Unwelcome adventures

Bahir Dar & getting home

Lake Tana

on an island on Lake Tana visiting monasteries 

monastery

monk with his antiques

hippo!

lush Bahir Dar

the first bridge to get to the falls

the second bridge to get to the falls

Blue Nile Falls

(Dec 15-16^th) With its warmer, wetter climate, mosquitoes, and large, sweeping palm trees, Bahir Dar felt like the tropics, a nice break from a week of cold nights in the mountains. I met a whole crew of characters at the hotel: Doug, a beekeeper; Ann, a lawyer from New York; Lorenz, a rocket-topper salesman; and Robert, a surgeon working in Bahir Dar and Addis, with whom I visited monasteries and hippos on Lake Tana and the Blue Nile Falls in Tis Isat.

Doug and I ventured out into Bahir Dar to reserve a seat on a bus leaving for Addis the next day (Friday). We finally found the ticket office, however, it was locked. I am perpetually confused by the seemingly illogical ways that businesses work in Ethiopia. Despite the office being closed, a young man that claimed that he worked for Sky Bus was hanging around the locked office. He told us that the Sky Bus was full for the next two days, but that another van would be leaving for Addis the next day. He led me down a particularly stinky alley to another “office,” a corrugated metal hut that resembled a child's lemonade stand or a backyard chicken coop. I felt unsure about the whole transaction, but anxious to get back to Addis and ready to leave Bahir Dar, this seemed to be my only option. He assured me that the van would pick me up at my hotel at 4am the next day and bring me to my home in Ayat. He even had me meet the driver and look over the van, excited to sell me on the facts that the van possessed seat belts (!!) and a TV. I was still concerned; a feeling of uncertainty was bubbling up from my gut. He made sure to escort me as I completed all of our other errands—buying bread, changing Doug's flight, visiting the bank. When Doug left, he asked me to marry him, “we'd have macchiato babies.” I turned him down repeatedly while Doug continued to bargain for my hand, jokingly saying that I could be his for a few bags of grain and a cow. The fake wedding ring that I don't dare to remove does nothing to deter these persistent men, hoping to secure a visa to the states. I see less and less humor in these proposals after receiving my fourth in the last three days. We finally got rid of the ticket salesman and completed our errands without him, only to find him back at our hotel when we returned. Hi friend stated that he missed me and asked if I would go to his house for a coffee ceremony. No thank you.

I went to bed that night and slept little, knowing that I would be waking up in only a few hours, hoping that the van would indeed show up. At 4am, I sat in the dark at the entrance to the hotel, waiting, the guard next to me dressed in the typical dirtied fleece, draped from head to foot. Eventually, a car pulled up to the gate, headlights blaring. I looked around the courtyard of the hotel, knowing that no one else but the guard was around, I felt reassured that my ride was finally here. I peeked out of the gate into the dark street and realized that it was not a van, but a Jeep. This was not the van that I had been introduced to the day before, nor was it the driver that I had been expecting. The guard (who did not speak English) shut the tall, metal gate behind me and I was instantly flooded with fear, alone with this unknown car on the dark street at 4:15 in the morning. I asked the driver the name of the passenger that he intended to pick up and he looked at me mystified and seemingly annoyed. Then I asked the name of his company and he responded in broken English that he was not a company, his anger growing. A man inside the Jeep opened a door, grabbed my backpack, and threw it behind him. I felt as though I was standing on a divide, that I needed to make a timely decision whether to hop in the Jeep and pray that Addis was indeed the final destination or declare it a lost cost, give up the money that I had already paid, and find myself stuck in Bahir Dar for two more days. I jumped into the Jeep.

We drove around Bahir Dar for another hour, passengers jumping in and out. Two women dressed in traditional white cotton stood beside the road. In the darkness, I could not see them until we had pulled over to let them in. We picked them up and after a few more loops around the town, dropped them off to join a crowd of women standing in the dark beside the road. Everyone else in the car seemed unfazed by this seemingly illogical and time-consuming game of musical Jeep. I was ready to get started on the eight-plus hour (and currently every-increasing) ride to Addis. The driver snapped his fingers at me from the front seat, a signal that it was time for me to pay up. However, my uneasiness was growing and I was becoming less sure that I would indeed make it safely to Addis. I scrounged up all of the courage that I could muster and refused to pay the second half of the fare, explaining that nothing was as I had expected it to be and that I would only pay it when I had arrived in Addis. This thoroughly irked the driver. After picking up yet another passenger, he looped by to my hotel, stormed out of the drivers seat and around the back to my door, whipped it open and began furiously yelling at me in Amharic. I was terrified. What had I gotten myself into? I started to cry, which was my best move yet that day. Immediately, this changed the game. The most recently acquired passenger began yelling back at the driver while holding onto my shoulder telling me that everything would be alright. He somehow got the driver to close my door and retreat back to the driver's seat. I tried to stop crying and whenever my new friend thought that I was continuing, if he caught a glimpse of a tear wipe or a sniffle, he again tried to reassure me. Despite the early hour (it was now around a quarter til 5), he called a friend that spoke entirely comprehensible English to further comfort me, explaining that he would meet me in Addis and make sure that I was alright (which he did). Here comes the fifth proposal.

After eleven hours, we finally arrived in Addis, the driver having not said one word to me nor having looked in my direction throughout the drive. We stopped only twice along the way, the first for “breakfast,” which consisted of shiro and lentils, and the second, for coffee. After a long Higer ride through the city from Mexico to Ayat, picking up kale and injera from street markets for my dinner along the way, I finally arrived at the gate to my home. I heard the maids running to open it. They immediately gave me big, warm hugs, and unburdened me of my luggage, their faces bright and excited. One even did a dance for me! All of the knots that had developed in my stomach over the past two days immediately dissipated and I was overjoyed to be safely home.