For the first time ever in our experience, due to the lack of time, we let a local agency organize our trip to Ethiopia. We have always preferred an independent planning, for several reasons. First of all, the journey starts exactly from the moment you are planning it: you study all the stops, you try to make everything fit together, you read other people’s experiences, you animatedly discuss the itinerary… but first and foremost, we have always liked to be free to choose: to do and see whatever we decide on the moment, perhaps improvising – unlike a predetermined itinerary – and letting the instinct guide us.
With this news, that’s when our adventure in Ethiopia started. At the Addis Abeba airport we met Jonas, the guy who would be our guide/travel companion and thanks to whom we have been able to enjoy this country’s beauty. The weather was ruthless; inside the off-road vehicle, there was Gueto, our driver, ready for us.
So we left to discover this country. We passed through several small villages and fields studded with lakes, until we reached Langano lake which is, as the majority of these areas, volcanic. We saw the first huts appearing from the enset plants, the fake banana tree whose roots are used to extract a pulp that is being macerated and used to prepare the kotcho, the traditional bread of sour taste, or to be fermented in order to make an alcoholic drink. Along the way, we witnessed the return journey of men, women and children to their huts, after a day spent working in the fields.
They were all on foot or by bicycle, loaded with bundles, bunches of bananas and containers filled with water taken from the wells. A very bizarre and funny memory is related to the children who, after seeing our car, were improvising some dances while waving their pelvis. We noticed that it is a custom of the whole area.
At a certain point we saw our guide throwing empty plastic bottles at them. We did not understand why, but we witnessed incredible fights to grab those bottles. Jonas explained that many of them (we are talking about 5/6-year-old kids) spend their days go grazing their cattle and those bottles are used for water or milk.
We reached our first stop and we were very disappointed. It was a fake village where everything is prepared to welcome tourists. Some of them were making bread, others were pretending to weave: it was not exactly what we had expected. We decided to talk to Jonas and gave him very clear directions on what we truly expected from this trip: we wanted to meet the real people and see how they really live. Jonas understood us immediately, gave up the travel program and that was the beginning of improvisation. Reset.
