First things first - Giorgio turned out to be a crook. It shouldn't come as that much of a surprise really that at some stage our luck with people would turn, and I think Gonder is where this happened, not that we noticed until the last day there.
On our last full day in Gonder I decided to make sure I didn't have malaria before setting off on the road again (as I had been having a pretty awful flu for the last two week or so), and so we made our way to the local clinic for the second time during our visit in the town. This time we went to a different clinic from the one Giorgio took us to though, and ended up paying 35birr for my visit and lab test whereas last time in the other place we had paid 100birr each for just doctor's consultation alone. Thankfully at least the test result was negative and I was reassured enough by the fact that there should not be any worry even if I would happen to collapse so we eventually made our plans to leave Gonder for Bahir Dar. In his friendly way Giorgio helped us with the travel arrangements which turned out to be effectively the second stitch-up he would impose on us. We got our minibus tickets through a broker he knew and were promised "a good price, not faranji price!" of 150birr per head. On the minibus the next day we came across some kind of an official list of minibus and bus fares for different distances inside Ethiopia (which we of course photographed straight away) with the referenced price of only 45birr per person for our said trip. So we lost some there too.
And upon us discovering all of this Giorgio lost our respect. Not for the reason we would not understand why people here operate in the way they do and accept that to an extent as part of local way of life, but for the reason we had asked him blatantly flat out about the price being the right one and trusted his word after the two weeks we spent hanging around with him with no obvious trace of him trying to benefit from us in any way. Quite the opposite, he had actually helped us on many small occasions and bargained for our share too - also not forgetting his hospitable invite to his house for peanut tea on the last night as I was still not feeling too good. After all, he could have just told us that we simply will end up paying faranji price because that's the way it goes.
In Bahir Dar we stumbled across a cheap bed for the couple of nights we spent there and got over our disappointment with Giorgio by spending a nice and sunny afternoon and evening at a few different terrace restaurants. We have really started to get into the whole injera (the Ethiopian national flexi-pancake-like bread with which, or more literally on which, all local food is served) thing by now, especially after the discovery of the best beer to go with it, Meta.
We also booked ourselves on a small tour around Lake Tana and its monasteries, and had a happy reunion with Cole and Amanda the next morning right before embarking on the tour. They had successfully survived the Simiens, of which I'm still jealous, and arrived to Bahir Dar on the same night as we had. We spent another sunny day out on the lake as part of our different tours but arranged to meet up later. The trip to the lake showed the true side of tourists' interests as none of the people in our boat really cared to see more monasteries than one (there are about 15 in total) and preferred to go scout out for hippos at the outlet of the Blue Nile which is found at the southeastern corner of the lake. And what do you know: I got to the see my two first hippos!
The evening was good fun with local Awash wine (the yellow-label used mainly for cooking), me and Amanda playing DJs and jamming to various tunes (including the shared interest for Bo Kaspers Orkester, the Ark and Stevie Wonder among others) to the annoyance of the boys, injera for dinner, some more wine and a round of ouzo shots, Jungle Shit (as re-christened by Amanda), yet another bottle of wine (this one red and hunted down by the boys at about 2am while swerving away from suggestions of prostitutes), and T and I eventually catching our minibus to Addis Ababa at 4am in a rather more than tipsy state.
Our tipple of choiceAdditional information to be declared in this post: our names to be given to hassling kids asking for them all the time from hereon are Poncho Bordel for T and Trumpet Mochacchino for the undersigned. Thanks for the inspiration go to Muffin Rodriguez and Fairydust Bananahammock.
N.B. Trumpet's camera was stolen during the said minibus ride to Addis for which reason there are no scenic pictures to be published for this post. Trumpet will try and kick Poncho in the balls to take more pictures in the future in order to preserve the visual quality of this blog.
It was a long time coming! Cole finally triumphs at Jungle Speed
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