Journal
Ethiopia Days - 2 & 3 Addis and Lalibela
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....
Ethiopia - Day 1 Addis
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]
Ethiopia in transit
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.....
Ethiopia & Kenya
Off to Ethiopia in a couple of days. This trip, 28 days, of which 16 will be spent in Ethiopia and 8 in Kenya's Masai Mara, was fun to put together and is a wonderful example of changing horses in mid-stream and surviving the swap. When we traveled in South Africa 2 years ago we knew that we wanted to return to africa and left the idea to marinate while we got on with other things. However when Aeroplan issued its misguided policy change that required airline travel points to be used within 7 years of issuance or lose them, we were forced to act. Between us, we had over 400,000 points that were issued more than 7 years prior to the policy start date and they would all have been lost had they not been used by the end of 2013 and so last winter, with some urgency, we began to think about what a trip would look like....
BA - Days 16 to 18
Met Hugh for coffee at 9:30 and then our friends from New York, Jane and David, arrived for coffee at 10 and Sophie, Hugh's shopping consultant, arrived at 10:15 to take V and Jane for a 4 hour shopping expedition. At this point we had overwhelmed the small breakfast room at the Magnolia and a party atmosphere was beginning to develop but the various parties began to disperse and order was restored. Jane and David are attending a wedding in Brazil and had stopped off in BA to spend a couple of days with us before the wedding and they will be joining us for the opera tonight at the Teatro Colon....
Puna to BA - Day 15
Easy start to the day, up late with beautiful sunshine but a cool breeze blowing as we are still at 2700 metres. Leisurely breakfast and then 4 hours to relax on the outdoor veranda while I caught up the blog and V read. Have loved the trip and the landscapes but it was nice just to chill for a brief moment...
Puna - Days 13 &14
Long, long day. Packed up and off early for our drive which will be 350k but will take at least 8 hours since there are no paved roads. The first couple of hours were through enormously wide expanses and fields of basalt froth which were blown out of the multiple volcanoes that dot the landscape as far as the eye can see off in the distance. Our track passes along the edges of waves of this material whose height reaches about 2 or 3 metres and which appears to be a black rocky foam filled with air bubbles. It would be impossible to make a road over or through it so we skirt the edge of the basalt lava flow which is so hard that edges are still razor sharp after a million years....
Puna - Day 12
Fabulous sunset last night but we were so late getting in to our hotel, El Piñon, and getting settled in that we didn't get any shots. Feeling the altitude. Yesterday in Cafayete we were at about 1700 metres. Getting to the Puna yesterday we climbed and when we crossed the mountain pass that took us to Catamarca province in the Puna region we were, and are, at 3500 metres. When concentrating on other things altitude not particularly noticeable, but I woke up a couple of times last night very aware of being short of breath and of the need to breathe more deeply. V and I both have prescriptions for a drug that is supposed to minimize altitude symptoms which we were to have started taking two days before altitude....