Moyale – lake Awasa

Moyale is a dreadful bordertown. Although formalities went smooth, they are even computerised and could scan our passports and our barcodes, the town was not very exciting. It was too late to go to a next place, some 100 km further on. The good thing is that Ethiopia is very cheap. Hotels, very very basic but only 4 euro per room do make a difference. Also petrol is half the price of Kenya. In the end we stayed in a grubby place, with the idea to get up early and drive as fast as we could to a nice place at lake Awasa, run by a German- Ethiopian couple. Only 500 km and on tar road but through mountains and lots, lots of small villages. Everyone uses the road and so do the donkeys, donkey-cards, goat, sheep, cattle and lots of children, shouting: “faranji, faranji”, foreigner or “you, you, you”. Once we were stuck in a kind of procession and after 10 minutes or so we were able to drive past them. Lovely scenery again, exotic people, so different from the Black Africans. From green rift valley places to dry white sandy places with lots of termitehills. They gave us the idea we were in a statue garden.

In Awasa we had difficulty to find our camping place but with some help we managed to enter a lovely garden where our German friends already were drinking ‘St George’ beer. One day of cleaning the car, laundry ( by hand), relaxing and recovering of 1000km hard work. Evert was all exited because in the garden 1 huge and 2 smaller turtoises lived. In the evening we walked to lake Awasa. A nice lake but you could not swim in there because of the hippo’s. We decided to give the boys a treat and the next day we went to lake Langano, 100 km furtheron, a lake with brown, tea like water, but you could swim. So we did and we water cycled and relaxed.