I haven’t written for a while. We went to Ethiopia and we had a problem with the internet. Daddy said that the government had turned the internet off.
Ethiopia is very big and we did a lot of driving. On the first day we saw men dressed in orangey, brown clothes, with painted faces and holding spears. Then we couldn’t get to the campsite because the road had been covered in stones. The taniwha drove over the first few, but there were too many and we had to turn round. We spent the night in a hotel in Dilla. I had a pizza but I didn’t like it because it had a hot chilli on top of it. We watched Pollyanna, because we had just finished the book.
The we went a long way north. We stayed at a Soda Lake. There were lots of pumice stones. Vivi and I liked throwing them into the water because they float!
We went through Addis and stopped at a camp on the edge of a cliff. We did a walk to a portuguese bridge. There was a waterfall and the view was really good. We played with two little girls.
Then we went to Gonder. We went to see some castles. They had big wooden doors with staples to hold the wood together. There weren’t very many signs to tell us about them. Some emperors lived there in the 17th century. They had lion cages!
Then we went to a church. We had to take our shoes off. Daddy went in a different door to us girls. The church was all covered in paintings.
Then we went to Lalibela. There were lots of churches that had been cut into the mountain. They are very old and must have taken a loooooong time to cut out. My favourite was the St. George’s church, because I was born on St. George’s day! This church was shaped in a cross. We had to take our shoes off to go inside. Some had paintings in them. There were lots of paintings of St. George killing a dragon. At one church there was a skeleton of a pilgrim.
We saw an old man weaving at the side of the road. We bought a white scarf with a coloured border from him.
Then we drove back south. We saw a special typed of Monkey called a Gelada Monkey.It has a red triangle on its tummy and so it is sometimes called a bleeding heart baboon. They are really furry and they are the only monkey that eats grass and they live up really high in the mountains. We took a high road that went to 3,240m!
One day we drove all day and it got dark and it was wet. We couldn’t find our campsite so we stayed at a very nice lodge. My bed was up a ladder and I loved it. The next morning we smashed the breakfast buffet. There was lots of fruit salad, with strawberries and watermelon and pineapple. There was cereal and pikelets and doughnuts and they made us each a fresh omlette.
I was glad to get back to Kenya. I didn’t like it when people called us farangi (foreigner). The roads in Ethiopia are crazy too. There are lots of mountains, crazy buses, rickshaws, and motorbikes, judder bars, and donkeys/goats/cows/camels on the road. Daddy didn’t like it very much, he is going to write a blog about Ethiopia too.
roaming.kiwi 