Ethiopia: Pictures

We celebrated New Year's Eve with Pernille at Jimma's finest restaurant. It was a very nice evening, but because we had to get up at four the following morning to catch our bus to Addis, we went to bed early (and without champagne or fireworks).

After having been in Addis for 2 days, we took a bus to Bahir Dar.
Again we had to be at the bus station at five, but we'd bribed a bus station worker (10 kr) to save us two front seats. When we arrived some minutes to five, the bus was almost full, and we were very happy about our reserved good seats, although I don't know if it was morally correct or not. Anyways, the bus ride was 12 hours long and most of it was on a bumpy gravel road, so if he had not saved us those seats, I, Maria, would surely have thrown up.
Here is our bus in the middle of nowhere... broken down. We had stopped once before at a hotel to eat breakfast and this was the only other stop the bus was going to make. Here they are working hard to repair the bus which took about 30 minutes. At this time (at twelve) I (Maria) really had to pee, but I thought I'd wait till the next stop as it was in the middle of a field and not much more than an occasional haystack to hide behind. Unfortuantly for me, the next stop was Bahir Dar, 6 hours later.

Bahir Dar is by the bank of the biggest lake in Ethiopia, Lake Tana.
The lake is famous for all its small islands with monasteries on them.
Yesterday we went out on an eight-hours boat trip to some of the islands, and here is Aske standing on one of the small beautiful islands.

Here is one of the churches. The paintings on the wall are between 400 and 600 years old, there were many of them and they covered almost all of the walls. We had a guide who is on the picture explaining what the paintings were about.