Archive for the ‘My life & thoughts’ Category
Our Ethiopian odyssey (12): Blue Nile Falls
February 18th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 12 (Wednesday) was our penultimate day in Ethiopia. Our morning excursion was to the Blue Nile Falls. Leaving the hotel at 8.40 am, we were soon onto yet another unmade road all the way to the falls. Although the journey was only 30 km, it took over an hour because it was so bumpy […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (11): Gondar and Lake Tana
February 18th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 10 (Monday) and it was time to leave the Simien Mountains and head back to Gondar. We set off at 8.40 am on what was going to be our last long road journey of the holiday. The first 40 minutes of our ride was a bouncy time back down the unmade road to the […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (10): Simien Mountains
February 17th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 8 (Saturday) was always planned simply as a travelling day with no sightseeing at all but, when one is visiting more exotic countries, one has to be ready for things not always to go precisely to plan. So we left our hotel in Lalibela at 10 am and set off for the airport for […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (9): another day in Lalibela
February 13th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 7 (Friday) proved to be the most strenuous so far and hopefully we will not have another day as challenging. The programme was a morning trip to a church on a local mountain top, so we were up at 6.15 am and off at 7.30 am. Our guide Dawit had given us three options: […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (8): rock churches of Lalibela
February 12th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 6 (Thursday) saw the departure from Axum of nine of the group. The woman who was the first to be ill had chosen to fly home, while the second woman to be unwell had decided to press on with the trip. We left the hotel at 9 am and were soon at the airport […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (7): Axum
February 11th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 5 (Wednesday) was a non-travelling day with all our time spent in Axum and environs, so it was much less challenging than the previous day – but now two of our group were too unwell to come out. The Kingdom of Axum arose in the 4th century BC, grew rapidly to be a power […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (6): slices of life and a treacherous road
February 10th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Our evening at the Gheralta Lodge – which is owned by an Italian but named after the nearby mountains – was rather special. First, we were given complimentary cocktails: Vee & Roger had the house cocktail which was honey wine with campari and a hint of something local like mint. Then we all had a […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (5): our first rock churches
February 9th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 3 (MondayOur ) actually began in the night when the alarm in our hotel room went off at the crazy time of 4.30 am. It was a case of wash, dress, pack and have a “grab and go” breakfast before the Cox & Kings group boarded our minimbus at 5.30 am. We were soon […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian odyssey (4): Addis Ababa
February 8th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 1 (Saturday) of our trip was in fact essentially just a nighttime flight from London Heathrow airport to Addis Ababa Bole airport. All our flights – both external and internal – are with Ethiopian Airlines. This is the largest and most profitable airline in Africa and has recently been declared “African airline of the […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Our Ethiopian Odyssey (3): a few introductory facts and figures
February 7th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
So much for the ancient history of Ethiopia. What about modern times? The recent history of Ethiopia has involved the Derg socialist revolution and ‘the red terror’ (in 1974-75, between 100,000-500,000 were murdered), invasions (by Somalia in 1977 and of Somalia in 2006), famines (most infamously in 1984-85 when between 400,000-million died), and full scale […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)