This morning my driver, Abboush, picked me up and quickly turned from the paved road onto an unpaved road. It was rocky and uneven with sections of mud or several inches of water. I thought the road was horrible and could not imagine driving on it. Then, after more than half an hour, we got to a section that was rockier and muddier with huge lakes in the middle. Abboush said, here the road is really bad (duh!), crossed himself twice, and carefully drove through the lakes. You couldn’t see the bottoms but apparently he knew that they were only a few inches deep. It was really hard not to be a white knuckle passenger.
Once again, the drive itself was fascinating. We passed through a few villages on this unpaved road. Again, the houses were shanties but the fields were beautiful and well maintained. Whenever I ask about famine in Ethiopia, everyone blames the government, because there is fertile land everywhere. The main crops are coffee and teff, but we also passed fields of corn, rice, and sugar beets, as well as banana, fig, mango, papaya, and avocado trees. There seems to be electricity, even out in these villages, but not running water. People wash and do laundry in the rivers. They back their cars to the rivers and wash them, too. And they collect water from anywhere, even large puddles on the ground.
It is an odd mix of traditional and modern in the countryside. Most people walk or run everywhere, but there were a surprising number of motorcycles and bicycles. Many people were dressed traditionally today for New Years and most women wear dresses and the traditional scarves daily. But most men wear western dress, often with a serape like scarf, and the younger men and some of the young women wear jeans. The children's clothes may be shabby, but the young people are always neat and clean, although I have no idea how they manage to do that. I saw children rolling hoops, an activity that I had only read about from a simpler time in America, but I also saw young men playing pool.
It is an odd mix of urban and rural in the cities, and it turns out that Bahir Dar is even bigger than Gondar. The roads are paved and crowded with tuk-tuks and the city buses which are blue and white vans. There are a few trucks and private cars and white vans for all of the tourists. Maybe it was just for New Years, but there were lots of shepherds walking their sheep and goats on the roads. The main streets are boulevards and it was not uncommon to see horses or the occasional cow grazing in the center strip.
Back to my long drive to Tiss Abaye which means Smoke of the Nile and is also the name of the village. Westerners call it Blue Nile Falls. We picked up our guide who walked with me up and down the mountain until we had a beautiful view of the falls. I should have been prepared since Lake Tana yesterday was brown, but the Blue Nile Falls are brown. I have never seen brown waterfalls before. They now channel seventy five per cent of the river through a canal and over a dam, but even twenty five percent of the river is impressive. And again, since we are at the end of the rainy season, the falls are full. They pick up their brown color from all the runoff from the mountains. Later the falls will look more like water, but they won’t be nearly as big. Two of the sections will dry up completely and the main section will just be a thin ribbon.
This was our snack bar at the end - round and open sided. The proprietess could make tea or coffee from that (brown) water in the container, and there were bottles of water, Pepsi, and Fanta lying on the ground. I had a delicious, air temperature, real Pepsi.
Walking back from the falls, my guide explained to me the mystery of the Chinese road construction companies. Estifanos had been wrong that Ethiopia only paid thirty five percent of the cost of the roads. Ethiopia has to pay all of it - eventually. But the Chinese Export-Import Bank lends the Ethiopian government the funds and a Chinese construction company gets the work. Concept! Someone explain this to those Republicans in Congress who want to kill the funding of our Ex-Im Bank.
We drove back to Bahir Dar on that godawful road and took a drive to the top of the mountain overlooking the Blue Nile and the city.
We and were supposed to visit a palace , but it was closed for construction. The shops were all closed for New Year's. We still had a little time before I had to go to the airport, so we went to a cafe on the river and watched all of the people strolling in their holiday clothes. The traditional dress is white with hand embroidered crosses. Many of the children - both boys and girls - were dressed in cute white suits and dresses.
And that was my interesting week in Ethiopia. After a quick flight back to Addis Ababa, I have one night with wifi strong enough to send out the blogs I have been writing every day. Tomorrow morning I will fly to Nairobi and meet up with my safari group.
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