Addis Ababa - Rest Days

Tuesday-Wednesday 19-20 Feb - Addis Ababa - rest days

We opted to take a room at the hotel. Interesting - the grounds here are beautiful with well-kept lawns that we can camp on. There are good clay tennis courts. But the rooms... extremely basic, and the WCs and showers (which we could use if camping) leave quite a lot to be desired - I'm sure city health inspectors would close the place down if it was in Canada. One wonders how it is that one part of a facility can be of such good quality while another is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.

Reality check - to put it in perspective, remember that the TdA is a camping excursion. The sites are chosen to facilitate camping and this location meets that objective. Some people chose to take cabs to more comfortable hotels in town. For us, for all its limitations, the room here gives us a chance to plug in the computer and work on the pictures and blog, and it is convenient for tomorrow's departure. We're not in Canada, so don't expect Canadian standards. The shower - yes it's cold, but we haven't had a hot shower since the middle of January, so why worry about that now.

We got into town after cleaning bikes Tuesday morning. The only ATMs that take foreign bank cards are in the Sheraton and Hilton hotels, so we go there - we need some cash both for everyday stuff and to pay for planned activities during the time that we can't go through Kenya. Neither machine will accept our bank cards, but Ursula managed to get a cash advance on her Visa card, so we're still solvent. We took the opportunity to enjoy a coffee and ice cream sundae - first ice cream in almost two months - at the Sheraton. It was great but more perspective - it cost three times as much as our pizza with a bottle of wine and a bottle of water for dinner near the hotel.

Addis Ababa has the largest souk in Africa. We went there with some of our fellow cyclists on Wednesday morning. We found lots of narrow alleys, lots of shops full of merchandise - and lots of people going every which way. There is probably lots of charm and interesting stuff, but we didn't find it and concluded that you have to spend a lot more than two hours to get properly oriented in a market that size.