ann and i were able to go to ethiopia for about ten days, and it was amazing!
we spent the first day in addis ababa. we stayed at the bow hotel, which is run by an ethiopian-canadian geologist who used to live in calgary. the first order of business for me was to get a visa for somaliland, where i would visit later in the trip. i had read only sparse reports online about people traveling overland from ethiopia, and an advance visa is required when taking this route, so i hoped i’d be able to procure one, though reports on this were sparse as well. the somaliland embassy in addis has moved three times in the past three years, so we finally found it after arriving to the third location in a residential area. they let us right in, and it was basically a house where the ambassador’s family was living, with kids sitting on the opulent couches surfing facebook, etc. they took my passport and told me to come back in a week, but i incessantly insisted until they gave me the visa on the spot!
our next stop was world vision’s ethiopian headquarters to arrange a visit to a child ann has been sponsoring through world vision for a few years! we met with one of their directors and said we just wanted to visit, getting there (a town in central ethiopia called mersa) on our own. he really wanted to arrange all our transportation and our entire vacation for us but we finally got him to agree to just a visit, though it eventually still turned out to be a heavily supervised one. world vision ethiopia is a pretty impressive operation, with dozens of development projects around the country, and all very well organized with local staff.
next, we needed to buy some flights! in ethiopia, like some other countries, domestic flights are much cheaper if purchased at the airline office inside the country compared to online from abroad. luckily none were sold out!
we then walked around downtown, including the famously nice sheraton hotel, and got dinner in a pretty hip club on the sixth floor roof of a shopping center, before heading to the airport early the next morning for our flight to lalibela!