Today Marie and I started our adventure in Africa. Ethiopia specifically. The Ethiopian Airlines 737 took us from Sana’a departing at 1645 and arriving at Addis Ababa at 1945 (if it had been on time). There was a stop en route at Djibouti that was meant to be for an hour, but it took a little longer to turn the plane around here.
Addis Ababa airport was new and modern. We disembarked at a remote gate as the airbridges seemed awfully high, possibly only for large widebody jets. The queues for immigration (me) an visa-on-arrival (Marie) were both long. But it took less than an hour for us to get out.
First impressions of Addis were pretty good. Despite supposedly being more third world than Yemen, it felt pretty clean and modern … but this was late at night. Our first impressions were reinforced even in the daylight next day though. The taxi ride into the centre of town took only 10 mins.
We stayed at the Ras Hotel and took dinner in-house. It was a treat being able to have wine with dinner. And Ethiopia’s sparkling water “Ambo” was also cheap and available.