At bit of pressure!!!

Trip Start Dec 24, 2009

Trip End Apr 25, 2010

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Where I stayed

Chambala Hotel

Flag of Ethiopia Awasa, Ethiopia
Thursday, February 11, 2010

On trips like this going through Africa one tends to develop stomach problems from the water or food, sometimes at the most unfortunate times!! It seems to happen to everyone, some more often than others, and this was a first on this trip for me! It happened to me while driving from Addis to Awasa. As lovely as the Ethiopian countryside is, there are just way too many people hanging around the side of the road, and there are a serious lack of good facilities (if you know what I mean???). Lets just say that I had a few lucky escapes on the trip down, and a pretty stressful time!!

The road out of Addis was pretty slow going, but once we were about 100km out the traffic got less, but the amount of animals and people in the road became more. We managed to cruise along at a fairly good pace, and I'm happy to say that up to now, we have not hit any animals or people yet, so long may this continue!!

Lake Langano

We stopped for lunch at lake Langano, which seemed very nice, we decided however to push on south, as we were eager to get to Kenya, and knew that it would be slow going over the coming days. As always we really enjoyed the scenery, and rural Ethiopia seems very different from the scenes we all saw in the 80's on TV. It is very lush, and broadly speaking the people seem very happy. One downside is that they beg a lot. Whenever you stop all you hear from the kids is: YOU! YOU! YOU! YOU GIVE ME BIRR!!! I think the presence of the NGO's have lead to this sort of mindset among the locals. It is a debate that seems to surface whenever one chats to foreigners trying to make a difference here. Do handouts actually help the people in the long run? You make up your mind!

We spent the night in a hotel in Awasa, which was very pleasant, I got the Cruiser washed, which was a miracle, as the Minister of Finance is keeping a tight reign to the funds at the moment.. The most interesting thing about this town were the vultures that were perched in the tree tops. They were massive, and we were amazed how the branches managed to hold them up there. There were also a interesting selection of monkeys in the trees around our hotel.

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