Thieved

I had my wallet stolen yesterday. I'm not impressed. There was a wad of fresh Birr notes from the bank, where i had just gone to change traveler's cheques in the morning. Luckily, I only had my South African VISA card in there, and not any others. We called Johannesburg and had it cancelled immediately.

On top of all that, we had a terrible sleep last night so we are moving to Wanza Hotel in the "New Addis" neighbourhood, the place where young and cool people go to shop and drink macchiatos.

Yes, the one saving grace about Addis is the delicious coffees and lattes you can get, thanks to the Italians. It's all top quality, and ridiculously cheap. They also left quite a legacy of good pizza and pastas, and some of the buildings have art-deco type designs, all very pleasing to the eye.

Business-wise, we accomplished quite a bit today.

After picking up our Egyptian visas and dropping off the passports at the Sudanese Embassy for Sudan visa applications, we went to African Lakes Auto to fix a few things on Foxy.

We lunched at the government-run Ghenet Hotel. They had a bowling alley, tennis court and impressive gardens.

There was a monstrous thundershower tonight, so loud that we had to shout at each other to be heard. We ate at Wanza Hotel's little restaurant and went to sleep in our tent.

It seems it is quite impossible to get a good night's sleep in Addis; there was loud banging on the gate all night and a huge bitter row between a prostitute and several drunken clients. All this happened right beside Foxy, and underneath us while we tried to sleep.

The yelling was in Amharic sprinkled with Arabic and English. Even though we couldn't understand most of it, one doesn't really need to comprehend the words to recognize the tone.



Start: Wanza Hotel, Addis Ababa, ETH.
End: Wanza Hotel, Addis Ababa, ETH.
Distance Traveled: 0 km
Road Conditions: -
Temperature: rain, dreary and polluted, but otherwise cool.