Addis Abeba is a surprisingly modern city and the internet speed here is definitely quicker than elsewhere in Ethiopia. It is also home to a fair few Italian restaurants - the place we ate dinner at was excellent (in service and in food). Our wanderings around the Piazza area last night was a rememberable taste of the slightly seedy, very energetic capital city night life. Bars were at most 20 metres apart and overamplified music pumped out of their neon lit doorways. Peering into their darkened quarters, it was easy to tell which were popular and which were still waiting on a crowd. The music ranged from a mixture of American Popular to local Ethiopian music, of varying quality (static was a common audible artifact). This was all on a Sunday evening too.
This morning we ventured to the Sheraton, the most exquisite hotel in Addis Abeba. Several riders who are feeling deprived of their luxury so far have checked in (evidently the credit crunch is over - apparently last year about 95% of the riders camped out, far fewer are camping this year). For the cash strapped of us however, breakfast was our brief taste of opulence - $25 for a typically 5* breakfast buffet. We took our time there, about two hours, and I figure I must have consumed about 2,000 calories at least. I stopped at the point where I felt any speed bumps would have caused my body to expel food.
The journey to the hotel was in a typical blue and white local taxi, where the doors usually need two people to open them and whistling and whining noises are commonplace. The windows didn't quite roll all the way up and we received a good whiff of the Addis air. It was terrible. I thought Delhi was badly polluted but for some reason Addis Abeba tops it at rush hour - most likely because many of the vehicles are much older (there was a layer of black fumes contained in the closest 4 feet of air to the ground). On our way back we managed to take a hotel cab which was an E-Class Mercedes - true luxury and the climate control sheltered our defeated lungs from the onslaught of vehicular exhaust.
We're saying goodbye to two sectional riders today, a nice couple (Mark and Georgie) who became engaged on this trip! Mark apparently proposed at some point on the Blue Nile Gorge stage - this was a pretty inspired move, respect to the man. Several new riders have joined and the camp looks nice and busy again.
Aside from eating a ridiculous quantity of food for breakfast, the rest of the day has been consumed with mundane restday tasks like laundry, cleaning my bike, fixing my bike (no more creaks thanks to Chris, our bike mechanic, and a tube of bike grease) and sorting out my luggage. The hills should mostly be over now and the cycling plainer until we reach Northern Kenya and the offroad pain begins again.
