Our Ethiopian Odyssey (1): why on earth go there?
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 any health matters we should address, we too wondered why we were going there as we had not anticipated the number of inoculations that would be necessary.
We already had the required cover for hepatitis A and yellow fever, but needed a course of four injections (at a cost of £30 a time) for hepatitis B, a course of three injections (at a cost of £65 a time) for rabies, another injection to cover diphtheria, tetanus and polio (there is currently an outbreak of polio in Ethiopia), and a further injection to up-date our typhoid protection. In total that was nine injections each at a total cost of £630.
As one nurse said: “You didn’t expect that you would be a pin cushion, did you?” No – nor a cash dispenser. We will have to regard it as an investment – at our age, we should be done for life now.
As well as the inoculations, we elected to take malaria tablets before, during and after the holiday (another £138 between us). Then there was the matter of visas: you need them to enter the country, the company recommended to handle the application of them charged us £82 each, and then they managed to return the passports with visas to a local tea packaging company. So inoculations, tablets, and visas added a grand total of £932 on top of the actual cost of the holiday (don’t ask).
Finally (!?!), there was the warning in our guide book that “figures suggest that at least half of all travellers will get diarrhoea at some stage”. So why are we going to Ethiopia?