Arrived in Addis in early afternoon and checked into the Sheraton. We have two nights and a full day to decompress from our driving and to get ready for our Kenya safaris. Couldn't wait to get to our rooms and a long hot shower and on to a good lunch. The Sheraton is a fabulous spot and a real lens into Ethiopia. Wandering the huge marble lobby and public rooms, all busy and filled with people coming and going or sitting and talking in little groups it feels as if there are layers that we can see and many more layers that we can sense but can't see. The people sitting around or moving through represent many countries and nationalities, all are very well and expensively dressed, whether informal or formal and there are lots of bespoke suits and white shirts in the crowd. Feels like being in a Graham Greene novel but not knowing the plot. There are quiet but gruffly intense Israelis, suited Brits who look as if they are on their way to a board meeting, wealthy Ethiopians with or without families, trim Germans, knots of noisy Chinese and quiet and steely Americans. Indians, Icelanders, geo-thermal experts, French, Africans from a variety of nations, all meeting and discussing and negotiating and chatting and finalizing and the background noise that you hear is the sound of money whooshing in and out of the country....

Paradise Lodge where we spent last night was supposed to be one of the highlights of our Ethiopian hotel experiences but we missed its charm. The rooms are built as stone replicas of the round tukul huts that are the usual form of housing in rural Ethiopia and are built on the edge of a highland looking across a wide, forested valley floor to the Bridge of God. This is a mountainous spur of land separating two rift valley lakes, both of which can bee seen from the hotel's rooms stretching far to the left and right of God's Bridge. Room was small, mosquitoes were biting and there was no support frame for the mosquito net so it draped over our faces and feet all night so that any self=respecting mosquito could use it as a feeding grid, poking through the net's mesh and into its waiting banquet, us. View was pretty spectacular but we're driving 300+ kilometres a day over very bad roads, getting up early to start our drives and arriving between 5 and 6, ready for bed. Things need to be pretty spectacular to make a dent in our dulled senses....

Uneventful flight last night and in fact it left 1/2 hour early as by then all passengers had checked in. It appears that we were the only flight from the airport that evening, so I think that everyone wanted to shut down and go home for dinner.

Very nice to be back in the Addis Sheraton, which seems to be the major hotel in the city for foreign dignitaries and business people, and in fact, we arrived on the eve of a meeting of the African Union which is headquartered in Addis and our hotel is apparently where many of the delegates are staying. As usual massive amounts of security, in the streets around the hotel and all the way to the airport there are armed military every 50 metres or so on both sides of the road and the luggage and personal checks at the hotel entrance were unusually thorough, turning up stuff in our luggage that airport security had not found or did not care about. Surprisingly for a Sheraton the hotel is large, marbled, impressive and expensive. However it has come to feel like home....

Staying at Kiriftu Lodge on the southern shore of Lake Tana, one of the two candidates for the source of the Blue Nile, the other is a small spring bubbling out of the ground about 16k away. Can't quite fathom how this can still be a mystery but since we're on Lake Tana then I'm voting for it....

Sunday morning was bright, clear and cool. We were picked up at about 7:30 to go to the largest of the in-ground churches where a service was being conducted and where a very special cross made of solid gold, and weighing about 7.5 kilos is housed as part of the church's religious treasury. It is claimed to be concurrent with the time of the churches construction and is taken out of the church only at times of grave local or national emergency when it used to in services to pray for heavenly intercession However for most of the time it is housed in the church and is used in Sunday services or on holy days. Eskadar wanted us to attend the service and see the cross because it is a national treasure but more than this, V wanted to take part in the blessing service. ...

Have been more or less off the grid for the last couple of days so will try and compact a couple of days in this post while I have fleeting and intermittent internet access.

V arrived on Friday on an Emirates flight from Dubai where she overnighted....

Today was an utterly wasted day. V joins me tomorrow and things will start to get back to travel normal. V and I are on different schedules partly because I had a credit with Air Canada for a trip that I had cancelled some time ago and that needed to be used within a year or be lost. I made my flight bookings with Air Canada and the only flight combination that worked for me was the flight that I described yesterday. As an aside don't ever make the mistake that I did and book flights with an airline who books all the flight itineraries on other airlines. My ticketing carrier is AC but my flights were with Lufthansa going out and will be with Air Brussels returning. When you need to talk with someone or make any changes AC and the other airline point at each other, wink, and say, Not my problem. You need to be a certified hostage negotiator in order to make any adjustments or get current information....[Continue Reading]

Long, long day. Lufthansa to Frankfurt in Business and then a flight to Addis with a stop in Khartoum en route, also Lufthansa Business. In the 24 hours leading up to departure I had my usual fit of nostalgia and early homesickness. Weird but I guess it's good to get it out of the way early so that it doesn't actually get in the way while on the road. Nevertheless it is inevitable, no matter how many times I travel, that I always get homesick before I leave. Once underway all is good, but the preliminary pre-departure mood always includes a significant component of early homesickness, nostalgia for my cats and a deep sense of wonder about quite why I'm doing this. I find that as I'm getting older this mood comes earlier and is more intense; I suppose that the logical extension is that one day I may just say, enough, I'd rather stay home with the cats and rip up the tickets. Mood always passes but.....