Tuesday, 15 April 2003
Another lovely morning began in Sophie’s garden. We said good morning to her gardener and had time to plan the day when drinking coffee. We had some mandatory tasks today; hence none of us needed any ambitious schedule this day.
The first task was to purchase flight tickets for our 6-day hike in the north part of Ethiopia. The travel agency “Express Travel” that we had used so far has an office in the main UN building. The alternative was to locate the “Express Travel” office downtown, which is a very vague term as the city is completely unstructured with no town center as we known it. This is probably cause by the fact that the country never was colonized; hence not marked by European urban planning.
Our contact at the travel agency had a lunch break, so we went into the staff restaurant ran by Hotel Sheraton at very reasonable prices. Here we met some of Jørgen’s colleagues from Austria, Switzerland, Malaysia and Finland.
Later we got our tickets and confirmed the flight back to Denmark next week. We succeeded in getting a considerable discount on the tickets, as we were able to include the international flights to buy a roundtrip. The four flights to Lalibela, Bahir Dar, Gonder and Addis Ababa was only $125 in total for each person.
We decided to go shopping and walked from street to street wondering how to find one’s way. It all looks similar and with no town center, no street names and almost no road signs. For that reason we did not dare to use the cheap mini-buses, as we did not know where they were heading?
Jørgen succeeded guiding us to some souvenir shops where wooden masks, antique weapons, old tools, pots, headrests and of course cheap pearls, expensive ivory articles and ornaments were on sale. Outside the shops were the street traders more than reasonable persistent and very soon a nuisance for us.
We bought some articles and were offered coffee and tea in one of the shops. People here are so helpful, smiling and with good sense of humor. It’s not hard to get at laugh and common understanding even though their English skills varies a lot. It was a really neat experience walking around in this city.
Another task for today was planning the trip to northern Ethiopia. Sophie had recommended a tour organizer called Gebru to Jørgen and later this afternoon we had our first meeting with him. He provided a full specification of the complete trip typed on his computer. He seemed like a very sensible and trustworthy fellow and after a price check that turn out reasonable, we arranged the trip with him.
During yesterday evening and the day, Jørgen had called his friends in Addis Ababa and arranged a dinner for twenty people at a local restaurant.
Amazingly him managed to assemble Danes, Swedes, Americans, a Japanese, an Ethiopian and three Italians for dinner in just half a day. It is probably possible because foreigners (called “Forenzies” by locals) go out to eat very often anyway.
We had a very cozy evening where we had conversations with so many exciting people from all over the world. Most of the people worked for UN, European Union, relief organizations or private companies in Ethiopia. This was an enviable circle.