Week 13

Thursday 14th July.

In the lap of luxury.

We left Bahir Dar and made our way to Gondar. The hotel we pulled into was really rank. The rooms were crap and smelt like sewerage and the toilets were so bad they were unusable, and we have seen some pretty bad toilets by this stage. Almost everyone went in search of another place to call home. We, along with Emma and Benne, Marcus and Fiona and Lars found ourselves next door to the shit hole in the luxurious Taye Hotel. It was our biggest splurge to date at US$60 a night, but we felt that we deserved a little luxury. The hotel was all marble and gold, the rooms were incrediblly big, clean, with DSTV, a balcony overlooking the quaint little city, room service (!!!), free wifi in the lobby..... I could go on, but I'll stop teasing you.

Alex was on cook group, so he knew nothing of this until I presented him with the room key and I was on clean group, but we did not waste any time getting back to our hotel afterwards. We had a drink in the lobby bar with our fellow hotel stayers and went to bed.

Friday 15th July.

A hard day's work.

We woke up just in time to get our free buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The rest of the day we spent chilling on our balcony, we ordered room service for lunch and ate it as a picnic on the bed, we watched movies, had the longest hottest shower in history, and went back to the lobby restaurant for the best beef ravioli I have ever eaten.

Saturday 16th July.

Jimmy and Jan- Status: M.I.A.

I got to speak to my sister who was enjoying her baby shower, I was really sad I wasn't there, but happy the time difference worked out well and I got to call her while it was still happening. We met Sheri and Lars at breakfast and gobbled down some pancakes and maple syrup so we could meet Tony at the travel agents in town. We were going on a half day trek in the Simien Mountains in search of Galada Baboons, also known as bleeding heart baboons thanks to a bright red heart shaped peice of skin on thier neck and chest.

We jumped in the minivan and were driven 1.5 hours away to the begining of the Simien mountain range.  All in all we hiked for about 3.5 hours. the scenery was just magnificent, it really was like being on top of the world. Some of the valleys and gorges were so deep that you could stand on the edge of the cliff and still not be able to see the bottom. It was green and lush and we walked up and down and up and down narrow, steep pathways around the mountainside, at the highest point we were standing at 3,000 meters above sea level.

We saw three small groups of galada baboons, each having 3-6 baboons in each. In the right season in the Simien Mountain National Park, which was still a further 1.5 hours away from where we were, the galada baboons are known to travel in groups of hundreds. We just happy to see one! Unfortunately they were pretty far away so we didn't manage to get a photo of the red chest that makes them so unique.
We got back to our hotel at 3.30pm and grabbed some food (beed ravioli- of course) and went upstairs to have a rest. We were planning on celebrating Jimmy's birthday but they had all gone on a brewery tour and were still M.I.A.

Emma and Benne eventually came back to the hotel and we sat in the lobby with them and Marcus, Fiona, Sheri, Janet, and Lars and had a few drinks, Jimmy and Jan were never to be seen again, well, that night at least.

Sunday 17th July.

Kings and Queens of the Castle.

We slept in this morning, trying to take full advantage of the expensive luxury we had allowed ourselves. In the mid-morning we met Marcus, Fiona, Emma and Benne downstairs and headed for one of the castle's that makes Gondar famous. We opted out of getting a guide and instead just explored the castle ourselves. It was good on one hand because we were able to explore the castle at our own pace, go where we wanted to go, stop where we wanted to stop, on the other hand however, we learnt absolutley nothing about the castle, such as why it was built, when ot was built, who built it, who lived in it etc. It was a beautiful castle, made up of about 10 different buildings and many more ruins. It was on a huge green chunck of land right in the middle of the town.

After a few hours of walking around the property we went back to the hotel. Alex and I walked up to the place where everyone else was staying (Farron had moved the truck out of the shite hole to a different place the morning after we got there). The plan was to go on the same brewery tour that Emma, Benne, Jimmy, Aileen, Jan and Mark had gone on the day before. But once up there with a drink in our hands we lost all motivation. We bummed around for the rest of the afternoon.

In the evening we made our way up to Emma and Benne's room for a celebratory drink for Jimmy's birthday. We all had a great night, living like kings and queens. We had room service of pizza and pasta for dinner and had way too many tequila shots brough up as well. I cant remeber what time is was that we went (crawled maybe) back to our room, lucky we didnt have far to go!

Monday 18th July.

African medical system.

We decided to check out of Taye hotel and move up to the Frogera Hotel where everyone else was staying so that we didn't have to make the move early in the morning the following morning. We sent Alex in a tuk tuk with all of our bags to the Frogera Hotel and Emma, Benne and I went shopping in town for any extra supplies needed for Sudan. Unfortunatley there were no big supermarkets in town, or in Ethiopia for that matter, only little mini-marts. Which of course made everything more expensive. The other thing we had to be careful of was the fact that most things were not priced, and there was no barcode scanning facilities, so the shopkeepers could, and often would, just make up the prices as they went along.

I only grabbed a few things such as deoderant, shampoo, chips, dairy free chocolate sauce (score!), snikers bars and it cost over 600birr, thats more that US$36! I think they may have added on a few(hundred) birr when I wasnt paying attention. We also stopped at a pharmacy and stocked up on some broad spectrum antibiotics in case we get sick in Sudan, as we are not expecting to come across many pharmacies. I really love that you can walk into a pharmacy in Africa, say that you have had an upset stomach and would like some antibiotics, and the pharmacist asks how many you would like. Its that easy. There is no going on a waiting list for a doctors appointment, no waiting in the waiting room while the doctor runs an hour behind schedule just to sit in the chair for under 5 minutes and walk out one prescription richer and $60 poorer, THEN having to go to the pharmacy, hand in the script and wait 15 minutes while the overpaid pharmacists takes thier sweet ass time grabbing the little box of pills. It is much easier here!

Fully stocked up on food and drugs we jumped in a tuk tuk and met Alex up at the Frogera Hotel. It was a nice enough place with little bungalows for 300 birr per night. We again considered going to the brewery, but instead ended up back at the Taye Hotel, ordering beef ravioli and enjoying the luxury we had become accustomed to.

Tuesday 19th July.

Sudanese Stocktake.

We left Gondar at 11am and had a cruisy day driving and watching the scenery change again from lush greenery to red desert sand as we came down in altitude, it also got considerably warmer as we descended. There are two nights of bush camping ahead, and although I really enjoyed the luxury of Taye Hotel, I was really excited to get back to bush camping and sleep in Helsinki again (our tent). We turned down a dirt road off the main road in the early afternoon and set up camp, a mere 10kms away from the Sudanese border.

Cook group made spag bol for dinner while we sat around the fire watching an amazing lightning show on the horizon. Everyone collected any alcohol they had been storing on the truck and put it all on the prep table. Sudan is a dry country and has very sever punishments if the law is disobeyed. If you are caught with alcahol, or are found to be acting drunk in public you can look forward to spending some quality time in a Sudanese prison. Even more hardcore than that is the death penalty if you are caught with illegal drugs, or if you are found to be a homosexual. We girls also have to be careful what we wear in public, making sure that our knees and shoulders are covered up at all times, and we may even have to wear head scarfes in traditional or rural areas.

Farron said that we are all adults and can make our own decision, and it is therefore our choice if we want to try and sneak alcohol into Sudan or not, but that it will also be our own fault and responsibility if we get caught and arrested for it. Not suprisingly, no one thought that it was worth the risk and hence, we had a stocktake party. All alcahol on the table must go. Free for all.

It didn't end up as messy as I thought it would. The old say 'many hands make light work' really is true! We sat around the fire drinking the stocktake grog and roasting marshmellows that I had found a few countries ago covered in the chocolate sauce I had found in Gondar.

Wednesday 20th July.

Into North Sudan.

We had breakfast at 7am and were on the road by 8am. We made it to the Sudan border in no time as it was only 10kms down the road. We waited patiently for Ethiopia to stamp us out, a very slow process indeed, and while we waited Jimmy, Jan and I went on a mission to change everyone's leftover birr into Sudanese pounds. The two banks we could find in the border town would only change American dollars, not Ethiopian birr, strange because we were still in Ethiopia. As we exited the second bank there was a small group of men telling us that no banks there would change birr but that they would do it for us at a good rate. Having had had a bad experience with dodgy money guys at borders I felt a little hesitant, but with no other options we followed them into thier little shop in an old shipping container.

In the last week Sudan had officially split into two countries, North and South Sudan, with South Sudan gaining independacnce and becoming the newest UN country and launching its own currency. Quite an eventful week. We had also heard reports of Khartoum, the capitol of North Sudan and our next desitnation, had been bombing South Sudan, so we were all hoping for a smooth and easy few days with no fighting or retribution from South Sudan.

With our pockets full of Sudanese pounds and having been finally stamped into the country, our next stop was the Alien Registration office, we had to register twice, once here at the border and once in Khartoum. We were also not allowed to take any photos until we had obtained a tourist photography permit, which we should also be able to get from Khartoum.

Whenever we asked an Ethiopian what we could expect in Sudan, all they would say was that it was very hot and very expensive. So naturally I got very excited when we found chargrilled 1/4 chicken, yummy flat bread, chillie, salsa salad and lemon for only 8 pound each, about US$3! Maybe Sudan will not be that bad afterall!

Another positive difference was that softdrink came in plastic bottles again, which we havent seen since South Africa. Everywhere else we have been had softdrink in glass bottles which you either had to return or pay for, meaning that take away drinks were rare as we didnt want to buy the bottle. There is also a huge selection of softdrink flavours that I have never seen before, like tangerine mirinda, apple fanta, strawberry fanta etc. I guess thats what happens when softdrink and water are the only liquid trades in an entire country.

Another major difference we noticed as we drove away from the border was that people just dissapeared, in contrast to Ethiopia where there were always people around no matter where we were, in Sudan we passed a few men pointing mounted machine guns at us and waving happily, and a few herders with thier camels, but that was it.

In the early afternoon Farron found a bushcamp for us that looked like the set for the horros movie "the hills have eyes", and these hills really did have eyes we discovered as small shepherd boys and thier goats slowly began to appear from behind the boulders and they just sat there and looked at us. It was a nice place to camp tough, very scenic. There were however more camel spiders, so it was not a late night for anyone as we all opted to watch movies in the safety and comfort of our tents.