The girls dressed for dinner, Haile Resort, Hawassa, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
Sunset over Lake Hawassa, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
Girls at Sadama people village, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
Child with toy near Chelba Tutiti Megalithic Stele site, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
Stele, Chelba Tutiti Megalithic Stele site, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
Chelba Tutiti Megalithic Stele site, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
House near Yabello, Ethiopia, 15 Feb 2014
This was a day where huge contrasts were encountered! We left the hotel at Yabello all quite relieved to be away from this grotty accommodation where there was hardly any electricity, sub-standard rooms and food that made some of us ill. Our path was northwards and the roads varied from super smooth bitumen (a rarity) to very broken pot-holed roads where our drivers had to weave at slow speed to avoid damaging the cars too much. The surrounding environment started to change from dry desert and the flatlands of southern Ethiopia to the more mountainous and hilly wet tropical regions within the Lower Rift Valley. The changes in agriculture are quite dramatic too with the soil being highly fertile and cropping abundant albeit at subsistence/small farm level. There were large holdings of enset (false banana), mangoes, pineapples, avocadoes, bananas and especially coffee. It is thought that coffee originates from the region around Kaffe from which the Europeans derived the name coffee.
At a place along the way called Tutu Fela we left the main road and headed several kilometres through coffee plantations to a fenced paddock area on a hillside. This is a stelae field and is a graveyard dating back about 1200 years. Each of the graves was marked with a vertical round shaped stone (a stela) often several metres high. A good number (there are about 300 here) have now fallen over and there’s been no attempt to seriously investigate what’s under these monoliths. Many of the stelae are shaped as penises and their carvings indicate that male circumcision was commonly practised. It is thought that women were buried here too but as yet there’s been no archaeological detailed study.
We had lunch at Dilla village and then continued north. It’s true to say that in today’s 300 km of travel there was practically nowhere along the road where there weren’t humans. About every 10 km we’d come to a town or village where the Saturday market action was frenetic and people in their hundreds were milling around the edge of the road buying and selling their wares.
Children seeing us foreigners (faranji) would excitedly call out “you, you, you” and put out a begging hand.
We then stopped at a village where the Sidama people live in circular houses with thatched roofs and bamboo cladding. The house we visited was divided into three rooms one for cooking and sleeping, one for sitting and one for the cattle as they provide heating during the colder nights. The people were very friendly and welcomed us into their community which is famous for coffee production. Photographs were taken without any fee being demanded but there was raucous laughter when the children got to see their images!
We finally arrived at Hawassa and the hotel we’re staying in is magnificent, a total contrast from the last night two nights. The hotel is called the Haile Resort and is owned by Haile Gerbselassie an Ethiopian marathon Olympic gold medallist superstar. He set the world record for the marathon in 2008 in Berlin in a time of 2 hours, 2 minutes and 59 seconds.
Our room is 5 star and has its own private balcony looking out onto the Awassa Lake which is a few hundred metres away. There’s a swimming pool with its own waterfall and a golf course too, the only one we’ve yet seen in Ethiopia. Wow, what a contrast but we’ve only one day here and tomorrow is back to reality we’ve been warned!!