He looks to be about 1/2 way across, but doesn't seem to be setting any speed records the last few days. I haven't looked at the weather to see what he's dealing with. He is going in the right direction, which is about all you can ask at sea.

I don't want to tell his story, but he got delayed when they had boat problems. They had to turn back for repairs and then set out again, hence the seemingly long passage.

Thanks for the update. I thought it must be something like that, since pretty much everyone in the ARC completed their crossing.

I was going to fly down and meet him, but he advised against it just in case something went wrong and I got stuck in the carib waiting on him.

Which would be awesome regardless until I got home to the wife and kids:

Wife: "how was it, how is chop"

"oh he didn't make it so I just hung out for a week on the beach until my return flight. merry christmas"

.. and that would be the story of me

The excellence continues. Fine work, chopstick.

Chop's going to be spending Xmas at sea. Looks like he might make landfall the next day though (depending on their ultimate destination).

Poor shark didn't get any Xmas treat!

As a sailor I find that joke highly inappropriate and triggering.

Welcome to OOT!!

Fyp

Have you heard anything from him? How did the crossing go?

The crossing went quite well. Made landfall in Martinique the day after Xmas.

As de cap mentioned, we did have an unexpected detour down to Cabo Verde about 5-6 days out of the Canaries. The port rudder quite literally fell off the boat, most likely due to a poor repair weld. While not as catastrophic on a catamaran as it would be on a monohull, it is not an issue you want to deal with while trying to cross an ocean.

So we ended up with an unplanned stop in Cabo Verde for a few days while getting a replacement made. It ended up breaking up the passage into two chunks, which made it easier on provisioning and was also just a nice way to split up the trip. Ended up making to to Martinique just after Xmas, and skidded into USA#1 on 31 Dec after an overnight in Montreal due to lolAirCanada, just a few hours before the start of a NYE party I always try to attend.

The passage was lots of fun. A few annoyances, but no major issues besides the rudder going AWOL. Great weather the entire way. Everyone got along fine. Lots of dolphins and whales. Ran wing-on-wing for days at a time. Caught more fish than we could eat and were catch & releasing mahi at one point. You know you're fishing well when you are releasing mahi! Had a fun Xmas on the boat. Martinique was beautiful. Took about 1200 photos/vids. Had a couple of whales swim right under the boat which is always exciting. Even managed to get one on vid doing it. Really good passage overall.

Been just chilling the last few weeks, visiting friends and family, enjoying reliable electricity, appreciating endless potable hot & cold water, using a kitchen, and catching up on irl stuff. I'll try to bring the thread current shortly.

OK, let's continue.

When we last left our hero, it was late August and time to board a plane in Kigali bound for Addis Ababa. Besides the fact that it's a stupidly long bus ride from K->AA, the real reason for the flight was because Ethiopia doesn't issue visa on arrival for land entry at its borders. Only for people who fly in, and only to AA.

So off it was to AA:




and more importantly, after a quick hotel check-in, on to the first of what would be many, many servings of injera:



this is true. Injera is served with pretty much every single meal in Ethiopia. It is the plate, the eating utensil, and the napkin all rolled up into one. It's a huge part of the cultural identity of Ethiopia, and I made sure to get my culture on, again and again.

This particular dish had a variety of stuff inside:



mostly hardboiled eggs and what was likely beef fragments. The server originally didn't want me to order that dish because it was "too spicy" but obv that just made me want it more. I'd say it was maybe a 6/10 on the spicy scale, and she was openly surprised that I clearly enjoyed it and finished it all. I ate a lot of stuff without knowing what it was during the entire trip so this was par for course.

Breakfast the next morning looked like this:




Lots of vegetables, multiple injeras, and little to no meat. This would become a repeating motif during the time in Ethiopia, but fear not, there were always other options available, at least in AA:

Like many African countries, Ethiopia is heavily religious, and you can see it everywhere. The hotel I started off in was across the street from a refugee church with some great art along the walls:



and there were lots of churches and mosques pretty much every place I went. Most people were very friendly, especially when I tried to use my broken Amharic. It took me a while to master "thank you" in Amharic (amesegenalehu) given it is 7 ****ing syllables long, but in a day or two it was rolling off my tongue almost as easy as the injera was rolling in. Used to be the Korean version (gamsahamnida) that was the longest one I knew, but that record is now crushed.

Speaking of injera.. I was invited out for injera multiple times:




sooncat.jpg:




as well as for tea/coffee, which is also important in Ethiopian culture:




Ethiopians consider their country the birthplace of coffee. I'm not a coffee drinker, so this was mostly lost on me, but those little tea/coffee shops were everywhere, usually tended by a lone woman. People would show up, hang out for a bit drinking tea, then move on. Funny enough, when we sat down at that one, another Ethiopian guy came along a short while later and he turned out to have spent a few years living not just in USA#1, but in DC where I'm mostly from. We had a good chat about the Ethiopian restaurants and presence in DC (there are a lot of Ethiopians there) and then parted ways.

The tea looks something like this:




and this is a close-up of the full setup:




that particular tea place visit marked the first time I noticed my girl Habesha:



who is a very important iconographic part of Ethiopian (and Eritrean) culture. More on her later.

Welcome back to USA#1, chop. Glad to hear the sail was smooth and safe.

Well done chop. Really looking forward to the whale video.

ROFL, never seen it spelled out in print, albeit in English phonetics. It sounds like only 4 syllables. I heard and spoke it often in taekwondo class.

pokeraz - I don't post vids here because I'm too lazy to make a youtube or whatever. You won't be missing much, the whale vids didn't come out very well because they mostly stayed just under the surface, so all you really see are large gray blobs swimming by under the water. It's a bummer because I'd like to ID the species (thinking they were Minke) but don't have any quality photos/vids to send off to an expert to verify.



Downtown Addis Ababa is a pretty busy place:




and I didn't go there very much, preferring to stay in the edge of the city close to the airport in an area named Bole. I did visit the Merkato, which is the world's largest open air market. Went there with a guy who contacted me on couchsurfing and ended up trying to sell me guide services. I declined because that's not what that platform is for, but he insisted on showing me around anyway for free, although the string that came attached to that would be nonstop hounding via whatsapp for the next few months to write him a review on tripadvisor to help him generate business. He had a car, so we drove into the market with a friend of his:




the friend stayed in the car upon arrival and took a nap. I'm guessing he was mostly there to watch the car because it's a pretty sketchy area. He also wanted to practice English and was a coin collector so I gave him a few rand coins from South Africa.

The open air designation for Merkato is kind of a misnomer because there are plenty of buildings in the market that are part of it as well. I'd say about half is outside and half is inside various small buildings and warehouses.

The market is chaotic, to put it lightly. Lots and lots of people, huge sections of wildly varying items, animals all over the place. Here's what it looked like walking out of one of the textile warehouses in a quieter part:




as well as a more standard section:




the spices area was probably my favorite:




but the "recycling" area was certainly the most interesting:




any and all types of plastic and metal that you can imagine end up there in massive piles, mostly sorted either by material type or function. Huge piles of washer rings, bicycle frames, soda bottles, screws, broken chairs, and so on.

I also liked the cheese section:




almost every stall in which had a person hiding under a table with an enormous knife / sword that they used to cut up the cheese:




It didn't make much sense to me that they were all under the tables like that, but my friend had no explanation and seemed to think it was a good question when I asked.

In the outdoor areas, people would set up their shops wherever there was space:




that dude was selling mostly bars of soap.

We walked around for a couple of hours:




and I saw a good chunk of the market, but nowhere near the whole thing. It would likely take a few days if not a full week to accomplish that.

My new friend dropped me back off at my hotel with his car afterward, which was a nice change from the little mini-buses I had been using to get around the city:




there are taxis as well, but they cost literally 10x the price and usually far more than that if you can't pass as Ethiopian, which I cannot. We are talking like 2-5 birr for most minibus rides vs 30-150 birr for the same distance in a taxi. The exchange rate is about 28ETB:1UD, so it's not like the actual amount was expensive in a taxi, but I prefer to travel as the locals do and have more memorable experiences. You also end up having much better conversations and meeting interesting people this way.

imgur is not happy with my photo sizes, keeps freezing on uploads, so chopped them in half again down to 1040x780. Probably best for page load times anyway.

Have never really been a coin collector but love animals on currency and bumped my game up a bit during this trip. Ethiopia has a few older coins that no longer are in circulation but you can find if you look hard enough. The reason they interest me is that they portray the Lion of Judah:




which has importance in multiple cultures. Not just Ethiopian, but Jewish and Rastafarian as well.

Look, I'm not going to lie to you here. My interest is that it's a lion wearing a hat. How sweet is that?

Took me a while to hunt them down but eventually found a few at some old junk shop in north Addis, not too far from this statue:




of course, I was much more interested in what was at the base of that statue:




my girl, Habesha!

There were other women around the city:




but only Habesha had my heart.

While in Addis, I also paid a visit to the Djibouti embassy to get a visa:




My plan had been to take the train from Addis to Djibouti, but the embassy staff told me that this was impossible and that entry by non-Ethiopians via train was forbidden and that I'd have to fly in. I wasn't really keen on that as I always prefer to travel via land to see more of the country I'm in, but they made it clear that they wouldn't issue a visa without a plane ticket:




so I ended up buying a ticket for a 30 minute flight from Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia for like $45 or something like that. They spelled my name wrong on the visa but assured me it would not be an issue, and luckily it was not.

I celebrated with some delicious shiro, which is a standard Ethiopian dish kinda like hummus but more stewlike:




and which I would find myself eating again and again during my time there.

I tried lots of foods that I had never seen or heard of with my limited experience in USA#1 Ethiopian restaurants. Here's a few menu pages at a nice restaurant:






Note that the second page is the fasting menu, which is used on the fasting days of Weds & Fri, as well as period like Lent. On those fasting days, many people eat only vegan food, so fasting menu items are common.

At that particular restaurant, I ordered shiro & beef tibs. Injera is always included.

The injera always comes out wearing a little injera hat (for which there was an entire section of the Merkato dedicated to making them):




and you scoop on some shiro:




and whatever else, in this case beef tibs:




beef tibs closeup:




and then a few minutes later, your plate looks like this:




Note again the lack of utensils. The injera is the plate, the fork, and the napkin.

I spent a good chunk of time just wandering around the city, mostly in the southern section just north of Bole and up towards downtown. Addis is a pretty standard city but far fewer pedestrians than I had experienced further south:




that scaffolding was interesting. It's all hand-tied wood, all the way up. Nothing machined or metal. Saw that a few times.

Ended up getting invited to a fashion show at some point:




which mostly consisted of a large hall full of vendors presenting their wares to corporate buyers:




and included a nifty opening ceremony presided over by the Nigerian ambassador who got to cut a big ribbon with some oversized scissors:




There were also lots of folks walking around in traditional or ceremonial clothing from their countries but unfortunately I was an idiot and didn't get any decent photos.

My plan to enter Djibouti by train having failed thanks to the Djibouti embassy, I decided instead to fly from Addis to Dire Dawa (city in eastern Ethiopia), then take a bus to Harar (small city nearby), then back to DD and fly to Djibouti from there, and finally fly back to Addis before heading overland to Sudan.

First thing I did was get some nice shiny 1 birr coins:




because those things have a mother****ing roaring lion on them!! I ended up getting like a dozen because I figured lots of people would want one back in USA#1, and that ended up being correct, already down to 4 or 5. Not that I blame anyone, that is one badass lion and he comin ta get ya.

The flight into DD was uneventful and super cheap:



If you fly Ethiopian Airlines into the country (or out of it), they will let you use a discount code for all domestic flights that cuts the price by 50% or more. Since I had flown in from Rwanda, I jumped on that and snapped up an AA->DD flight for like $37 or something crazy like that.

The bus to Harar was the standard African minibus experience:



and cost 50 birr (about $2) although initially the kid tried to charge me 500. I laughed at him and he gave me the can't-blame-me-for-trying face and laughed right back.

The smaller towns we went thru were a contrast to Addis:




and the hotel I found had a memorable bathroom:




mostly because the shower hook was broken and the hot water tank would shake when activated, and since it's right over you.. yeah. As usual, the guy claimed his credit card machine was broken when it was time to pay, and that resulted in some drama. I held my ground and refused to pay cash, and gave him a time limit of a couple hours to get it fixed before I left. After lots of complaining and whining, he magically managed to get it working again right before the time limit was up, so all was well in the end. At one point he was calling his sister in AA to get her to agree to meet me there and buy her some groceries upon my return, so it's possible his machine was legit broken, but I was so tired of the whole "oh my CC machine is broken!" routine at this point that I didn't much care. It was one of my least favorite recurring experiences during 2018.

None of this mattered, tho. I was finally in Harar, which I had been excited about ever since first reading about the hyena whisperers.

The hyena whisperers are a couple of guys who feed wild hyenas each night at the edge of the walled town. The story goes that Harar used to have problem with the hyenas raiding their village, so they decided to befriend them instead of killing them, and accomplished that by feeding them every evening to dissuade them from killing livestock. Hyenas still roam the streets in the evenings but it's mostly to eat the organic trash that people leave outside their doorsteps for them.

First I met up with a local guide, Testi, who I had texted on arrival:




Testi was a tuk-tuk driver / guide who spoke perfect English with an American accent and said that he got a lot of business from American referrals. He was fantastic and I totally understand why he had so much word-of-mouth buzz. He showed up on time every time, never tried to cheat me or pressure me into doing anything I wasn't interested in, and so on. He was a little expensive at about 900 birr/day (about $30USD) compared to other guides, but things in Ethiopia are so cheap overall that it is irrelevant and he was worth every penny.

We hopped in the tuk-tuk at dusk and headed out to a clearing just outside of the town, where one of the hyena whisperers was hanging out waiting for the dark. Not long after dark, the whisperer started hooting and calling to the darkness, and it didn't take too long for the hyenas to show up:




they were skittish and mostly stayed out at the edge of the clearing so you could only see eyes glowing in the darkness (see the white dots?), which is a bit of an eerie feeling. Every so often, the dude would toss out some meat scraps and they'd cautiously wander in to snatch them up:




getting closer and closer each time. After a bit, the whisperer called me over to sit next to him, and my guide managed to snap these sweet photos:



that's a bit of meat on the stick. The white dot over to the right is a set of hyena eyes in the darkness.

Dude lures them over, then holds the meat over your head, which causes the hyena to stand on you to get at it:






You can also bite one end of that little stick to hold it in your mouth while dangling a piece of meat off of it and feed them that way as well a la Lady & the Tramp. Did that, too. Can confirm hyenas have really bad breath.

I'm about 5'10" / 178cm & 165lb / 75kg, for scale.

These are spotted hyenas, which are larger than striped hyenas and kill most of their own food rather than scavenging. They have insane bite force which allows them to crack open giraffe femurs and eat pretty much any part of an animal.

These ones are habituated to humans but still wild.

This was probably not one of the smarter things I've ever done, but it was absolutely exhilarating. I've been up close with a lot of different large wild carnivores, including bears, lions, sharks, etc, but it's something else entirely to interact with one like this.

This is not exactly a legit sanctioned tourist activity, and I'm sure some idiot will eventually do something stupid and end up getting bitten or mauled, resulting in the government stepping in and stopping the practice, so if you want to experience this, probably better to schedule a visit sooner rather than later.

Holy crap, that is awesome. I love they are are trying something other than killing them.

Wow, that hyena picture is absolutely terrifying and amazing. Thank you for sharing all of your adventures.