In Yabello

~ photos added! ~

Hello, family and friends - we are in Yabello and have been here since Monday evening... but we've had lots of trouble accessing the Internet, and even the phone lines went down here for 24 hours, which apparently is an unknown event. I still can't get my stupid Yahoo email to work enough to compose an email, so this is my little shout-out that WE ARE SAFE and here and settling in. As of today (Thursday lunchtime) we still don't have a house, but it looks like it will happen, maybe by the weekend some time. We are in a hotel on the edge of town for the moment. 

OK, here is a blog post I wrote our first night here when I thought I'd be able to post right way... since then, I haven't written anything but I'll try if this actually works. I'm also going to try adding some photos if the text successfully posts:

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After two days of travel, we made it to Yabello last night before dinner. The trip was longer and harder than I expected, even in a private car with a careful, knowledgeable driver.

The first day, we drove about 300 kilometers to Awassa, which took us over 5 hours. Along the way, we stopped for lunch in the town of Ziway, which is situated on a large Rift Valley lake of the same name.

At Ziway, we had fantastic fish (tilapia) – I’m sorry in advance if you aren’t interested in our meals, but for a pregnant mother, food has become one of the main concerns of my day (more than usual, even). Will Cora eat that? Will I eat that? What repercussions will that salad / soup / plate of meat sauce have on us in 12 hours? Are we getting enough protein / veggies / water? Are we having too much red meat / carbs / sugar?

This is what Ethiopian food looks like in Ethiopia.
Nate's thick "tagabino" on top, my saucier "shiro" bean sauce still covered below.

Bread, injera, and beef are easy to find in Ethiopia. In the morning, eggs are standard (thank goodness for the “Spanish omelet” with tomatoes, onions, and hot peppers). But beyond that, every place we go we can’t be sure what other options we’ll have. Maybe the menu says soup and lasagna and chicken cutlet, but really all they have is French fries and shiro (bean sauce) on injera.

Eating Cheerios in anticipation of her eggs at breakfast in Awassa

Now that we are done traveling for a while, it will be easier to maintain a healthy diet. Nate already knows some of the good restaurants in town, and we’ll cook meals for ourselves at home, too. When we have a home… But house hunting is a story for another day. Today I’ll describe our trip south.

The drive from Addis Ababa to Awassa begins in the Abyssinian Highlands at 2,400 meters, drops into the Ethiopian Rift Valley to follow along several of the eight Rift lakes, and begins to climb back into the Highlands at Awassa (1,685m). We crossed into and out of two major ethnic and administrative territories on this trip. Addis serves not only as the capital of the nation, but also of the Oromia federal region.

At Awassa, however, we entered the capital of the “Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s State”, where no single ethnic group dominates and in fact there are 45 different ethno-linguistic groups among the 12 million souls who live there. They produce a lot of coffee in this region, and one of their major tourist attractions is the really interesting cultural tribes of South Omo – I think you can find good photos of their fantastic hairdos and ceremonies if you google “Ethiopian Southern Omo tribes”.

The city of Awassa has a reputation for being well organized and good for visitors. But having spent a week+ in an African city, I mostly wanted to enjoy the natural beauty of Awassa lake. Despite the doubts of our seriously adorable driver, Dagafa, I talked us out of the expensive city-center hotel that Nate’s colleague, Birhanu, had arranged, and into a cheaper, somewhat run-down but interesting lakeside resort that no one really knew the name of.

Monkeys in the morning

When we arrived at that resort, five Ethiopian weddings were going on at the same time. Picture that: five different color bridesmaids dresses, five couples taking photos in front of the lake, about five hundred guests playing in the pool and drinking at the bar and strolling along the lakeshore. Amazing. Add in the fact that the beautifully wooded grounds were teeming with guereza and grivet monkeys, and you get an idea of the scene. Cora, as you can imagine, was delighted.

Our bungalow was large but really run down – I wouldn’t even allow Cora into the bathroom. After Nate checked the room out for the first time, he came back to ask me if we were ready to start “roughing it, Africa style”. But there was no way we were leaving that breezy lakeside and those monkeys, however, so the no-name resort it was. (Really, the place is allegedly called “Midroc Zewed Village, formerly known as Wabe Shebelle Hotel #2”, no kidding. But it’s pretty meaningless without any signs on the road turnout or at the hotel itself.)

The next day, we had a lovely breakfast on the restaurant veranda at the lake, visited with the monkeys once more, and headed on our way south by 9:30am. We climbed into the Highlands some more, passing through villages surrounded by coffee, false-banana (Ron and Kathy, you should remember the segment about that plant from the Ethiopia video we watched at your house), pineapple, papaya, and all sorts of other lush greenness.