Archive for the ‘My life & thoughts’ Category
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: […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Our Ethiopian Odyssey (1): why on earth go there?
February 5th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Our latest trip – an organised tour with Cox & Kings – is to the African nation of Ethiopia and some of our family and friends have wondered why we would chose such an obscure country for a holiday. We must say that, after we had booked the trip and consulted our local surgery on […]
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How many ties you you own and in what state do you keep them?
January 29th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
My wife Vee and her niece Sharon (who is staying with us) decided to tackle me on my ties. They wanted to know how many I had. I had no idea. So we counted and the answer was 33. Is that a lot or a little or average? Then they wanted to see how I […]
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Listening – at Christmas and always
December 22nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
“A few years after I left my secondary school in Manchester, I was invited to help out with the school’s Christmas Fair and I decided to have a go at being Father Christmas. I had recently grown my first full beard and thought that I would enter into the role by rubbing flour into my […]
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