Eastern Africa

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Mahe and Victoria

After breakfast, I bused into Victoria, the capital of Seychelles. It is a tidy quaint little town. As I propose to bus in tomorrow with my luggage for the ferry terminal, I checked out the route and distance first. It took 15 minutes and I’ll save a considerable amount as taxis in Seychelles are hyper […]

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Arriving in the Seychelles

Above:  View from my guesthouse of Beau Vallon bay. The flight left Dubai at an obscene time of 0205 after my 11 hour transit. The flying time was just over four hours and we an arrival at Seychelles’ Mahe Island around 0630. I don’t know how Emirates can get their seating so wrong so often. […]

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Homeward bound

After breakfast at the Ras Hotel, we taxied to the airport.  I was homeward bound.  Back to Sana’a, my home-away-from-home, for an overnight.  Then Dubai overnight, Hong Kong and hopefully Auckland thereafter on standby. The Ethiopian Airlines B737 was chocka to Djibouti but nearly empty for the second leg to Sana’a.  The transit in Djibouti […]

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Bumped

The Ghion hotel was going to take us to the Gonder airport.  As usual I wanted to go early but they said it would be OK to leave the hotel an hour before the flight as it was only a Fokker 50 leaving from a small airport.  Once we had set off, Marie realised she […]

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Blue Nile Falls

I didn’t sleep well last night.  This has been the case on-and-off during my Ethiopian trip.  It might be the Lariam I’m taking, or just the awkward sleep patterns that’s required for all the early bus trips. We left around 0930 for the bus station for a short outing to the Blue Nile falls at […]

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Lake & monansteries

The islands (and a peninsular) on Lake Tana are home to many monasteries. We had an early boat ride arranged for 0800 but we had to pack up and move to Ghion Hotel before that. After a mango juice and a macchiato, we set off with one extra hanger-on from Netherlands. The cruise on Lake […]

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By Lake Tana

Today we travel to our last stop in Ethiopia, not counting our return to Addis afterwards.  We had a van ride booked at 0700 to take us to Bahir Dar.  While on the bog, still way before our pick-up, the hotel man came to let us know that the van was nearly here.  Not long […]

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Timkat!

We were advised to be at the Fasilades Baths by around 5am.  Surely nothing much can happen before sunrise.  So Stephen and I took a gamble and got there by 5:45am.  It was still rather cool.  We waited patiently till nearly 0800 before anything significant happened.  I guess we did absorb a bit of atmosphere […]

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Timkat eve

Today is the eve of Timkat, which is Epiphany on the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar.  This is when celebrations begin rather than tomorrow.  While we didn’t know what to expect, we were advised to be at the Piazza at 1500. That gave me time in the morning to do some sightseeing.  I thought of going to […]

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Day of rest

Soon after waking up, we decided to go to Misrak Pension next door to secure two rooms at 3x the normal price; they have no twin rooms.  The joys of travelling during a festival.  With that sorted, our minds were put at ease. After attending to money and lunch, we visited Gonder’s Royal Enclosure.  I […]

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