The photo to the right (second from the top) shows the exquisite view over the Rift Valley lakes that Andrew and I enjoyed as we ate our breakfast this morning in Arba Minch. Sadly the food was not up the quality of the view, but we felt that the view more than compensated for the greasy, oily omelette that I was served, and the surprisingly greasy, oily club sandwich that Andrew ordered. But it didn’t matter - after several days of having no running water, enduring rough dusty roads and dodging voracious mosquitoes, we had enjoyed a night with continuous electricity and hot water. Both failed just half an hour before we checked out, which was still by far the most reliable supply we had encountered for a week. We were happy and ready for the final 500 kilometre drive into Addis Ababa.
Because of the long drive, the only stops that we planned were for lunch and refreshments. Sightseeing today would be restricted to looking through the windows of the car. And yet the state of Ethiopia’s highways meant that there was a constant stream of interesting things to see, both on and off the road. Ethiopia’s roads serve not only as a channel for vehicle and (even more so) animal movement, but as community centres - places where children can play and people stand and have conversations, safe in the knowledge that vehicles will simply zig-zag around them. After a couple of weeks on Ethiopia’s roads, it all seems so normal now!
The first section of our drive north of Arba Minch to Sodo was on a heavily broken road that had once been sealed, but now the potholes comprised more than 50% of the surface area. Dodging the huge potholes reduced our average speed to just 25 kilometres per hour in places. We stopped in Sodo to stretch our legs and have a much-appreciated macchiato. To drive from Sodo to Addis Ababa there was a choice of roads. We could either take the same road through the Rift Valley and the town of Shashemene that we had used when we had driven south, or we could take a new road through Hossana. We opted to drive through Hossana as it was slightly shorter, the road was of better quality and it gave us the chance to see some different countryside.
We did stop on one occasion a little to the north of Sodo. We had been observing a large number of farmers ploughing fields in preparation for the hoped-for coming rains, and when we saw one farmer doing ploughing right next to the road we decided to stop and have a closer look. The farmer was extremely friendly and offered Andrew the opportunity to make a furrow with the plough behind his two cows. As Andrew commented, it isn’t as easy as it looks.
After a stop for lunch in Hossana, where we both enjoyed some excellent spaghetti, we continued the drive northwards on smooth sealed roads of a type we had not encountered for almost a week. Although some areas we passed through had problems with severe soil erosion in the form of gullying, the farmlands in general appeared to be very green and productive. We reached our hotel in Addis Ababa at a little before 5:00, having spent almost an hour driving through the traffic clogged streets from the city’s outskirts.
After checking in to the hotel, I spent the next three hours answering as many as possible of the 124 e-mails that were waiting for me. At 8:30 pm, our driver called at the hotel to take us out for dinner at a restaurant specialising in Ethiopian food (which really means a cuisine based on injera). This was a great experience. The restaurant was named the ‘Habesha Restaurant on Bole Road’, and it was the best injera that Andrew and I have ever had! Furthermore, there was a floor show featuring singing and dancing, the dancing being modernised adaptations of traditional tribal dancing. It was a very loud, very tasty experience, and an excellent way to spend our final evening in Ethiopia.
We returned to the hotel at about 10:30 pm. I was intending to finish answering e-mails, but remembering that it had taken about half an hour to pay the bill at this hotel when we stayed here previously, I decided instead to pay our hotel bill this evening. That was a wise move; it took just over two hours. I finally managed to get to bed at 1:00 am, which was later than I had hoped as we had to rise at 5:30 am the following morning to catch our flight to Namibia.
