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Driving Day to Bahir Dar

We were supposed to leave Lalibela at 8am. However, the truck didn’t start so that we needed to push it until the engine started. The whole procedure was pretty quick (four minutes) but it took another 25 minutes before the truck was ready for driving. Due to the delayed start of 29 minutes I claimed that I have won my bet against Daniel that the truck will break down for at least five minutes until we arrive in Nairobi (see blog entry from Oct 19 for details). Daniel obviously didn’t share my opinion and claimed when he wanted to start the truck at 7:30am my fellow traveller Pierre had asked him to not do so before 8am so that people don’t need to inhale the exhaust of the truck when loading their luggage into the truck.

We spent the majority of the day on the road and arrived around 4pm in Bahir Dar. The town is situated at Lake Tana the largest lake in Ethiopia. Unfortunately it’s not advisable to go swimming in the lake since there is a high risk of getting infected with Bilharzia. So I only went for a walk along the lakefront.

Speaking about diseases, our driver Daniel actually got infected with Malaria. After suffering from it during the past two days he saw a doctor in Bahir Dar who confirmed his infection. Probably Daniel got infected in Sudan since he didn’t take any Malaria prophylaxis. He simply doesn’t care since he got already infected with a different type of Malaria at an earlier stage. There are also a few other people on our truck who didn’t take Malaria prophylaxis since they either wanted to save the money for the tablets, they experienced side effects when taking the tablets and then stopped taking them or they thought because there is only low to medium risk to get infected with Malaria in Sudan they will not get infected. But luckily despite from Daniel nobody else got infected so far.

Other diseases include an upset stomach so that basically every day somebody else is sick. Luckily, I’m absolutely fine so far but I also take care of me as good as I can, meaning not drinking tab water and taking my Malaria prophylaxis. Smaller pains are bedbugs which some of us caught in dirty hotel beds. This time it was up to my fellow traveller Norms having bedbugs in his trousers and he needed to wash them with boiling water to make sure that all bugs are gone.

In Bahir Dar we were planning to camp for three nights on the ground of a nice hotel near the waterfront. Since the camping space was not very scenic many of us used the option to upgrade to a room which was just an additional 2 USD per night and person in a triple-share.

We were also happy to have WiFi connection which we didn’t have for the past two weeks. So I took the opportunity of a Skype video call with my parents.