Ethiopian Adventures

Ethiopian Adventure

Ah, yes, the end of a multi-week adventure ends in the daunting task of writing what happened. The lists of places that you saw, the people that you met, the fiascos you encountered and overcame. A rambling list that, after the fact, is often not very entertaining to anyone who wasn’t there (and often not even to those who were there).

Here’s the cliffnotes on the “where and what we did”:

Take Off: Woon Cho and Joelle meet in Nairobi and travel to Addis where they are set to meet a couchsurfing host who has bought their tickets for their next flight (leaving at 7:30am). But Joelle wrote down his phone number wrong, so they are stranded 10 meters from his house at 2am w/o phone or internet. Somehow it all works out.

Lalibela: Christmas Eve and Christmas morning spent at a super sacred site for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. 11 churches carved out of these giant rocks in the 14^th century? How’d they do it? The angels did it. Ya know, I think I actually believe that one. You’ve also gotta be blessed if you can make it through a service from 6am til 3pm in a hot, claustraphobic church without eating and trying to get time with the priests’ rattles (I swear there is no pattern!). Yup, Joelle nearly fainted and nearly threw up on a pilgrim after just an hour in there!

Gonder: Do you have hot showers? Yes. We’ll take it. Um… where’s the water? Maybe tomorrow. Right. Castles and Kitfo (raw ground meat that we have sent back twice to be cooked more thoroughly as we imagine our brains spotted with tapeworm cysts).

Bahir Dar: We did the obligatory Lake Tana Monasteries, taking in the Byzantine depictions of the Madonna and Child, John the Baptist suckling from a goat, and various Ethiopian priests leaning on their staffs or chillin’ under umbrellas (this culture is in love with parasols!). Then we make it out for a night of traditional dancing where we make friends with some girls who collectively speak about 20 words of English, grab a tuktuk to a second club and in the process lose (and find) one of the girl’s shoes in the middle of the road, and eventually end up with Joelle getting dance lessons and being scolded for shaking her hips and not her shoulders. And then, we caved, leaving the cultural experiences behind in favor of gin and tonics on the lakefront and massages at the spa. Love Bahir Dar.

Addis Ababa: After her shoulder-dancing lessons, Joelle now thinks she’s a professional dancer and tries turning two potential pickpockets at the Mercato* into friends by grabbing their hands and forcing them to dance with her when Gangham Style comes up on someone’s phone. (She miraculously makes it out of the market with all her stuff!)

*Mercato: Arguably the largest open air market in Africa, selling everything from clothes to curios, spices to spare parts, and notorious for pickpockets.

Korea (via Addis): The Korean cultural experience then comes into full swing as pile into Tim and Laura Love’s LoveBug (yes, these two have the last name Love and have a rocking 1970’s VW bug) for a dinner of Korean deliciousness. This is of course followed the next morning by visiting the swanky Korean mission hospital in Addis with Tim, complete with authentic Korean classroom chairs, cafeteria food, etc. Too many cultures coming at me at once!

Back to Ethiopian Addis: We finish off with a cooking class since both Woon Cho and Joelle like to eat themselves sick on Ethiopian food and dread going back to the bland diets of Rwanda and Kenya. The sweet spice of berbere and shiro fills the kitchen as do tales of Haile Selassie, the self-unproclaimed  Rastafarian second coming of Christ. (So I’m told…Haile Selassie actually went to Jamaica and told the Rasta’s that he was sorry to disappoint, but he was not their next Savior – they didn’t believe him.) And then comes the coffee… roasted, ground, and brewed in slow delicious ceremony – even the adamantly non-coffee drinker (Joelle) cannot resist the deep chocolately flavor.

Dodola:  Going off of about 30 minutes of sleep apiece (Joelle b/c she went out on New Years Eve and Woon Cho because she tried unsuccessfully to meet a friend on a layover at 3:30am at the airport), the Bobsy twins make their way to catch an illegal minibus heading towards Dodola. Looping the city for an hour, with a stinky rag-cloaked fake minibus conductor and a fake passenger watching Asian porn on his stupid phone (shining oh so bright in the night), we nearly cheer when our two least favorite people finally disembark the minibus just as we are starting to pull away… chased by a motorcycle cop. We careen down the street, “safely” losing ourselves in the early morning city traffic. Seven hours and a few more twists and turns later, we make it to Dodola, a one street town and our launch point for the Bale Mountains.

Bale Mountains: Community-based ecotourism on a horse – for shizzle! Four days riding through mountains on a horse – have I died and gone to heaven? Ok, so sure it’s freezing cold some nights, but we’re at 3800meters and looking down over a sea of spectacularness! Sure, I’m dirty as stink, but we climbed 17km one day, dodging all number of tree branches and made it! Sure our guide tries to trick us that the white wolf (pointing to a domestic cat) only eats white people, but we saw two red wolves for reals! Sure, my butt and thighs and shins and everything is SORE, but we got to gallop for 3.5 hours like freakin’ cowgirls! Best. Trip. Ever. When can we do it again?

Merry Christmas: The Ethiopian calendar is very much confused. In Ethiopia, it’s currently 2005 (yes, you are seven years younger when you visit there). And New Years is in September. And Christmas is January 7^th. And 1AM is really 7AM. You can see how this gets tricky. But not tricky enough for us to miss Christmas! Gathered around the Love table (again, that’s Tim and Laura Love), we dined in true Ethiopian style with a freshly slaughtered goat, shiro, doro wot, and of course finished off with an Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Merry Christmas everyone!