It was a brisk early morning in Arba Minch. We woke up, tangled in our mosquito net (still haven't figured out how to properly tuck those in) to a beautiful view of Chamo Lake. We had our final stretch back to Addis, around seven or eight hours, depending on "traffic." While the tribes and raw beauty of Omo Valley will continue to trace our time in Ethiopia, Brian and I were pretty excited to leave the dust behind us and explore a completely different part of the country. Unfortunately, the violent protests we briefly mentioned before had worsened, so we decided to skip Gondar altogether and head straight to Bahir Dar.
One of the main reasons for visiting the Omo Valley is to see the local tribes still residing within its borders. Brian and I were floored when we learned that Ethiopia has over eighty different ethnic groups and tribes with more than forty of them in the Omo Valley region alone. Our plan was to visit three of them, the Hamar Tribe, the Karo Tribe, and the Mursi Tribe.
So where did we leave off? Oh, that's right. Brian and the luggage fiasco! As a side note, Brian still to this day says he was "right" about the whole thing since in the end they did accept the picture. I don't know about you, but I call BOGUS. The rest of the airport experience was anything but easy. We rushed over to the line rapidly forming outside of the airport. It looked like a hybrid ticket counter and security gate except we noticed that everyone waiting was already holding what seemed to be boarding passes. We figured maybe they did self check-in somewhere else? When it was our turn the agent asked for our boarding pass. Errrrrr. Puzzled, we kindly asked, "Isn't that what we get here?" Apparently not. We inquired about which line was the correct one and she replied, "this line." Okay. We asked how to get our boarding pass and she said, "I need your boarding pass." Well, this wasn't getting us anywhere.
Our time spent in Ethiopia was actually during the low, rainy season. I had read something on a travel blog that said if you can avoid traveling there in August you should do so at all costs. Perhaps Brian and I were really lucky because I couldn't disagree more with that statement. We rarely saw other tourists and the landscape was beautifully dramatic with its lush green rolling hills and comforting morning mist. It rained twice during our ten days, neither of which were an inconvenience.