Northern Ethiopia

In case anyone was wondering what happened to my blogging for the past few weeks, well it seems that Ethiopia has a block on all blog sites so I had to just write them up and save them to post later on.

In a nutshell from Addis we headed north to Bahir Dar to see the monasteries on the lake (not quite as impressive as we were hoping but still very relaxing), and the Blue Nile falls (which were great). Steve and I both ended up with flu for a few days which meant we couldn't go to Laliebela, but we tucked ourselves up in bed and emerged a few days later feeling much better. We managed to make it out to the Obama Cafe in town for the most grossly oversized and disgusting burger we have encountered so far...but the cafe was certainly the hip place to be!

From Bahir Dar it was up to Gondor to see the castles and trek in the Simien Mountains. Gondor is a quiet sleepy town with lots of good Ethiopian hospitality and a series of very European style castles. We had a night out in the San Fransisco Golden Gate bar, and tried a Tej Beat (local bar) for some home brew honey wine.

The Simien trek was GREAT. It was a two night three day trek where 6 of us (Gav, Shin, Katie, Ryan and us) drove into the mountains and got 3 ponies to carry our gear for us. We trekked up to a base camp and from there walked to several look out points. It's amazing scenery quite unlike anything I've seen before. Rather than the mountains being peaks it is more like a giant plateau range that you clamber over at 4000 m....quite high. We could certainly feel the altitude while climbing and at night the temperature dropped to well below freezing. Consequently Steve and I were also freezing as I checked the rating on our sleeping bags and it was -2, and on the way our sleeping bags had somehow got wet which wasn't a good start. Let's just say we wore everything we had to bed that night and were still freezing cold.

On the trek we saw lots of a special kind of long haired baboon, and it was also a good chance to see some locals living a truly tough agricultural lifestyle in the mountains. I don't know how they manage to cultivate the ground...we were struggling to just walk up the hills let alone farm them.

After our trekking we arrived back in town very dirty but satisfied. We then packed up all our gear in preparation to head into Sudan...everyone was feeling a bit nervous at this point as the Sudanese border is apparantly notorious for turning travellers away. Fingers crossed.