ADDIS BY NIGHT
We are starting to feel more and more comfortable in this city of Addis-Ababa.
It goes hand in glove with hanging out, enjoying the nightlife and meeting new people. And I have to tell that these last previous weeks have been really rich concerning our experience of the “ADDIS By NIGHT”!
I will put and update a specific article on the blog a shortlist of the places we hung out in.
To give you an overview of it, let’s start by saying that here, everything is in Bole Road (South-East of the city) or around (see the map).
Since we started to rent a car (a nice Suzuki SUV actually, 300 Birr a day) each weekend we stay in Addis, we spent much time around Bole, testing restaurants (Ethiopian, Yemenite, Italian, German,..), and going from a club to another! Life becomes so easy as you have a car!
Actually we even started to reckon some of the people that make the Addis nightlife : among them several prostitutes, a perfect double of Lil-Wayne coming from Washington DC, owner of clubs, DJs, and so on…
Clubs start being crowded at 2 in the morning (8 in the night in the Ethiopian time), and Ethiopians LOOOOVVVE dancing! All Ethiopians? Not exactly. Our dear friend Dawit isn’t actually that fond of dancing. So as we brought him once in Illusion club, which mixes really good music, we tried (successfully at the end) to make him dance!
Amharic music is always mixed in clubs, whatever the initial ambiance of the party was supposed to be. There are like 4 or 5 highly popular songs that are always given, always with the same excitement’s shouts when people hear the beginning of the melody! Basically, Ethiopian dances are not that sophisticated. Music is almost always on 2 times (they also dance on four times sometimes) and Ethiopians are crazy about breast’s and shoulders’ movements!
They also love Flo-Rida (Right round), Akon’s music (Beautiful, Keep You much longer) and Konvikt Records music in general!
We also spent 5 crazy days with Alex, Malaika’s boyfriend! We hung out in (almost) every club of Addis, danced like fools until the morning light (6.30am during this season) and met plenty of funky people! It’s like we have now a good party team to go out up here!
This is during these days we met a group of very funky Ethiopian girls, in Illusion. Since this long night we spent dancing with them, we went out together several times, to dance, share a meal or a shisha!
We also met Kitty in Bailamos. She’s a totally crazy-dancing girl, I have to tell she is very impressive!
ENTOTO
20 minutes (by car) far from Addis-Ababa is ENTOTO, a 3000 meters high mountain from where villagers feed the city with wood.
After only 20 minutes of driving we really felt somewhere else, very far from the pollution and the noise of Addis.
We met kids making resound their whips in the depth of the valley, and also very CUUUUUTTTE kids who were curious to see what these two white guys were doing in their countryside!
BAHAR DAR
« We’re back on the road, baby! »
After all these little adventures in Addis, we needed to go back on Ethiopian road to do some travelling…
So we chose to travel to Bahar Dar, a city in the north of the country, easily reachable with Selam Bus, and in which we were eager to discover the famous Tana Lake (where the Blue Nile starts) and the Tilsisat’s waterfalls!
So we left Addis at 6 in the morning, and we spent almost the entire rest of the day sleepy in the bus. The only outstanding interruption was due to a slip of the road. Half of the road had slipped; consequently just one way was available, though very muddy. A long tail of trucks and buses were queuing on this side of the mountain, waiting for the way to be fixed up.
Although the bus drivers were stressed to resume the journey, we considered the good side of that unexpected event and enjoyed the wonderful landscape. We couldn’t have been trapped in a more beautiful place!
We finally reached Bahar Dar’s surroundings 11 hours after departure, and we started to see many cycles in this town. In Addis, cycles are (for many reasons: price, but also possibility of robbing, and pollution) still rare. Though, in Bahar Dar, they seem to be the most common way to move, at least as popular as the taxis.
We were welcome at the bar Galaxy, right in front of the bus station, by the little sister of our host Yordano. Her English was rich enough to have a nice conversation with her. She brought us back to their place, just a few minutes to walk from there.
As we arrived, we discovered the large poster “Pelican Homemade Wine”, which was actually the name of the business of Yordano and her sisters.
Yordano, who couldn’t welcome us on arrival, due to a meeting meanwhile, revealed herself as a very interesting and dynamic 25-years-old entrepreneur. She is an economics graduate working for the government, and meanwhile she had set up this (for now) little wine business to employ her sisters and earn some money for the family. She was selected a month ago to participate to a national contest where 300 young Ethiopian entrepreneurs were invited to present their business, or at least their business ideas, in front of a professional jury.
Only 20 were selected to have a Business Plan class, and Yordano was among them. The happy ending was that Yordano finally stand out of the 20 among the three winners!
We had coffee, as the tradition wants, and Charles is still unable to explain how the Ethiopian coffee makes him fall asleep!
The morning after we went to the Tana Lake (the largest one on Ethiopia), which is also known as the original source of the Blue Nile. We managed to find a boat for 400 Birr half a day (truly too expensive, but we just had one day, and it wasn’t enough to find a group or a better price). The guy was sailing soooooo slooooww, probably to save the gas, so we made the journey to the islands you have amid Lake Tana in 2 hours and a half instead of 20 minutes!
Entrances in some of the islands are not allowed to women, as there are the shelter of monasteries where monks are living a pious life… So Charles and I visited a 2 islands and their monastery, and in the last one the monks gifted us some local holly bread, beer and snacks.
We also visited a so-called “Museum of the Church” which was actually 4m² large, and in which the monk/guide offered us a long presentation in English (even if he was constantly apologizing for it..).
As we were going from an island to another, Charles and I were wondering if the churches and monasteries we were seeing and presented as dating from the 14th century really were so. For instance, in the last island we visited, the whole village’s land seemed to be under construction!!
At noon we hurried up to find a taxi (300Birr!) to drive us along the 32km which separate Bahar Dar from Tilsasate and its famous waterfalls! Once we got in Tilsasate, we had to walk for 40 minutes in the mud and the marshes, bumping into lands where the addictive khat was growing naturally (Free KHAT!) and into shepherds who absolutely wanted us to listen to their flute, to finally arrive in front of huge waterfalls of the Blue Nile!
As I was kind of disappointed by the Tana Lake, I could not hide my joy in front of such a beautiful sight: I danced in the mist created by the fall of this bicolor water!
At night, we stayed at Yordano’s family’s place: we were a bit tired and besides, there was this diffusion of the International Athletics Championships in Berlin.
The sad thing is that Ethiopian long-distance runners let their Kenyan neighbors win in all the disciplines they were up to get some gold medals (Kenya even edited a new record in marathon!), excepted for 5000m and 10,000m men (Bekele won). So the atmosphere was there of the same kind as France after being defeated in soccer finals against Italy in 2006!
After tasting some dates’ homemade wine of Yordano, we went to sleep.
Indeed, we had to wake up at 4 the morning after to take the bus back to Addis. Actually they wrote on our tickets that the bus will leave at 5am. Of course we knew that even if it was untrue, we had to be there around 4.30am.
We left at 6, as usual, and the road back to Addis was a long try to get some entertainment from the few books we had brought with us, from the funny Amharic version of Ong Bak 2, the (once again) too loud music (during 11 hours!) and the baby on our right, who saw him almost poo and throw up (at different moments of course) on Charles!
Arrived in Addis, we came to our place to take all our backpacks and move in our friends Alex, Malaika and Ericka’s place, located in Bole-Japan (Bole Road, close to the Japan embassy).
We went in a pizzeria shortly after our move, and I had the pleasure to discover their special PIZZA FIRE (thanks a lot Charles, once again, for the order), which is infact a pizza with almost only pepper on it! I was crying (my mouth was really burning) and it took me 2 days to regulate this.
On Monday morning Charles was feeling so weak that he thought he had caught MALARIA! Besides he had been bitten by mosquitoes 3 times in Bahar Dar (which is much lower than Addis, so doted of a more numerous mosquitoes’ population).
As I am writing this article it is Friday, and he seems to be doing much better.
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