… I seriously thought to myself as landed in Addis Ababa airport on Feb 22nd 2011. I really did properly question what I was doing putting my backpack on and checking in to a basic and grim African hotel again, surely I was too old for all this now?!
I arrived early that morning, Addis had a quite nice feel about it for an African city and although shattered after a hectic few months and absolutely no sleep on the plane, I decided it was a good idea to be efficient and quickly nip to the immigration office to try and organise my three month visa rather then the inconvenient one month given on arrival. That was a mistake and a half! With somewhat limited Amharic, I negotiated my way through basic sign language on to a mini-bus through the city to the immigration building, joined an enormous ‘womens’ queue, eventually made it into the right office almost falling asleep on my feet, entered complete chaos with little queues and rooms everywhere not really meaning anything as far as I could work out and scattered with various wandering officials being typically unhelpful. The joys of African bureaucracy and order, why oh why. Long story short, achieved absolutely nothing in the few hours and decided I’d just have to overstay my visa and organised a cab for 5am the next day to take me to the bus station where I’d head south out of the city to a place called Awasa. I then finally slept, and slept, and continued to wonder why I was in this strange country I knew nothing about and why I was taking on this ridiculous challenge to set up Big Beyond!
I arrived early that morning, Addis had a quite nice feel about it for an African city and although shattered after a hectic few months and absolutely no sleep on the plane, I decided it was a good idea to be efficient and quickly nip to the immigration office to try and organise my three month visa rather then the inconvenient one month given on arrival. That was a mistake and a half! With somewhat limited Amharic, I negotiated my way through basic sign language on to a mini-bus through the city to the immigration building, joined an enormous ‘womens’ queue, eventually made it into the right office almost falling asleep on my feet, entered complete chaos with little queues and rooms everywhere not really meaning anything as far as I could work out and scattered with various wandering officials being typically unhelpful. The joys of African bureaucracy and order, why oh why. Long story short, achieved absolutely nothing in the few hours and decided I’d just have to overstay my visa and organised a cab for 5am the next day to take me to the bus station where I’d head south out of the city to a place called Awasa. I then finally slept, and slept, and continued to wonder why I was in this strange country I knew nothing about and why I was taking on this ridiculous challenge to set up Big Beyond!
But in the cold dark morning I put on almost all my clothes (brrrrrr second highest city in the world) and found a mini-bus heading for Awasa. Started the journey south towards a town called Arba Minch, near Nechisar National Park, a place I’d chosen to start the Big Beyond investigation…
I did quickly got back into the swing of things and reminded myself that I was about the create the best job ever. That’s why! Never too old.
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