Thursday 22nd September 2011
I’m going to be honest with you; I’m not an early morning person. I used to drive a lorry for a living, which meant I had to get up at 4am on a fairly regular basis but back then, I’d get a coffee, fall into the cab and set off.
It’s a different thing when you get up at 4am, as ready as you’ll ever be to set off and you have to sit around and wait for a taxi. So begins my trip to Ethiopia and my first ever visit to Africa.
Today is a day of journeying and to be honest there’s never much to blog about on the first travelling day if everything goes smoothly. I see the inside of an aeroplane, watch a couple of films and manipulate cartooned food around an impossibly small tray.
We landed in Khartoum, which was mildly exiting if only in that I got to see the Nile and my first glimpse of Africa. All in all the journey took us about 12 hours. Arriving at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa around 7:30pm local time we lined up to buy our visa. I love the fact they did the whole visa process using triplicate books and carbon paper. We the head off to get our bags from the conveyer-belt only to realise after all the other passengers from our flight had disappeared that three of our four bags had failed to make it as far as Ethiopia.
My case had made it but Paul, my travelling companion from Global Care, was case-less. There were also two cases of clothes for the preschools we’re visiting.
We hung around various desks for a couple of hours and were finally told our bags would arrive tomorrow.
Kiflé, our Ethiopian friend met us outside the airport and took us to a restaurant on the way to the guesthouse. He’s a great guy, general secretary of the church denomination he is part of. I’ll find out more tomorrow. I ordered grilled fish but got fish goulash, but that didn’t matter, it was amazing. After a quick lesson in the local dialect, of which I remember nothing, we headed to the church’s guesthouse, a good but basic house in the embassy area of Addis.
I was happy to see that KLM replied to my tweet about lost luggage. We’ll see if it arrives before we leave for Hosanna tomorrow.
