Nobody will tell you. The guide books don’t mention anything. None of the overlanders we met told us a thing. Not even the locals would inform us. Nothing. Therefore we were absolutely surprised when we suddenly arrived in Africa. I know, there is no such thing as Africa but we all have imaginations. We drove through a little gorge and on the other side everything was different. There was no more desert. After one and a half months of sand and dust the land was green or rather brownish green (Africa after all). There were no more arab style houses but round huts made of clay with roofs of straw or reed. Cattle was everywhere: goats, sheep, and cows. Faaaantastic! Then everything went quite quickly. We drove for half a day, slept in the bush, drove another half day and arrived at the Ethiopian border. Again everything was different: no more burocracy, everything straight forward. We were through in an hour and heading for the customs office about 30km away from the border. That’s where the day started to get interesting. The customs office was closed (lunch time). So we had a cup of 5 spoons of sugar dissolved in tea on a roadside tea stand. We talked with the locals and a boy asked us whether we could give him a lift to his parents’ place. Of course we could. After an hour’s drive we arrived at his home and invited us for coffee. Ethiopians are world champions in making coffee. They invented it after all and the coffee ceremony is famous. They even roast their coffee beans freshly on a charcoal stove. Yeahh! The house was also great: There was the boy’s mother, her daughters, and the daughters’ children plus three calves that behaved like dogs. After one and a half months of instant coffee and this sugar saturated tea I drank the best coffee in the world. Can you imagine? Time went on and we left to arrive in the net town before it got dark. We had just left when we had to stop for cattle crossing the road. A boy approached the car and asked me something in amharic. I had no idea what he was talking about and mentioned he name of the city we were heading for. 30 seconds later, another boy was sitting on our hood clinging to our wipers and we drove on. After a while we tried to find out what was going on and asked the boy inside. He wouldn’t understand a word and wouldn’t come in. He looked quite ill, was totally frightened and spoke not a word of English. In the next village we asked the people to tell us what was going on and get the boy inside. By the time he was almost deep frozen but would come inside. In the following village I tried again to ask the people. I told them that he probably needed a doctor.
All the people started to laugh their heads off and told me that the boy was not at all a doctor but a farmer. Conversation can be so refreshingly efficient! Anyway, it turned out that they had a clinic there; we gave the boy some money and drove on. We decided that we like days like that!!