Of course, we have returned home (?) and are back to what is now our “normal”‘ lives. In a way it’s better that I’m writing this post now – I’ve had time to develop a better understand Ethiopia in retrospect. Truth is, I’m not sure I’ll ever really be able to grasp all the emotions I felt while we were there. Ethiopia was all at once breathtaking, heartbreaking, and inspiring.

Coffee Ceremony

The people here were most impressive. Their ingenuity and will to succeed is truly inspiring. They do so much with so little – all the while being thankful for what they do have. This was most evident when Michael and I took an impromptu cooking class. It wasn’t truly a class, but rather a kid invited us over and volunteered his mother to teach us how to cook. It wouldn’t cost us anything, he said, except the cost of the food.

A (rainy) trip to the market and several highway robberies later (we paid a severe penalty for being faranji), we had bags full of native vegetables and enough spices to make enough dora wat for an army.

Mmmm....

We started with a coffee ceremony, roasting beans and pouring sugar and thick coffee into tiny cups. We made many different dishes, but the injera was the most memorable. Balancing on logs over an open fire, they heat the gigantic flat pan. It’s circular, and you must pour the injera batter all the way around the edges first, then filling in the middle. They did all this like pros, but generously praised Michael and me for our clumsy efforts.

Pouring Injera

The food is easy to make, and we managed to pay much less for the spices we brought home. By the time we left, we had figured out that they should cost about 1/10th the price they originally tried to charge us!

We made our way from the east coast of Tanzania to the midwest to start our safari in the town of Arusha. There, our driver, James, and our cook, Michael, picked us up at the hotel and we went on our way. We were so excited to start our safari experience. It would be great to be the polar opposite of the zoo life that we had seen at the National Zoo (or any zoo for that matter). We would be the ones in the animals’ territory, boxed into our Land Cruiser, and the animals probably staring at us. 

On the way to Lake Manyara, James stops for our first sighting of a giraffe and zebra on the side of the public highway. James must be good. He has seen thousands of giraffes and zebras during his 15 year career, but he still understands the magnitude of our first sighting. James continues to show us the animals throughout our six day journey; we never tired of seeing lions, leopards, eagles, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras, wildebeests, buffalo, or jackals. I became somewhat of a bird-watcher, something that I could never understand to be interesting. However, in Lake Manyara, Serengeti, and the Ngorongoro Crater, the birds were the easiest for me to spot (and then have James identify for us)–you can’t miss something far above the landscape.

How do you pick out the highlights of a six day once-in-a-lifetime journey?

• Was it the two female lions with 4 cubs following in between?
• Watching the cubs fight over nursing turns?
• The elusive leopard lying next to its dead prey in the top of a tree?
• The 22-member elephant family that walked next to our car?
• Checking off sightings of the “big-five” (leopards, black rhinos, elephant, buffalo, lion)?
• Discovering a pride of four lions starting to devour a warthog from 10 yards away?
• Cheetahs eyeing their potential dinner?
• A herd of hundreds of wildebeest?
• Seeing a savannah: thousands of acres of just grass and an occasional tree?
• Being in the collapsed volcanic crater of Ngorongoro and seeing the 20,000 big animals that make their home there?
• Or was it this? (Note: If lion pornography offends you, please do not view)

On the last hour of the last day, we had pulled up to the male and female lion lying next to each other. James comments that this showmanship exists during mating season. The lions mate about every 15-30 minutes for one week; if we are patient, we will witness it. And as you can see, James knew his field and his expertise paid off.

The six days of 10 hour animal watching went by extremely fast. While the lions provided us with a very vivid and intimate experience, the countless other animal visuals were equally as rewarding.

(We wish we could put other pictures of our journey, but I think we just crippled the Ethiopian internet by uploading this one video.)

After several months of what I would consider careful photo management, I not-so-carefully managed to erase two weeks worth of Tanzania pictures. How could you have done something so stupid, Brooke? you might be asking. And I would tell you it was shockingly easy to lose all our pictures of Zanzibar, Pemba, Arusha, and Moshi. The morning we started the safari, I was checking our memory card for empty space. The screen said “1.6 GB of 3.6 GB used. Format OK?” Yes, I thought to myself, 3.6 GB is the correct format; the card is actually 4 GB, but it always shows up as 3.6. So I clicked OK. And then a little bar of death ran across the bottom of the camera screen, and then in less than one second over 1200 pictures were gone. Forever. I had mistakenly formatted the memory card, which of course deleted all the memory. *Sigh* At least it was before the safari.

Misadventures

Ethiopia’s claim to fame is “13 Months of Sunshine.” Their calendar actually does have 13 months, as they count each month as 30 days then tack on an extra “month” of five or six days at the end of the year. (Note: they also keep time differently. 7am for us is called 1 o’clock here, which kind of makes sense to me – the day starts when it’s light outside. But this has caused some confusion, and we have to clarify if everything is Ethiopian time or our time, which they call European time.)

From our experience, 13 Months of Sunshine couldn’t be further from the truth. At last count we’ve been here nine days, and nine days we’ve had rain. Cold rain. Downpour-style, cold rain. We thought it was funny, this little irony, on the first day.  We were having our clothes washed, which were filthy from safari dirt, and only had shorts to wear when we arrived in Addis Ababa. It was pouring and very chilly, but we made the best of it. This slogan got progressively less funny every day, and peaked on cruelty yesterday when we took a day trip to the Simien Mountains and couldn’t hike because of the downpour and fog. As we’re wrapping up our time here it’s getting kind of funny again, and in spite of the rain we’ve gotten to see some great things. Pictures will follow, we promise, when we find a place where the internet will support the uploading of pictures. That is, unless I manage to delete them all again!

Mayhem

Michael has said that arranging transportation has been our biggest headache of this trip, and is most often the place where we’re being taken advantage of. Finally, though, (finally!!) we outsmarted them. As we left Addis Ababa, we had a very early morning flight and had arranged for a taxi the night before. A staff member at the guesthouse (we’ll call him “Ali”), who had asked us about 1,000 questions about our travel plans the night before, knocked on the door a little before 5:30am – European time – to let us know our taxi had arrived. Then he said, “Pay me and I will give it to him.” This sounded a little shady, and we were busily packing at the time, so we made up a convenient excuse that our money wasn’t handy right away; we would pay the driver when we got out there. When we got to the taxi and loaded our bags, Ali was there with the driver and again said “Pay me, 150 birr.” Why would we pay you? The driver is right here, we’ll pay him. Last night we had negotiated this ride for 100 birr (a little over seven dollars). Wait a minute…. Ali is trying to get a commission (and a huge one, at that!) for a ride we had already arranged for ourselves!

What we surmise had happened is this: The night before, we took our cab home and asked him if he could take us to the airport the next morning, at 5:30. We also told him the Ethiopian time, which is 11:30. He either didn’t show, or Ali chased him away, whereby Ali flagged down his buddy (our imposter cab driver) and was counting on us not recognizing the difference. Then Ali didn’t know we’d been planning to pay 100 birr and were shocked that the price had jumped 50% overnight.

I told Michael this wasn’t our driver. He didn’t have the Che Guevera flag that I’d noticed last night. Michael asked him his name, and I tried to get a look at his face. Neither matched what we were expecting; this was definitely not our guy. Ali, meanwhile, is still trying to get us to pay him 150 birr; 100 of which (we presume) he would give the driver for the cost of the ride, 50 of which would go in his pocket for his trouble. No thanks, buddy! We asked the driver to open the trunk so we could get our bags. The driver, realizing we were on to the scam, gave us our bags and drove away. We told Ali we weren’t interested in his arranging a cab for us, we had already arranged one, and if he didn’t show we would find another. He knew he was busted, and said it would be hard to find a cab at this hour. We said we had an aggreement with someone, and we’d wait. We waited for a bit, but time was of the essence – we had a flight to catch! By now our original driver was pretty late and we would have to find our own ride. We bid Ali a not-so-farewell and made our way to the main road to hail a cab, which we found instantly. It was the same driver that Ali had tried to arrange for us. He gladly took us to the airport (although sans seat belts and the door flew open – twice). For how much, you may be wondering? 100 birr, just as we’d planned.

I’ve never been more wrong.

The boat must’ve been my own personal version of hell. It was late, and ok, hakuna matata, that’s fine, whatever, *big deep breath* I can deal with that. There was some confusion over what line we should be in. That was cleared up. We were some of the last ones on, and ok, that’s fine too. When we finally boarded, there were already people all over the aisles, in every other seat, and no two seats were empty next to each other. All right… I can live without him for two hours – no problem.

So I sit to another large stinky man. (Is this a recurring theme, or what?) There are two empty seats, but one is being reserved for his wife, who’s sitting in the aisle of the boat. I later learn this is to help prevent seasickness. I’m sorry to say this little trick doesn’t seem to work.

As we bounced over the gigantic waves, I’ll have to admit it wasn’t what I’d envisioned for my boat trip. I was pretty uncomfortable, but then I wasn’t the only one. At one point I realized that nearly every single person on the boat is vomiting! I wondered if Michael was (turns out he wasn’t). Then I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me – everyone else is puking, maybe I should puke too? I considered it. But I still didn’t feel nauseous.

This wasn’t all. Between the separation, the hoardes of people, and the vomiting, believe me, that wasn’t all. Of all the entertainment in all the world they could be blasting over the television, what is it you think they chose?

If you guessed American professional wrestling, you’ve just won yourself a free boat trip. WWF was turned up full blast on the TVs.  Unbelievable.

After two hours of kicking myself, the man beside me practically knocked me down to get off the boat, and the real chaos ensued. “Please exit the boat in an orderly fashion!” was never announced, so everyone was quite literally pushing, shoving, yelling, and desperately trying to get off the boat. People were even getting on for the next trip before we’d gotten off! I felt claustrophobic and it was then that I really wanted to vomit. Finally, I pushed my way to the daylight of outside, found Michael, and walked as fast as I could off the dock. *whew* We made it. And I crossed my fingers that this would be the last boat trip we have planned for a long, long time.

The flight was about 20 minutes long, and definitely scary. I can’t imagine how Michael felt, sitting there in the cockpit! Thankfully, we landed safely in Tanga and without difficulty. One thing I noticed, though, is that this isn’t even a proper airport, it’s an “airstrip”!