Day 3
The down side of taking the public bus without pre-bought ticket is that you have to be at the station around 4:30am to be sure to get a ticket for the 6am bus... We both barely slept that night, worried that our “plan” fails and we have to find another way to get to Arba Minch. The taxi driver is on-time and we cruise through an empty city listening to Ethiopian Jazz. There's a few people cleaning the street but that's pretty much it. It gets busier when we reach the bus station. Our taxi drop us off and our bags are “taken care off” by two guys (mistake!). Everyone is shooting in the ticket booth section, it feels like a fish market early in the morning. Out of the blue a brawl starts, people are throwing rocks and each other and a guy is being chased around by another one holding a stick. We get our tickets in a hurry and arrive safe and sound in the bus section. The two guys who “helped” us now ask a 100birr tip each for their service. To give a little bit of context, the bus ticket is 145birr (20birr = $1). We propose 10birr or nothing. After a lot of protesting and arguing they finally take the 10birr... lesson learned. We get a preferential treatment with our bags, they don't put them on the roof but on a private side trunk; one less thing to worry about. We're all set but the bus won't depart until it's full and that'll take another 2 hours. We finally leave the station at 7:30.
Addis is clearly ugly but outside it's a different story. Left and right, cultivated fields stretch as far as the eye can see. Traditional huts replace little by little the corrugated iron ones. They use straw for the roof and probably some kind of cob on a wooden frame for the walls. Donkeys and cattle are roaming freely in the fields when they're not used to plow. On the road, kids herd cattle to and form the grazing areas.
Nice surprise, breakfast is served in the bus. For 15birr we get bread and a soda. So far all the bread we had was good so I guess Ethiopia is one of these countries where you can have decent bread; 1 point for Ethiopia! They started making a huge push on infrastructure a few years back and it shows. There's work on the road every now and then but it's very decent. Out of the blue some overhead package starts leaking on passengers two rows in front of us, triggering a collective effort to solve the problem. We're bored already so any little event is welcome ;) It takes very little time to get used to the bus routine; every few minutes we break, honk or dodge (or all of the above) donkeys, cows, goats,... After 3 hours of this we have our first bathroom break. We're in the middle of nowhere and all you have is trees to answer nature's call. We use the opportunity to stretch our legs. The seats are very small with no space for legs; I must be tall by Ethiopian standards. During the break a donkey pass by, alone, in the middle of the road, carrying 2 jerrycans. We'll see it again by the river. They know their job and do the back and forth between the village and the river on their own. It's more and more rural now, a lesser portion is cultivated and we can see villages of traditional huts in the distance. It's noon or 6:00 if we use Ethiopian time (they start counting at dawn), time for a lunch break. We have 25min so we order quickly and when it's time to pay, they charge us twice the price. We protest for a good 5 minutes but the bus is honking impatiently and we have to let it go. You can't win all the time I guess but that was really lame. After a flat plain area with only cattle we get back into a hilly terrain where the work of erosion is on display. The soil seems very unstable; small rivers dig deep into it and on the side of the hills, one can see mini mudslides. We reach Sodo to unload/reload passengers and we're back on the road for more of the same. Banana plantation are taking over and we finally reach Arba Minch. It's the final stop of the bus... for the day. It keeps on going the next day to Jinka. Hopefully for us we're done with that taxing experience; it's 5ish pm, we've been traveling for almost 10 hours...