pinchy85

First to explain, Somaliland is a separate state to Somalia and has been since the early 90s. It just has not been recognised by the international community yet. So, this trip was not some suicide mission into Mogadishu nor was I in search of any pirates. I had been told that it was safe to visit and quite interesting. As I wanted to visit Harar in the east of Ethiopia, I decided it wasn't that much more of an effort to get to Somaliland. From Jijiga, we got a minibus to the border town of Wajaale. There, we completed the formalities on the Ethiopian side, had our bags checked not-that-thoroughly and walked through the rope across the street that formed the border and into Somaliland. We got stamped in and had some camel for breakfast. We ... read more

We were up before 6 o'clock to get the bus out of Lalibela, but unfortunately this wasn't early enough. We were hoping to get to Addis Ababa in one day and this wasn't a good start. We had to get a Land Cruiser to take us to Gashena, which meant we ended up catching the public bus. We got on this bus, which was to take us to Dessie. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the bus and it struggled to get out of 2nd gear. At Woldia, we had to change to a minibus to take us the rest of the way to Dessie. This minibus was a lot quicker, but it started to lash down rain and made driving conditions pretty difficult. This didn't deter our driver from overtaking vehicles as we drove on ... read more

On leaving Axum, we decided we wanted to try visit some of the rock-hewn churches, which Tigray is famous for. We decided to get to Adigrat first and use it as a base. Unfortunately, a lot of the churches aren't easily accessible (one requires you to climb up a rope to visit), especially when relying on public transport. By the time we arrived in Adigrat, we were too late to make it out to visit anything, so just had a walk around town. There isn't much to see or do in Adigrat and they certainly do not get many tourists there. There is quite a few NGOs there though, as it bore the brunt of a lot of fighting in the most recent Ethio-Eritrean War. After one night there we got a bus south on the ... read more

We got to the bus station in Debark for 8.30 a.m. to make sure we got a spot on the bus going from Gonder to Axum. After a bit of a scramble once the bus arrived, I managed to get us two tickets. The bus set off around 9.30 a.m. and as soon as we left Debark we began a slow, winding descent down the mountains. The views were incredible, but it wasn't the most comforting sight when you looked out the window and saw the bus wheel inches from the edge of a sheer cliff face. Any mistake from the driver and we would have been rolling down a couple of thousand feet! The driver negotiated all of the hairpin bends all the way down, but then we had to do the same in reverse ... read more

We spent a couple of days in Gonder trying to figure out the best way to do a trek in the Simien Mountains. After speaking to a couple of tour operators, we decided the best option was to head to Debark and organise it ourselves there. The extra days in Gonder gave us a chance to meet up with some other people we had met over the past few weeks and we had one good night out, where we went out to one of the local clubs. I tasted some tej that night, which is their local honey liquer and fairly potent. We were up at 5.30 a.m. to get the bus to Debark. This left at around 6.30 a.m. and after just the one breakdown, arrived 4 and half hours later. We were quickly harassed ... read more

We took a bus down to Bahir Dar after a couple of days in Gonder. This should have been a relatively straightforward 3 hour bus journey. But we quickly learned that straightforward and bus journeys don't belong in the same sentence in Ethiopia. Despite our bus having 'Lufthanza' emblazoned on the front, it was anything but reliable or efficeint and after about 45 minutes we were broken down. After about a half hour or so of maintenance work, there was still no restarting 'Lufthanza'. A second bus pulled up and more maintenance work continued. We were assured that the guy from the second bus was an expert mechanic and would get the bus started. After about an hour we decided to cut our losses and decided to get on a minibus going by, despite having to ... read more