More Amazing Churches, More Amazing Dad Dancing Natata La'ab Monastery Wednesday Morning. Some of us go for a short drive to the Natala La'ab Monastery(?), built into a cave near Lalibela. Our first stop is a religious school near the monastery. The teacher, who we are told is 83 years old, has a class of about 10 boys (no girls) who are training to be priests. The boys are all chanting different passages from the bible and the priest seems to be able to hear each individual and pick out their mistakes. The boys show complete respect for th [View Full Entry]

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Lalibela - Underwear, Churches and Cool Priests Security Alert Today is a bad day for the women. We have to leave the hotel by 5a.m. to get the early flight to Lalibela. Everyone - even me(!) - makes it on time. Our bus is on time and we get to the airport on time! It's all good. At the airport, though, we have to go through bag scans and body scans twice. The second scanner seems to be set a bit too sensitively, though, as all the women set the scanners off because of the metal in their bras. Eventually, [View Full Entry]

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Aksum's airport is even smaller than Teesside's but the security is tight. My hand baggage is searched both when I enter the terminal and just before I board the plane - it's the same woman on each occasion, but second time around she starts asking me questions about items that previously she'd ignored. The plane is small and the passenger list smaller still, so only ten minutes elapse between the start of boarding and actual take-off. The journey to Lalibela is short, and the windows are sufficiently scratched and dirty that it's hard to make out much detail in the crumpled [View Full Entry]

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The main tourist trail in Ethiopia, although not particularly well trodden, is the so called historical circuit, which consists of a loop to the north of Addis Ababa. Due to limitations in both time and enthusiasm for historical sites, we chose to carry out a truncated version of the circuit. Our first port-of-call was the town of Bahir Dar on the shores of Lake Tana. Here we organised a boat trip, taking in some of the many monasteries populating the islands of the lake. The monasteries were adorned with some impressive, centuries old paintings and the resident monks took great pride [View Full Entry]

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Of course, Timkat is not in February but January. But I was there and it was incredible!!! What a colourful, joyous, loud (!), exciting celebration! And that was just the beginning. Four weeks did I spend in that most amazing country. Condense that into a single blog entry? No way. So bear with me. Here comes part one. I arrived in Addis Ababa early on January 17th so tired after a rather sleepless night on the plane that a first tour of the city didn't leave much of an impression besides it being huge and noisy. Although, even if a bit [View Full Entry]

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The atmosphere in Lalibela was incredible, with the population of the sleepy village swelled by an estimated 20,000 pilgrims, who were visiting one of the major Christian sites in Ethiopia for Christmas. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I went for a walk to the market and ended up walking past the major church of Bet Maryam, where people were securing a sleeping space for the night. As darkness fell, I went back to the church for a few minutes to soak in the atmosphere - a sea of white-clothed pigrims. I asked one person how many people he thought were [View Full Entry]

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"Here, give me your hand." No, I know what you're going to do. "Just gimme it, please?" No. Jos draws me in closer to his body and puts his arm around me as we walk together through the streets of Lalibela. I sigh and resign myself to my fate. He turns around to the local boys following us blatantly staring at me or my boobs, we don't know which. Jos's mouth turns up at the corners into a lopsided grin of victory. "Sexy China girl! She's my girlfriend, yeah. Sexy China! Sexy China!" The boys blush and squeal in laughter, jumping [View Full Entry]

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Lalibela is certainly the most famous and the most visited place in Ethiopia. There were at least 30 tourists in the town… It deserves to be that famous as it contains 11 absolutely amazing rock hewn churches within 10 minutes from each other. The churches were built on the order of King Lalibela which as the legend has it visited Jerusalem and on his return wanted to build a Jerusalem in Ethiopia. There is even a River Jordan ... carved out of solid rock! Allegedly all churches were built in the early 13th century within 23 years by [View Full Entry]

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030 - Africa - Lalibela 09/15/08 - 09/20/08 Historic Ethiopia Imagine walking along rural Ethiopia a few centuries ago, flanked by green fields and farmlands, mountains in the distance, small stones digging in to your bare feet. You stop and have a vision of a church that doesn't exist. A church built out of rock. Not only that, but built out of one piece of rock, and built from the top down, by removing the earth, not adding to it. And not just one church, but a community of churches, each one carved out of rock, and each one unparalleled in [View Full Entry]

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From Bahir Dar where we are based we took a chartered van to Lalibela an arduous 10 plus hours of driving on bad roads, along the way we hit a hailstorm that lasted a good 10 minutes. We finally made it to town of Lalibela and checked in at the Green Olives hotel. We made a deal at reception since it is not peak time, 3 of us shared a room, me Craig and Sam. We talked to some people about hiring guides that will not over charge and Bod found one for the group. Dinner at the horel then off [View Full Entry]

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