Blogs from Ethiopia, Africa - page 2

We were picked up by the Toyota workshop driver unexpectedly in the morning and this gave us a false sense of progress arriving at the workshop. One thing we have come to learn in Ethiopia in the last few days is “local time” which is completely different to time on your watch. It is measured as hours from sunrise which is around 6:30am. So after much initial confusion in recent days as to when the car parts might arrive we learned and realised they were on a completely different clock to us. Bizarre though that their watches and phones and computers display time as we know it but they then work out local time and quote that. A good example of what we’re trying to work with here in trying to get a car fixed in ... read more

We stumbled on a local bar/club/live music venue and not another western face in sight – this was where the locals hung out. We were immediately subject to some Ethiopian singing which to put it politely was not our cup of tea. This then escalated into dancers, women mostly wiggling their boobs and men mostly wiggling their shoulders. Then umbrellas got involved and the range of colours on show certainly showed a broad range. While this was going on we saw locals nearby drinking wine, so we thought we should try some and picked one called Tej. It turns out Tej is a honey mead wine, in short it is like mixing mead with white wine. It is alcoholic for sure, but realistically an acquired taste. After about 2 hours, we decided our cultural limit had ... read more

You spend days waiting for simple things like a tarmac road and a larger town where you can actually get some decent supplies, and then you get stuck in one and it isn't that much fun. We headed off early in the knowledge of making Bahir Dar on the lake and having a lazy day catching-up, doing washing, replacing the blown tyre and re-supplying. We were on good tarmac roads and the going was good as we approached the outskirts and saw a Toyota service centre and dealership. Since the steering was a little off (likely due to all the bumps) we decided to stop in and get the steering aligned. They were very friendly and said it would take 30 minutes, well it didn't. After an hour they explained some of the bolts they needed ... read more

We are definitely travelling the road less travelled as we just don’t see any other tourists, but what we do see is real Ethiopian (we think). Whilst we might complain about the roads (and yes they were bad tracks occasionally relieved with tarmac, albeit with massive potholes), it is really quite telling to look at those by the side of the road. Everywhere we stop or even slow down we get hounded for money, water and lifts down the road. As we came through the South everyone lived in little mud huts by the side of the road in traditional tribal villages and while they may not have had much they seemed happy. The men all carried small wooden stools and AK47 assault rifles, women always carried water containers and children mainly seemed to have sticks ... read more

What started out as a good day ended up very muddy and poor Nelly reached the limit of how far we could go. We headed into Turmi to try and buy some supplies but the sum total of potatos, tomatos, onions and garlic seemed all that was available. So after limited purchases we pushed North, although finding the road out of town proved harder than we thought as the one we believed to be correct ended in a footpath. Eventually we did find the right road and headed out of town where they had started building a massive road, but of course we couldn’t go on it and had to go down a rather bumpy set of tracks down the side. Eventually and rather unexpectedly we reached a section of Tarmac in the middle of nowhere ... read more