Coming down off the mountain hike (literally and figuratively), we stopped at a little settlement for single mothers. The staff teach them arts and crafts so they can support themselves and their children. This was the first time I’d seen a loom operating in person.
Seeing such attention to a needy part of the community, especially a solely female one, was a refreshing change from our travels so far in Africa.
The women also weave and knit and even make their own clay pots and fire them on-site in one of several kilns.
We made our way back into town to explore it a bit. Gondar is very hilly, and the power often cuts out due to weather. Our few night excursions, say for dinner, were made trickier by the lack of street lighting due to a power cut. We even managed to watch England’s last World Cup match (vs. Croatia) in a little cafe that had a generator during one of these powerless evenings. Unfortunately, England lost, and more unfortunately, most of the Ethiopians in our room were rooting for Croatia and loudly at that.
At least on the way in from the settlement we could see the lovely cobblestone streets and donkey-drawn carts plying them.
I don’t have photos for this next part, but I think it’s worth trying to tell with these squiggly-line pictures.
Our time in Gondar came to an end and we got up early to pack. One of the minibus touts (street salesmen) came to our hotel room door while we packed to see if we would commit to their minibus to Bahia Dar for 200 birr. We demurred, and said we’d be downstairs at 0700 to see who was there. We did, they were gone. So we went with our backup plan and hopped on a minibus for 10 birr to Azezo bus station, about 10 km (6 mi) out of town. A half dozen minibuses waited on the street, most of them empty. They tried to get us into them, offering a reasonably good rate of 75 birr. But since they only leave once full, there wasn’t anyone in them yet, and they’re usually massively overcrowded, we decided to try the actual station building and see about a proper coach.
The actual station building was empty except for about 20 young male touts. They fell upon us like flies on shit. We tried walking to the various touts actually behind sales windows, but the circle closed around us and pressed inwards, competing with each other for our attention. I pushed three of them away gently but firmly to keep us from being separated as Dave got properly fed up with the press. We managed to hold them off and get to the exit with our persons and property intact less than a minute after entering.
We made our way down to the minibuses and found one close to leaving. Hopping in, we made our way to Bahia Dar.
In Bahia Dar, we found our way to our hotel and settled in to do some planning. Then the power went out. This is apparently very common here. A rather slimy-seeming man who seemed to at least be affiliated with the hotel suggested some activities, including a waterfall tour that afternoon. We took him up on the waterfall tour, and held off on any further big activities for the next day.
We were to join 4 Spaniards going out to the mountains. We didn’t have a ton of time until sunset, so we hurried into the minibus and set out on the road. At one point traffic just stopped. A semi truck and trailer was being pulled out of a ditch.
The town at the waterfall is actually down a very long and bumpy dirt/mud road. At the river, they told us the trail was too treacherous not to take a guide (for extra money) and we also must pay for the river crossing. Lots of hidden charges later, we set out.
We kept on hiking, trying to avoid the mud from the copious rainfall this region had been receiving.
We didn’t see anyone else trying to make the journey at this time of day. That should have been a clue.
The sound of rushing water grew, and we rounded the bend to stop dead in front of the muddiest waterfall I’d ever seen.
Even Dave got misty-eyed.
We walked the arc in front of the waterfall and stopped constantly to take more pictures. The sun was starting to set, and our thoroughly-unnecessary guide was getting antsy.
We finally made it back to the minibus and set out for town. The driver wasn’t having a great time… apparently there were no windshield wipers or defrosters, so for 45 minutes of extremely bumpy, rocky, muddy, flooded road, he hunched forward in the darkness and wiped the inside of the windshield with his bare hand over and over.
The Spaniards invited us to a drink and dinner with them. The drink spot was a cavernous open space with incredibly bored musicians on a raised platform. The drinks weren’t bad but it wasn’t long until we left for dinner.
The dinner was at a nearby cafe, and we had a traditional Ethiopian meal: lamb tips with onions, injera (a sort of grain, made into a spongey pancake, Ethiopia’s staple crop), and some scrambled injera mixed with chili and tomato. The whole is on one platter, no plates or utensils. Everyone eats with their right hand only, off of the communal plate. I was too hungry to take a photo.
The power was still out all night and into the morning. I tried to do some hand washing of my clothes in a sink but the water quickly stopped running. Everywhere. We were now in a hotel with no power or water, and unlike some places we’d stayed, there were no buckets or similar mitigations available. The toilets couldn’t even flush. There was no WiFi (my cell internet doesn’t work in Ethiopia). The hotel across the street, however, had no such troubles.
We decided to push on to Addis Ababa next instead of our planned stop halfway, part of our desire to claw back some of the 10 days we lost in Egypt, but as our hotel couldn’t even give us an idea when anything would be fixed, we had to walk all over town to find a coach we could reserve.
We found the sheep/goat/walia market, but not the coach stand.
A little WiFi was definitely in order, and we’d also not yet had any proper Ethiopian coffee. Maybe there was a way to solve both of these problems at once?
We found the coach stand but all the coaches for the next day were sold out. We booked the first available, two days later (Sunday), as a backup plan, but decided to try for a 4:30a minibus the next morning anyway.
The slimy “official” hotel tout we’d dealt with before had offered us a 25% discount because of the water and power trouble, but had only arranged a ~6% discount. We got him on the phone and argued, but he pushed back hard and got really rude. We escalated to the owner, who quickly gave us 50% off. We went to bed triumphant, dreading the morning alarm, and smelly.
Next time: a tremendous set of jugs
P.S. Dave says: “Hang on, you’re only now finishing Bahia Dar?”