From Lalibela, we embarked on a little travel marathon to reach our final destination: Harar. Flights out of Lalibela to anywhere were pretty expensive on short notice, so we decided to take a bus to Bahir Dar and fly from there, via Addis Abeba, to Dire Dawa. Harar doesn’t have an airport, so from Dire Dawa we would take another bus to Harar. Sounds long? Yeps, it was.  

Our bus journey to Bahir Dar was probably the worst we had in Ethiopia: first no seats, then overcharged for our luggage, or they would have kicked us off the bus. In exchange we did get seats, however the bus was too full and a puking women (8 h straight almost!!) sat and puked next to Mathijs on the floor. Not very enjoyable. The flight was the easiest part and went rather smoothly, Dire Dawa a catastrophe stopover with a bad overpriced hotel with unhelpful staff, and the bus ride to Harar longer than expected.

Harar started off badly as well. Lots of homeless people, many druggies trying to talk to you and get something from you etc. Some guys grabbed me, tried to touch me and so on. I shouted at people, slapped one of the guys in the face and people around me were just laughing mostly. What the f…!? Ethiopia so far had been exhausting, but this was just plain bad bad bad. I just didn’t feel safe, something that was not the case anywhere else in Ethiopia.

It turned out though that the town itself is nice and colourful. It’s just not as pretty as we had expected, but there’s lots of picturesque little streets and colourful local markets.

Because it’s a mainly Muslim town, women were all covered, but in a very colourful way that made for good photos. Fortunately, they usually didn’t mind, so Mathijs was one happy street photographer.

I was still not feeling too comfortable, but the photogenic old center made up a bit for the exhausting trip here and the drama with the homeless druggies. A bit. I wouldn’t go back to Harar, and it’s not a must see for me. The effort required to get here is just not worth it – there are easier to reach market towns in this world.

After these last exhausting days, I was also more than happy about our sudden plan change to leave Ethiopia a few days earlier than planned: we had discovered that the visa we had gotten was valid for 29 days instead of the usual 30 days. Our flight out was on day 30. We couldn’t find any easy way to clarify the mistake without paying lots of money and read about people being forced into ridiculous fees or otherwise missing their flight. In short: the easiest way out (literally) seemed to be to change our flight to Windhoek for 2 days earlier – not cheap either, but at least our worries were gone!

Ethiopia, you’ve been very interesting, and very exhausting.