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....

Early out of Murelle and back up to Paradise Lodge on our way back north to Addis. Retraced our route through the trackless, well barely, rough, dry, scrubby desert country. This is a region of termite mounds which are scattered in surprisingly large numbers across the countryside in addition to something else that fascinated me. This was the presence of a flower called by the locals a bottle flower, blooming in large numbers on a plant whose stem was smooth and gray and somewhat bottle-shaped, which like the termite mounds, were scattered throughout the dry scrub....

Arrived at the Buska Lodge in Turmi after our bull-jumping adventure, a place that is in the middle of the desert that characterizes the southern part of the country. TripAdvisor had said of our hotel that one should bring their own food but we discovered when we were checked in that we should have brought our own room as well. We arrived at the hotel at about 8:30 to find that it was full and the room that we were given after 12 hours driving over broken tracks was a reject from a BBC production of Oliver Twist, tiny, dirty, with space only for a bed, a mosquito net and a fluorescent light. The lodge consists of about 6 0r 8 huts constructed like tukuls and a couple of rooms for overflow guests one of which we were given....

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....