Saturday, September 29, 2007

Trip to Ethiopia

Recently, we went on a trip to Ethiopia and I decided to share my experience. Not many tourists select Ethiopia as their destination and the reason is pretty obvious; there’s not much tourist infrastructure there and the only reason foreigners show up is to pick up their adopted children or to start a business. Basically, you won’t have to worry about crowds of tourists. Ethiopia is the 2nd-most populous nation in Africa and the official language is Amharic that is written in the Ge’ez script. You will find many English and Arabic speakers.

First Impressions

The landscape is amazing, the people are very nice, the sense of history is tangible. Ethiopia is pretty pleasant all year round, with temperatures in Addis Ababa averaging around 20°C (68°F) no matter what the season! They say the best time of the year is in Early October, just after the rains. Our trip took place in early August, so it was raining on and off, but even then, the country was wonderfully green, the wildflowers were stunning and everyone was preparing for the New Millennium!

Grand Guest House

We stayed at the Grand Guest house, in Addis Ababba. It was a really nice villa, everything was new and clean - so that was a relief. The staff was really nice and they served breakfast every morning in the dinning area for everyone in the guest house. Since the guest house was a small villa, it was easy to met everyone staying there; we met a very nice British couple and an Ethiopian woman who was running her own shop in Dubai.

13 Months of Sunshine

During our visit, everyone was preparing for the New Millennium. For many years, Ethiopians have celebrated their own calendar that was originally based on the old Egyptian calendar. The calendar has 13 months, 12 of them are 30 days and the 13th month is five or six days. Every four years, it adds a leap day without exceptions. The current year according to the Ethiopian calendar is 2000. They recently celebrated the millennium when the new year began in Ethiopia September 12, 2007 of the Gregorian calendar. The celebration would last a whole year to mark this special event.

Moreover, Ethiopians also have a different way of telling time. The 12-hour clock cycles does not begin at midnight and noon, but instead are offset six hours. So, Ethiopians refer to midnight (or noon) as 6 o’clock.

Kaldi’s Coffee

We frequently visited a popular local coffee shop known as “Kaldi’s Coffee”, named after its owner. It was very funny since the interior was a clone of Starbucks’, as was the staff uniform and menu and even their logo! Kaldi’s coffee was established in 2002 and the coolest part was that the coffee beans were grown locally and the milk was fresh cows’ milk! I later discovered that Starbucks has a contract with Ethiopia for their coffee beans. The most expensive item on their menu is a can of Red Bull, which costs around 20 Bir ( 30 Bir = 1 Kuwaiti Dinar ). A tall cup of Mocha Latte is only 7 Bir and the short is 5 Bir only! They also offer different ranges of freshly squeezed juice and homemade ice-cream for a small price. Everything tastes better than Starbucks and is so much cheaper!

Sodere

We headed south to a village called Sodere. It is known as “the spa town in Ethiopia” because it has natural hot springs. Many people from Addis-Abbaba head there to spend their weekends. On our way, some kids came out in the middle of the road and started dancing and singing; their way of greeting tourists. It was really fun and then we gave the kids cookies and it was really nice to see them so happy over something so simple. This trip really made me find out how much of what we have that we take for granted.

We camped at a resort that had natural hot springs, swimming pools and a restaurant. It was really nice. At the restaurant’s open court, there were little monkeys hanging around waiting for the right moment to steal a sandwich or anything laying around thats edible! Even though there was always someone with his stick on guard, to make sure tourists are not attacked with these mischievous monkeys, it really didn’t stop them from sneaking around. I guess that was the reason food was not allowed inside the cabins -to protect its visitors!

Walking around at the resort was really fun. There were many beautiful birds to see and they chirped all day and night. We also saw a few ducks, crows and gazelles. Back at the cabins, some of us decided to stay up all night and enjoy the moon light and cold wind.

All in all

It was a great experience and it was wonderful seeing parts of Africa. If you are interested, there are more photos of Ethiopia up on my flickr page: flickr.com/photos/jonquille.

Update :

There were a few searches on “guest house in Ethiopia” running through my site, so I decided to add contact information here:
Grand Guest House
Tel : 011 663 49 09 / 10 / 11
email : grandguesthouse (at) yahoo (dot) com

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