Addis, how nice
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
177
228
Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
We arrived in Addis about noon and got a room at the Baro Hotel for 100 Birr. We could tell from the smell of bleach that the room had just been cleaned, which gave us a good feeling about the place. This is another hotel that is popular with overlanders and travelers on the Cairo to Cape Town road. We meet a lot of interesting people and learn about traveling in Africa. Many of the people are spending 3-4 weeks here in Ethiopia and there is plenty to see and you'd need that long to travel around by land. There are also writers, painters and professors staying here. There are some real characters, including us. The first thing we do is go to the Hilton where there is supposed to be an ATM that accepts MasterCard. It turned out that the ATM does not work but a branch bank in the hotel is making good business running cash advances through their system for a 6.5% fee, that's on top of whatever our bank is charging
23-02
. January 24, 2008
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
This morning we went to the Kenyan Embassy to apply for visas. Traveling by local buses and trucks from Khartoum to Addis was hard and during the most miserable part when our spirits were the lowest we cheered ourselves up by agreeing to fly from Addis to Nairobi. From what we'd heard from other travelers and from Paul Theroux's description it sounded like that leg would be the hardest part. Although we doubted we'd be shot at by bandits as he was.
January 25, 2008
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
This afternoon we picked up our visas which costs 876 Birr for the two of us. At the Baro Hotel we met Hank, a Belgium who comes here twice a year representing the sponsors of an NGO operating shelters for female street children. He invited us to visit one of the shelters for sexually abuse girls. When the police see a new child on the street the child is taken to Child Protective Services and they can place the child in one of the shelters until the child can be reunited with her family
23-03
. The children are brought to the city from the countryside by men who promise their parents that they will have a better life in the city, but when they get here they are put in the sex trade. Hank tells us that they must rescue the girls in the first couple weeks, because after that they get used to life on the street and it is harder to get them to return to their families. January 26, 2008
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
We spend time today walking around the Markato buying souvenirs. The Markato in Addis is supposed to be the largest market in Africa. It is not one building but a whole area with many buildings housing shops that sell everything you can imagine. The place is so large that we needed some help finding our way around but there are plenty of people offering to do that.
