Sika | June 24, 2010
Essaouira is a great town. The medina area is old white stone, with blue blue skies and splashes of color from all the vendors selling souvenirs and fabric and jewelry and spices and fresh juice. It looks like it could be the less elegant cousin-town to the Greek towns that are always in the movies. [...]
Sika | June 24, 2010
The trip with the Americans was complicated, but not actually very interesting. It took two half-days of travel (actually what I was trying to avoid; the timing of it all just didn’t match up well on public transport), but I finally arrived in Marrakesh. Navigating the warrens of the Medina was a bit crazy-making, and [...]
Sika | June 22, 2010
Merzouga was just what I needed. I arrived around 5 or 6 in the morning, after chatting in stilted English much of the way with a Moroccan who had been in Fez for a guide job. The guy at Auberge Mohayut was incredibly helpful; when I decided I wanted to do the camel trek the [...]
Sika | June 21, 2010
I don’t really have much to say about Morocco. The feeling of wanting to be done with traveling ebbed and flowed, but had not passed. When confronted with the very different culture of Morocco, that feeling only intensified. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy Morocco. I did. But, for the first time [...]
Sika | June 21, 2010
It was weird to think that in the course of one day I was in three countries, and not in the hanging out in the airport sense, either. Driving through Kampala at 2:30 in the morning, I was surprised to see people on the streets, tomatoes and oranges heaped up on maize sacks, women in [...]
Sika | June 18, 2010
A Ugandan man at Chimp’s Nest stopped me and asked me if I was going chimp tracking. I said hopefully, and he offered me a lift. His name was Charles, and he was tour guiding for two Italian women, one of whom lived in Kampala with her husband and the other of whom spoke no [...]
Sika | June 18, 2010
I left Lake Bunyonyi at 7 in the morning. I could have caught the midnight bus, and in retrospect I wished I had, as my trek involved a motorboat to the shore, a taxi to Kabale, driving around waiting for the minibus to fill for about an hour before heading to Mbarara, the sweet taxi/minibus [...]
Sika | June 17, 2010
I headed to Lake Bunyonyi on a bus that went straight through to Kabale, where I caught a short taxi and then the boat to Byoona Amagara. The bus ride was a bit cramped, but not too bad—I had my own seat and played a little with the kid next to me. When I got [...]
Sika | June 16, 2010
Kampala is bigger than Lilongwe, and in better repair, at least in the center. Although it definitely felt like an African city (unlike, say, Maputo or Cape Town), it just felt more vast than anything in Malawi. It also has marabou storks, which I hate, a little bit because they are frigging huge and ugly [...]
Sika | June 15, 2010
We went back to the hotel so I could catch breakfast and to pick mom, who was feeling much better after more sleep. I had what seems to be the traditional Ethiopian breakfast: bread with creamed fresh honey in Hello Kitty-ish plates and coffee (ok, the Hello Kitty may not be traditional). I had decided [...]
Sika | June 15, 2010
Mom didn’t feel like going to see the actual festival in the morning. She wasn’t totally recovered from getting sick earlier in the trip (what with the go go go pace) and we both were a bit tired of the preferential treatment and especially of all the religious stuff. Eventually, after many longing looks at [...]
Sika | June 14, 2010
At the Lalibela airport, I was once again surprised at the ornateness, suburban-Ethiopian style. We had a new problem in Lalibela: a taxi and two guides waiting for us. Apparently there was a guide convention in Addis, because the guide Nebil had arranged for Lalibela was there, too. But he had sent a replacement, and [...]
Sika | June 14, 2010
We got up and threw on clothes we had set aside the night before. I brought my shama, just in case. Michael was was waiting for us in one of the blue rickshaw-like vehicles that are so common, noisy, and pollute-y in Ethiopia*. We drove through the pre-dawn streets, which were only slightly illuminated by [...]
Sika | June 11, 2010
The first thing I noticed on landing in Axum was the airport. All of the airports on the historical circuit are very fancy; they look like architectural representations of Ethiopian culture. The airports not on the historical circuit, like Dire Dawa/Harar, look like boxes. We were traveling relatively lightly because Desalegn let us store a [...]
Sika | June 10, 2010
Since we couldn’t get anywhere on the historical circuit until Wednesday, and I had thought Harar sounded interesting,* that’s where we decided to start our journey. The flight lands in Dire Dawa, about an hour from Harar, and we got in late enough that we felt we needed to stay in Dire Dawa for a [...]
