Addis and unexpected encounters

Place: Addis Ababa

Tunes: Above and Beyond

Crossing over to the pavement from a smaller road. Don't try this with a Goldwing.

How far will that camel go with all that hey?

Here young girls work instead of going to school. Young men hang around the villages doing not very much.

More crowds. You cannot do anything without a crowd in this place.

Pietiläinen and us. Note the position of the hands.

Normal procedures in the morning and no rubber chicken for breakfast. 12 people working in the little cafe with wight customers and it still took 30 min to get our omelettes and coffee. African efficiency. 

The roads from Dese are nice and there is great scenery around the route. The tarmac is good. There’s stuff (rocks, construction waste, rubbish, sand, whatever) piled on the roads and many many potholes, fallen tree trunks etc. But if you have a bit of common  sense and are not racing, it's all ok. If you took only the cattle, the idiots who are blind and/or insane and the shit from the roads they would be perfect. Top gear should really come here to try these roads. They have the muscle to seal the road and to put enough police on there to keep the idiots from wandering around. They would have a blast here and could make this place known to the world.

There was this tunnel on top of a mountain at about 3400 meters. Inside, the traffic was very heavy and your only source of light was the tail light of the person in front of you. The ground was very hard. Cut rock full of very deep grooves and completely soaking wet.  

It was so cool that we had to do it wearing sunglasses.

Some long sections of road works had to be avoided every now and again, so more off-road driving. One wee fall occurred (not to me for once) and now we have two street fighter GS 800’s. 

I always felt that the plastic screen was like a filter between you and the "real thing" and things are much better without it. And you get a neck like a wrestler in no time as your helmet has this sun visor thing that does nothing else than catches the wind and tries to tear you head off. 

In Addis Ababa, people do have private cars, but outside the city traffic was light. Only lorries and suicidal minibuses. Despite the increased traffic in the city it was surprisingly easy to get around and people drive with some common sense and skill.The hotel was recommended by the embassy and is nice indeed. Finally, there is good internet (relatively speaking as it is censored), but the Leader here has decided that blogging is for foreign spies, so still no access. Later, this got sorted out thanks to Tor and a big thank you to Bram for pointing me to the right direction.

There is a sauna here too! The staff seems to be a bit puzzled how we do things in a sauna, like drink beer there or throw water on the stones, but for now all is well and life is good. No nightlife today as one tends to pass out after a big meal in the evening if you had nothing to eat since breakfast.

Day two

Today, tourism believe it or not. I was hoping that stuff was behind us, but one does what he is told in these situations. We walked around the center (?) and looked for some cash machines only to find the seediest looking machine I have ever seen at the Hilton hotel. The blue bar you have on the screen in a Windows PC was clearly visible on the bottom of the ATM screen. The Sheraton had a better one and my cash problems were history for the moment.

Some piss-ants (fixers) were offering their services all day in order to sell us cheap souvenirs or cheap taxi rides or whatever you might possibly ask for. Very annoying. The oldest part of Addis was essentially a little slum in the middle of town, soon to be demolished. Nothing to see there but misery.

We did not do much shopping as going to the market looked like the kind of place where you have to do all the things we do not like to do. It would have turned into a fistfight in no time with the merchants, jut like in Egypt. Besides, shopping is for amateurs and tourists. Real adventurers live off the land.

In the meanwhile, Jukka found a new windscreen for me. It was a big plastic canister of cooking oil in a previous life. Some screws and cable ties later, I had a new colour coordinated windscreen. It is just as yellow as the rest of the bike. Jukka put his own windscreen back on as too many women were chasing him for riding such a hard looking bike (GS 800 without a windscreen).

At the hotel Gym, another Finn told us how to find Kyösti Pietiläinen aka. Legionnaire Peters, in Addis. This was a bit of a surprise to me as I did not know he lived here and let alone that people knew about his whereabouts. 

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C3%B6sti_Pietil%C3%A4inen

In brief, this guy has spent 28 years in the paratrooper regiment in the Foreign Legion and retired in 2000. He has seen and done all sorts of things most Finnish soldiers (or French ones) only see movies about. He has written a number of books from his experiences and I had read some of them prior to this trip. In a a nutshell, this guy is the real deal. 

We took a taxi to a place and managed to find him with some of his local friends. After many stories we had to retire but we agreed to meet up tomorrow morning for some book signings. It was an honor to meet such an accomplished soldier and an ambassador to Finland in many ways. 

Tomorrow we leave and start racing towards Kenya. It will be good to be on the road again to leave this tourism thing behind us.