Mon 10 Feb 2014 (3 Yekatit 2006) Adama

Mon 10 Feb 2014 (3 Yekatit 2006) Adama



The clothes are mostly dry, and we're in no great hurry to get going. Carol goes down to breakfast. Mike heads first to the front desk to straighten out the lost key problem. Surprise! They have the lost key in their possession.



The Maya Hotel buffet breakfast, while somewhat simpler than Dire Dawa's Ras is still a solid 8 out of 10. A first for this trip: steamed milk along with the coffee and tea.



Mike falls into conversation with an interesting professional family from Addis. The husband, who is part Ethiopian, teaches at a theology institution. His Indian-born wife and their three daughters are enjoying this school break holiday. All speak English fluently. The wife is the one who instinctively knew that our 4:30 AM bus in Dire Dawa would not have left until 6 AM. They had eaten at the Green Valley Restaurant near our hotel the night before and highly recommended it.



Mike was still curious as to how our room key had gotten to the front desk overnight, so he asked the husband to inquire further at the front desk. He reported back that someone overnight had thrown the key onto the grounds - it had been picked up and delivered to the front desk. Yesterday, the room key had been in Mike's front left pocket atop a few small bills, functioning as his money clip. The room key had in fact protected his money from the bump-I'm-sorry pickpocketer.



Mike reached into his right pants pocket and discovered that his cell phone, a simple 10-year-old, non-smart phone, was also gone. It had been kept on top of the camera. So the phone turns out to have protected the camera and the other less important stuff in the right pocket from being taken.



Mike concludes that perhaps the correct response to any pedestrian delivering an "accidental" bumping would be to step hard on the foot of the bumper, and almost immediately hit him hard in the groin, saying "Excuse me" very apologetically. Then check your own pockets, and check the pockets of the bumper. This will either recover your pickpocketed stuff, or get you thrown in the local jail for assault and battery. Well, maybe not.



(This morning at breakfast, there is also an American family with a teen girl and a toddler daughter. More about them tomorrow.)



Folks from Addis come to Adama to see the lakes and the wildlife. Today, we have a choice of two day trips to do the same. Choice 1: We can go to the eastern shore of Lake Koka, where there is a hippo pool and purportedly a reliable likelihood of seeing hippos and maybe crocodiles. Just take a local bus toward Addis, get off at a junction 15 km west at a big blue sign. Hitchhike on a local road 12 km to a parking lot, and walk to the pool. This sounds pretty problematic without a car, so we go on to Choice 2.



Choice 2, the Sodere Hot Springs, is a resort complex 25 km to the south of Adama. It is located on the Awash River (this is the same river which drains from Lake Koka and continues on to Awash Falls and the Awash National Park 100 or so km to the east). Luckily, it is served by a regular minibus, so Sodere it is.



It is now 9:30 am. We walk to the bus station, find the Sodere minibus, ascertain that the fare is 20 birr each, and get on. Pretty soon we are off. We are stalled in the bus lot for close to 10 minutes, but it turns out that we are just waiting for the driver. As we drive and people are getting off and others on, the conductor is collecting the fare. Nobody is paying more than 10 birr, so Mike offers 20 birr for the two of us. A discussion ensues. It turns out that those passengers staying on the main road to the town of Awash (sorry, but everything seems to be called Awash) are paying only 7 - 10 birr. However, if you want to turn east and go the last 5 km to the resort itself, it is 20 birr. This is not a farengi pricing just for us today! We agree and pay.



As we leave Adama, businesses sport bi- and trilingual signs. We get to the town on the resort road, then STOP. We are only passengers going on to the resort. We are "sold" to the minibus that is sitting there, which is going the last 5 km. OK, we have seen this transfer arrangement many times before in many other countries and many other contexts. The driver for this second bus gets then on. He takes what looks like a radio and sticks it over the existing radio in the minibus. He takes a keypad and plugs it into what looks like a receptacle for a cigarette lighter in older American vehicles. This is his music player, with which he can dial in hundreds of music channels (God forbid that we should be on a minibus without blaring Ethiopian music).


It is now 10:50 AM. We are off (gently downhill) to the resort, following the path of the Awash River. We are in sugar cane/teff country, and lots of tall green stalks are growing on both sides of the road. The bus lets us off 20 meters from the resort entrance. Along with other arriving tourists, we pay the admittance fee of 30 birr each.  Down a lovely landscaped path we come to a collection of  low-slung buildings around a fountain, evoking powerful memories of Howard Johnson Hotels of days long gone.



Sodere Resort opened in 1963.  This is where middle class Ethiopians come to relax, about a 2 hour car trip from Addis (120 KM). Sodere is famous for its hot springs and mineral water bathing (outdoor pools in Addis seem to be pretty rare). There are at least 3 swimming pools (different generations of construction), one of which is a "Swmminig Pool". There is a facility for massages, a building offering "Chinese Medicine", a conference hall, lots of cabins and other resort hotel type accommodations (some brand new, and some looking pretty worn).   There are also trails, and off we go, in search of native animals.



Near the trailheads there is a brick wall decorated with clever metal sculptures of a rhino, a hippo, a crocodile. A metal snake, prey in its mouth, winds around a large tree which is growing next to the wall. There is a chair built into an artificial waterfall - the perfect spot for a bathing suit photo-op.



The whole resort stretches out along the south bank of the Awash River, which is fenced off and not reachable by foot. The trees and greenery that fringe the paths support a lot of darting birds. There are people on the other side of the river, including some kids tending their donkeys, but that is rural Ethiopia, and the two societies do not communicate here. But we are mostly in constant view of the river.


We keep on walking. We pass a small structure which functions as an [Ethiopian Orthodox] chapel. We keep on walking, passing monkeys and a good number of water birds (such as egrets), but no hippos. Apparently there is one hippo, who will appear every now and then, but we are not among the annointed today (maybe it is also on school holiday). The only Crocs to be found are on the feet of paying guests. They are the most interesting fauna to be seen - more cute two-piece bathing suits, jog wear and cargo pants here than neteles, veils, or Muslim caps. The many children enjoying the resort are dressed just like American kids. Yuppie is as yuppie does.



The road peters out, and clearly turns into a parking area for the newest of the resort cabins. Almost no Ethiopians own private cars, but the small subgroup who do have their own vehicles are staying at Sodere. Perhaps if we were ferengi posted to Addis for a period of years, we would vacation here too.



Time to get back to town. In truth, we have been here not much more than an hour, but we seem to have seen it all. And the day is becoming steadily warmer and somewhat oppressive. We pass again by the swimming pools, a gift shop or two, some changing rooms, and we are now in an area of vervet monkeys.  How do we know? The adult male has a pale blue scrotum. It is fun to watch them carefully groom each other, from beneath the tail to the top of the head. Several will combine for a good nit-picking on a single "customer" (maybe the massage staff has paid them off for a little subliminal advertising.)



Goodbye metal hippo.
And metal croc.
And rhino and snake.



We walk out, back to the stop where we were let off. There is a minibus waiting there. After about 15 minutes it fills, and we are off uphill. At the main road, we are put on a bus back to Adama - we know the drill by now.



In town, a few blocks before the bus station itself, we get off at a booth Carol had noticed during our trip to Sodere: "Iodized Salt for Women and Children." There are piles of bags of iodized salt, along with someone who will explain the importance of micronutrients. It turns out that Ethiopia is among the world's 13 most iodine-poor countries.When a mother has an iodine deficiency during her pregnancy, there will be insufficient amount of iodine for the production of thyroid hormones. This is a common cause of cretinism in people who do not have enough natural sources of iodine in their diets. Carol remembers well two older men with mental retardation at the program in southern Georgia where she worked in the early 1970s. Before US laws were changed, poor rural Americans used to save money by using uniodized salt. Ethiopia is landlocked and its soil is deficient in certain minerals. The country used to get its salt from the Eritrean port of Assab, where iodization factories added the nutrient. But since the war, most Ethiopian salt comes uniodized from the salt flats of northern Ethiopia. "It is estimated that almost half of Ethiopia's 80 million population faces iodine deficiency disorder (IDD). Of the 35 million people at risk, 40 percent are believed to have contracted goiter, a swelling of the thyroid gland in the neck."



It is lunch time, but two large glasses of juice (avocado for Mike, mixed for Carol) will do instead. So we stop in a crowded juice bar and imbibe.



After our juice lunch, we look again at a grocery across the street, which has a large placard depicting pigs and some words in Chinese. Inside, Mike discovers some frozen pork, some bottles of soy sauce, and bags of rice. For vegetables, in addition to the rich mix of Ethiopian vegetables, they sell napa cabbage, but precious else for true Chinese cooking. Is there a single store in Addis where the Chinese who are all over the country go to buy their supplies, 200 kg at a time?



Footnote: At home, Mike has the following for a minimal Chinese kitchen: soy sauce, light soy sauce, fish sauce, hoisin sauce, rice vinegar, xinjiang [chinkiang] vinegar, shao hsing rice wine, black bean paste, pickled vegatables, chili paste. Also, rice thread, bean thread, rice noodles. And for specialty dishes, Szechuan peppercorns.



It is now past 2:30 pm. After this morning's analysis of the contents of Mike's pockets, we are eager to transfer our 1200+ trip photos to a USB stick.  We walk back to the hotel to pick up the USB stick and a transfer cord.



At the hotel there is an Ethiopian fellow absorbed in his computer. He speaks reasonable English. Mike asks him to call the number of the now-lost cell phone. Someone answers. Our caller says you have a stolen phone. The answering person stammers a bit, and the phone is turned off. Our caller spoke in Amharic, but the local language is Oromifa. Would we have had a different result if the call was in Oromifa? Fat chance, most likely.



Back in the center of town we find an internet café. We don't need our transfer cord for the procedure. We use a USB cradle that holds our camera memory card. Bingo: we are copying. It is slow, but finally all 1207 pictures and 5 short movies are on the computer. Then they are on the USB stick, headed for deep packing in Mike's backpack.  Now if someone makes away with the camera, they get an old camera, and only the very newest pictures from the last day or so. Paranoia has its virtues.



It is now close to dinner time. A restaurant in the same off-road plaza as the internet café serves kikil for 30 birr. We sit down, relax, and watch the passing scene over two very tasty bowls of soup. Across the way in another restaurant patio are 4 Chinese men. Mike goes over and talks to them. How do they get supplies for Chinese cooking? It turns out that these guys are posted somewhere in rural Ethiopia; they are here in Adama for a conference or a meeting. It also turns out that one of their number is from Lanzhou, in northwest China, a major city on the Yellow River, the capital of Gansu Province. Well, this Lanzhou fellow was very good at throwing noodles: a bag of wheat flour, some water, and a little yeast, and they had Chinese meals. No need for all of the other Chinese kitchen items. Still no explanation of how the Chinese who are not from Lanzhou are eating.



Footnote: We have a New Lan Zhou Restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the owners throws his own noodles. This quite a process - make the dough, roll it out, stretch it, throw it, and stretch it again. Cut it into dowel shapes. Then fold in half, stretch it, fold it in half again, and half again (now you have 8 thick noodles). Then again (16), and again (32), and again (64 thin noodles). This guy in Atlanta usually gets 128 really thin noodles. Tear away the small ball of dough at the end, and throw the noodles into the pot of soup already on the stove.



While we are eating, the electricity goes out. This is fairly normal in Ethiopia, but not so good for folks who try to run internet cafes. Luckily, kikil soup tastes just as good without electricity as it does with electricity.



It is now past 7 PM and dark. We walk back toward Maya and find the Green Valley Restarant (recommended the Ethio-Indian family for its sundaes). It is located on the second level of a multistory building. The cafe tables on the patio facing the street turn out to be the places to see and be seen from the street below. We watch a table of young women friends, who seemed by their dress to be a mix of Muslim and Orthodox, carefully position themselves by the railing.  We try to order a sundae. What came instead was a chocolate ice cream float. Tasty (and filling) enough. We didn't see anyone else eating sundaes, or see them on the menu. Oh, well.



Back to the hotel, just a short distance away. Walk side by side. Keep your eyes out for people coming too close. Carol spots the young beggar woman from last night. On closer inspection, is she holding a baby or just some artfully arranged cloth? The past few days have taken a toll on us.



Into the Maya courtyard. Up to the room, key in hand. And to sleep.



Over the course of the trip, the people inhabiting Carol's dreams have become less Caucasian and more African.