Tag Archives: Ethiopia

Perception Versus Reality In Travel

By Tom | Published: September 30, 2009
It was late April and the Ethiopian high­lands had been rolling beneath my wheels for sev­eral days. Inch­ing towards Dji­bouti, I con­sul­ted detailed road-engineers’ maps of the coun­try to plan my route, and found an enticing-looking dirt track through the Afar region of the infam­ous Dana­kil Depression. I’d developed some­thing of a romantic fas­cin­a­tion with [...]
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Notes From Afar, The Hottest Place On Earth

By Tom | Published: May 6, 2009
I gazed out across the plains from my vant­age point by a mil­it­ary watch-tower at the east­ern edge of the Ethiopian high­lands. I was about to leave the famil­iar crazi­ness of Amhara and to cross the Afar desert, the site of the hot­test air tem­per­at­ure ever recor­ded, and the home of the nomadic Afar tribes. [...]
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Ethiopa: No Pain, No Gain

By Tom | Published: April 27, 2009
I waved good­bye to the Tele Café in the piazza of Gondar, where I’d enjoyed many a delightfully-spicy break­fast or pint of mango juice. I was about to exper­i­ence a mag­ni­fi­cent ride through the soar­ing high­lands of north-central Ethiopia. As I rolled out of town towards the green val­leys below, how­ever, I was nervous. Aside [...]
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Rest And Recuperation In Gondar, Ethiopia

By Tom | Published: April 18, 2009
I spent four days in Met­ema. The mild symp­toms of mal­aria were the lesser of my con­cerns. More wor­ry­ing was the stiff­ness and sore­ness that quickly appeared in my legs, as if some­how sparked off by the unex­pec­ted parasites. By the even­ing of my arrival, my lower calves were sore and stiff, caus­ing some dis­com­fort [...]
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When Things Go Wrong, How Do You React?

By Tom | Published: April 14, 2009
My six days in Khar­toum had been some­what sur­real, to say the least. Bar­ging through the dark, dusty, unpaved back streets in a big white United Nations four-by-four, passing observ­ers would have assumed me and my host to be rush­ing to assist in some nearby inter­na­tional crisis, unaware that we were actu­ally try­ing to find the [...]
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