Day 33 May 14th 2018
Up at 5.00 am ( this is becoming a habit!) then picked up by Eskinder to go to the airport.In the terminal we met an Australian woman working for the UN.She was heading back to the Somalian border.As the only white woman in the border town she was finding the position challenging.She no longer called Australia home ” home is the next job”.Again we realise that half the fun of travelling is meeting interesting people.
Met at the airport by Johannes (guide) and Tom (driver).Leave the airport travelling through flat landscape with lots of donkey carts and tuk tuks (called bajaj here)reminiscent of Asia.
Bahar Dar itself has wide roads lots of construction but parklands near the city centre .Then a surprise we cross the Nile!
Check into the hotel then off to a waterfall on the Blue Nile.We travel on thirty kms of gravel road threatening to rattle out of existence. Past fields of sugar cane and onions! Mud walled houses and buffaloes dragging wooden ploughs.
We arrived and met a local guide who takes us away from the village and past some outlying small farms over a a 400 year old stone bridges then a suspension bridge to see the Tis Abay,(Big Smoke) waterfall.This waterfall is actually on the Blue Nile which flows out of Lake Tana (see below) as it heads to Sudan where it joins the White Nile. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Nile
On the way to the falls we crossed a stone bridge built by the Portuguese in the 17th century.We walked to the falls past farms and kids going to school.Had to get out of the way to let donkey caravans go past!
In the afternoon we went out by boat across Lake Tana to the Ura Kidan Miheret monastery on the Zege peninsula.Since the fourteenth century around twenty monastic churches were built on the islands and peninsulas of Tana.After a walk through the forest surrounding the monastery we arrived at a circular building which housed a spectacular series of paintings covering all the wall space within the church. See https://www.bradtguides.com/destinations/africa/ethiopia/lake-tana.html
A day seeing first hand the agricultural life of the average Ethiopian and another look at the art and architecture of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity.
