Eithiopia: Gondar, simians, Axum, Ladibella, Addis

Arrived in Addis late at night and managed to get a taxi to the hotel for 10 Birr which is 50p. Nice hotel with a room high up where the Mozzies can’t get you. Also Addis is 2000m up so it’s cool at night. Can’t tell you what a nice feeling getting under a quilt to keep warm is after months of being too hot in bed. Next day we flew straight to Gondar. The views from the window are impressive. It’s a dry yellow and green landscape that reminds me of western movies a little.

Gondar turned out to be really nice. It’s got a café culture and is fairly hassle free. (Though on our return there after the simian mountains, I wore shorts to go into town and we got hassled by everyone. Guess it’s a cultural thing, none of the locals wear shorts so if you do you deserve what you get.) we had lunch neat the town square and got our first taste of real eithiopian food, injera.

Vicky's happy, she's got grub.

Went to visit the castle compound (which is where the never laughed until toilet incident occurred.) It’s an impressive place, but the photo’s say it better than I do….
we were feeling silly pose-ish

Then we went to a church, again, see Photo’s
churchyard view, 's alright eh?

The bones are of a former ruler, doubt they expected to be in a glass case for the entertainment of westerners when they built the church.

Eithiopia is turning out to be a lot more modern in it’s outlook than we expected. There’s the café culture in Gondar for a start. At the castle compound thee were a group of 3 girls doing a fashion shoot, it looked a lot more like a way to entertain themselves than a photography course or anything professional, but still, it’s the sort of thing that we just wouldn’t have seen elsewhere in Africa. We met someone who said their guide had taken them to a gay bar in Gondar and again, we’ve not seen anything else like this. (Homosexuality is still VERY taboo in Africa). Then there’s the traditional dancing…

We went out to a bar that had traditional dancing. It’s great fun, they dance and sing about whatever the audience shout out and the songs seem to be more rugby song inspired topics than love ballads, Certainly, every verse seems to end with a punch line. We couldn’t understand a word, but they asked us where we were from and the next punch line ended with ‘England’. Anyway, it has a lot of similarities with strip clubs…
The girl dancer is the centre of attention.
There were no local women there.
The beer is overpriced.
You stick money on the dancer’s forehead or tuck it into her hat when she dances in front of you. (I know it’s not the same as a g-string, but the principle is the same.)
She jiggles her boobs in front of you, (dances here seem to be either the ‘Tigran shoulder shuffle’, a good impersonation of a man with a pneumatic drill, or the ‘pigeon walk’ which looks like what it sounds like.) Bra’s don’t really seem to have made it into African culture so the shoulder shuffle is quite dramatic.

In fact there were only really two major differences between the local folk dance club and a strip club.
The girl didn’t actually get naked.
and
Vicky let me go to the local folk dance club.
Boncy boob girl from Gondar Bouncy dancers from addis
So after Gondar we headed for the Simean Mountains. We got a bus at 5am. Or at least we got on a bus at 5am. It sat around, just like all the other busses, until 7am. 2 hours with 50 busses running their engines makes your eyes water and your throat hurt from the fumes. It’s amazing no one passes out. Anyway, once we were off it was ok. The roads here are hard packed gravel, but there’s so little rain to cause ruts that they’re actually quite good. The town at the foot of the Simean Mountains is called Debark which is where we checked into the Simean Mountains Lodge. The place is nice enough with helpful staff and a good restaurant, but it should have been renamed bed bug hell. We always check the bed for blood spots, but if they change the sheets, you don’t get that clue. Since we wouldn’t sleep in a bed with what looked like unwashed sheets, I don’t really know why we check… Anyway a day later we were both itching from head to foot and hoping it was bed bugs - gone once we left the hotel – rather than fleas or lice. Thankfully we didn’t get any more bites.

The next day we were off into the Simean Mountains, we got a lift to Sankaber the first village inside the park and then headed off with our Scout, our donkey driver and our Donkey. We hired a donkey to carry our bags, how cool is that.

It’s a bit like walking around in a fairy tale. We both think some of the inspiration for the Lord of the Rings could easily have come from Eithiopia. The area just outside the Simean mountains is idyllic: hay fields, circular houses, tiny villages connected by tracks and a hilly landscape that could easily have inspired the Shire. Gondar has lots of castles to inspire the white tower and is so close to ‘Gondor’ that Vicky keeps mispronouncing it. The town of Bahir Dar is just down the road from Gondor - Bahir Dar / Bara Dur? You decide.

Anyway, first stop Gitch. A tiny village on the side of the hill. There’s not much to tell really. The best of the views all come after that first day.

Next day we were off to Chenek via some of the best scenery we’ve seen out here and we saw some Ibix thanks to the sharp eyes of our scout Mskano. An IbixRidge top views

This is the zoomed in view down showing all the clutivation on the steep hillsides

by a waterfallcampsite -first night at GitchGitch meeting the locals.The walk to Chenek Still the walk to Chenek

Gitch had been cold at night, Chenek, despite being lower at 3500m rather than 3800 was much colder. Neither of us slept well. The next day we headed to the top of a 4300m peak called ‘Bwaheit’ Either we’re a lot fitter or we’ve kept some of our acclimatization because we hardly felt the altitude. Amazing views and we saw another Ibix, up close this time. On the way back down we met a group of Germans who had driven all the way from Gondar to within 20minutes of the mountain summit. Lazy Lazy sods. I think they missed the best views on the previous day from Gitch and there can’t be much satisfaction in walking 20 minutes to the top of the mountain and feeling knackered cos you’re not acclimatized at all.

Top of Bwaheit, so high the sky looks like space is coming to meet you

We headed back to Chenek that night and had a proper wash in a pool of the stream while the sun was still out to warm us. The water was freezing, but we both felt better for it. The day after we headed back to Sankaber. We got within about an hour of making it when we jumped on a truck to take us back to Debark, it was probably the last transport for the day and we didn’t want to take the chance and have to stay in Sankaber. We got the bus straight back to Gonder rather than staying in the bed bug lodge again.

We went out to a posh restaurant in Gondar the next day. The food was great, but weirdly they had live ducks walking around. I was just wondering how they stopped the place getting covered in duck poo, when a duck poo’d on the carpet and amswered my question.

Not Duck poo
Not duck poo DUCK POO!

There was an AIDS concert in the town square. The first act was diabolical, so we only stayed long enough to get some snaps.

They're all waiting for...

This man. Can you feel the stage presence? we couldn't so we went and looked at another old church.

Amazing tree.

Next up a flight to Axum. We stayed in a hotel called the Remhai, though their advertising posters around town spelled it variously, Remhai, Rayhai, RemHay, Rimhay and Romhay. Axum is famous for its Stelae, which are 1000 year old monolithic carved monuments. The tallest still standing is 13m high and they’re in the middle of re-erecting a 23m one that the Italians have returned – having previously stolen it at the end of the last century. The place had some underground tombs and an interesting-ish museum with lots of ancient pottery. There’s also a church compound. They claim to hold the ark of the covenant in one of them but won’t show it to anyone. Rome doesn’t seem too excited by the possibilities and neither was I. There was one interesting thing though, we figured out when the great big lie that Christ was white started... They have some Virgin Mary paintings from before and after the 6th century Byzantine period. The VM is black prior to the 6th century and then after, white (or at least more Turkish coloured than black).
They showed us a book which was 1000 years old, many of the pictures were coloured with things like egg yolk and the colour had lasted through the years. Though with them pawing their way over it every day for tourists I don’t fancy it’s chances of another 1000. They kiss the book too, which I thought was weird until I saw them kiss a dusty old carpet in the monastery… religious nuts if you ask me. They also had a museum, which was quite good fun because it had just opened and the caretaker was trying to learn the name of everything in English, so we taught him, goblet, embossed, trumpet, umberella, and spire. He put us to shame, after 2 weeks in Eithiopia, we’ve learned one work of Amharic, ‘amasaganalo’ which means ‘thanks’. Still why would we bother to learn a language where thanks has 5 syllables! What’s wrong with ‘Ta’?

They spent years carving it, when they stood it up, this happened. Ha Ha! idiots!

Then the next day we were off to Ladibella, which is 2600m up and perched on the side of a hill. It’s an Othodox Eithiopian Christian centre with lots of churches hewn straight out of the rock. It’s still a place of worship now, with hermits, nuns, priests and lots of dedicated locals. They’re sticking a false roof over some of the churches because the designer forgot to put drainage on the roof and so they get waterlogged in the wet season.
They’re very impressive though, flying in the face of all building techniques everywhere, they started with one really big rock and just dug down into it until they had a monolith and then carved that out to create an ornate church. X marks the spot Once it was all one rock. I recon when they finished, some clever local came up and showed them how to make bricks.

Us in the doorway, I think this is where the fleas hopped aboard.

The kings wife did this, who says DIY and women don't mix?



some use existing caves They were cleaning it with knives. Nutters!