the same towns often enough and always know where you’re going, it can be annoying, but if you’re in a new town, then it can have its advantages. Ethiopians, however, always just let us wander around knowing/hoping/trusting we’d find the right bus. The bus itself was also quite different. The buses that you take for long distances in Kenya are fine but the seats aren’t too comfortable and the windows are tinted weird colors so it can be strange to look out them. The buses in Ethiopia that took us to Gondar in northern Ethiopia were very nice! We got 2 bottles of water, a piece of cake, nice seats and they had 2 TVs hanging in the aisles which actually played Ethiopian music videos the whole time! It was spectacular to say the least. The view was also amazing. We passed so much flat farmland that was as green as a cucumber! There weren’t many towns along the way, just lush green land. We finally got off of the bus around 10:30pm after about 17 hours sitting on the bus with only a few toilet stops and one stop for lunch. Thankfully we’d been able to contact an Ethiopian to meet us at the stage and take us to a hotel. Robel was amazing! We got his contacts from an Ethiopian PCV who knew he’d be willing to help us out. He had recently married a PCV who had just left after her close-of-service and was waiting on his marriage visa to go through. He hung out with us for the full day we were in Gondar and showed us around from a local perspective.

The next morning we met Robel for breakfast and juice-delicious!!! And then headed off in a taxi for 45min to the Simean Mountains. We’d decided to do the half-day hike and walked around the mountains with a tour guide for about 3.5 hours. It was incredibly beautiful! We saw the tree with branches that some people use as toothbrushes and some bleeding heart baboons. We got much closer than I’d expected us to! Overall the mountains were beautiful and so green! It was unbelievable! We spent our afternoon at the market and walking around town which was also really cool since we were with Robel, a born and raised Gondar man. That evening after a short nap, we all got ready for a night on the town. We met up with Robel again and he took us to find dinner. We wandered around but a lot of places had closed since it was 8:30 or 9pm until eventually we found a place that we were initially just going inside of to use their restrooms but then after Robel talked to the guy for a little bit, the manager agreed to stay open for 30 more minutes and give us food! We ate an unusual but so good combo meal of enjera with sauce and lasagna. The next stop was a little hole-in-the-wall bar where Robel took us to get a drink and teach us to dance. It was our starter course. We all attempted it for a while but none of us really succeeded, though it was hilarious the whole time! Then we went to the next level and he took to the ‘House of Camelot’ where we saw traditional dancing and participation was highly recommended so naturally, we all jumped in and made complete fools of ourselves J  The last place he took us to that night was a slightly underground night club which played popular American songs intermixed with popular Ethiopian songs and the whole crowd danced with a mixture of styles which was so cool to watch and try to attempt!

On Saturday morning we woke up early, again, to fly to Lailibela. We made it there in the morning after a 25min flight and found our hotel. We walked to market about a 30min walk away since it was actually market day and it was in full swing. We ended up meeting two high school boys, Abraham and Antonio, who helped to show us around and showed us the juice place. The afternoon was cool because we went shopping in our town and we met a really sweet athletic lady who is Deaf! I could only understand about half of what she was signing but I was with 2 other Deaf Ed volunteers and between the 3 of us, we had a good short conversation. We found out she had competed in Athletics in Addis Abba recently and was a pretty decent runner and now she is a great business woman who has her own shop in Lailibela! It was really uplifting to hear about her success and think back to my students and hope they can have the same success! We ended our day by relaxing outside with a few cups of coffee and a delicious large Ethiopian meal.

On Sunday we woke up at 4am trying to meet up with 3 other PCVs from Kenya who had taken the bus up from Nairobi instead of flying like we did, because we were going to go to a monastery to hear the monks chanting and singing. However, luck was not on our side and we didn’t know we had to buy tickets for it beforehand so we said hellos and went back to our hotel to pass out. I spent the morning with some of them walking around town and we ended up running into Antonio and Abraham again who showed us a shelter for the homeless who now make and sell scarves! Pretty neat. And our afternoon ended with the church tour. That is the main attraction of Lalibela, the sweet super old stone churches. There are 11 total, split into 3 groups of monolithic, semi-monolithic and cave church I believe. They have been around for ages and the coolest part is that at least some of them are still in use sometimes. That evening we went to a bar where we saw more traditional dancing, and it’s always astounding how they’re able to move their shoulders like that.

The next morning we woke up early again and hung outside one of them to listen to the chanting and drumming as they started the celebration for one of the holidays, St. Marys Day I believe. Then everyone headed out of Lalibela either to travel around the north a bit more or to fly back to Addis to fly home the following day. Jocelyn and I were the only ones to hang around for one more day and we took it pretty easy. We were exhausted from the little sleep we’d been getting and were looking forward to a pretty relaxing day filled with Ethiopian food, movies and wandering the town.

On Tuesday we flew back to Addis in the morning and met some cool people on our flight. One couple had gotten married in January and were now taking their honeymoon of 14 countries in 40 days-and the guy had actually grown up in Hempfield (Lancaster, PA!). We met the other PCVs in the hotel to grab our stuff and say farewell as they flew off that afternoon. We ended up staying at Joe’s house (the RPCV’s workmate that we met when we flew into Ethiopia). He took us on a tour of the biggest open air market of either East Africa or Africa, called Mercado. It was super muddy but awesome. On the way back and the way there actually, we stopped for coffee at a place called Tamoca which is known for having the best coffee in Ethiopia. Then on the way home I had between 15 and 20 people tell me that my leg were dirty/offer to wipe them off/chuckle and point at my legs…even in Ethiopia people thought I had dirtbag tendencies hahaha. It was all because I had a skirt on but had rolled it up when we walked through the market because of how incredibly muddy it was and then on the walk back to Joe’s house, the mud had caked on and I had a beautiful splatter paint thing going on. That evening was fun as Joe took us out to a Sudanese restaurant with 4 of his friends who work there but were originally from various parts of Europe and Australia. The next morning was my last day in Ethiopia and so I decided to go get my hair done. The first two places wouldn’t do it-one because they were booked until after lunch and the second just looked at me and shook their head-but the third time was a charm. They put small cornrow braids in my hair. It took an hour, we (Eran and Jocelyn came with me) got served coffee and bread and the whole thing only cost $5! I ended my stay there by eating lunch with Eran, Jocelyn and Joe. We ate enjera with raw meat! It was actually really good and apparently a lot of Ethiopians eat raw meat often. Overall I’d say the sort of spontaneous trip there to transition between Kenya and America was awesome!

Love,

Zabet