Addis Ababa, Debre Zeit, Jimma, ETHIOPIA: 11 - 16 Jan. 2011
On arrival in Addis Ababa, I met Síle (who moved to Ethiopia in September for a two year VSO volunteer placement), James (who was at the end of his Christmas holiday to visit Síle), and Tom (who I had been introduced to in Dublin over Christmas and who was passing through Addis on his way up from Kenya) - it was bizarre but nice to arrive into a place like Ethiopia and to have three friends to have a drink with within an hour of landing.
It was here that I first encountered some things that would become major features of my month in Ethiopia: - eating the staple food of Ethiopia, injera: It is made from a grain called teff and looks like a flattened foam sponge pancake. It is served on one big plate and everyone at the table shares it, using their handes to wrap pieces of injera around whatever you get served on top, which is often a vegetable or meat wot (stew). Luckily I liked injera, but once (as opposed to three times) a day was enough for me.
- getting encouraging reactions when I tried to speak Amharic or Oromiffa: Ethiopia has over 70 languages and thanks to Síle (whose language skills impressed me greatly) I picked a few phrases in Amharic (the official language) and Oromiffa (the language spoken in the region where Sile lives). The joy and merriment caused by us trying to speak these languages made me feel like a stand-up comedian and it was great encouragement.
- being called a faranji: After 15 months in Latin America being called a gringo, here I was a faranji (that is not a big eared, money-loving alien from Star Trek but rather what Ethiopians call foreigners). Everywhere we went, people called us (and often shouted at us) the word faranji. This was especially the case the following week in Jimma where Síle and I took part in a 7km race (this was supposed to be only 5km, but a few minutes before it started they announced that it would actually be 2km longer!) that was part of the "Great Ethiopian Run" during which people in the crowd lining the city's streets encouraged me throughout the run.
The race was a fun experience and a highlight of my trip.
and I walked around the Dubai Mall, which includes an aquarium, ice rink and waterfall, as well as all the world's most stylish brands. I'm happy to say that in this city of Prada and Gucci the thing that I was most impressed with was the Dubai Mall's bookshop.
and Christopher.
So I'm happy to report that to me Ireland all seems well, Guinness, brown bread and chicken fillet baguettes are all as tasty as ever, and the only major change I noticed was that my brothers are now both experts on all things baby related!
and then in the evenings enjoying some lovely meals out, followed by nighttime walks to soak up the Christmas atmosphere (like seeing the tree in front of the Rockerfeller building).
From getting the morning boat to Ellis Island, having a dim sum lunch in Chinatown, going to the top of the Empire State Building, to seeing "Wicked" on Broadway, it was a fantastic week.
But it wasn't too bad; it just meant that we visited a fair few museums and art galleries (I especially liked this painting in Medellin by Fernando Botero about the death of the other famous man from Medellin - the drug lord Pablo Escobar) 
and we did some muddy treks. In the end, we decided to embrace the mud by bathing in the mud volcanic pool outside Cartagena - a fun and truely unique experience.
During my last few weeks in Colombia, I was reminded of Alain de Botton's book "The Art of Travel". One thing I remember from reading it was his view that guide books' and other people's supposed highlights do not have to be your highlights. While the walled, coastal city of Cartagena certainly lived up to the hype, for me other so-called highlights failed to greatly impress. For instance, while we heard that going to the beach in Tayrona National Park was a "once in a lifetime experience", I much preferred the couple of days we (Ciaran, Elaine and myself) spent at the stunning and deserted beach a little further along the Caribbean coast at Palomino (where we slept in a hut on stilts literally right at the water's edge).
Similarly, for me what made our time in Salento in the Coffee Region so memorable was not the hike to see the famous wax palms, but rather our night out there. We started by drinking in a "wild west" type saloon full of men wearing ponchos and cowboy hats playing cards and billards, and then moved onto another bar where at the back you could play tejo. This game, which is free to play so long as you keep buying drink, is one of the best pub activities I've ever done. We had hours of fun throwing metal disks at a clay-filled target box about 15 metres away which was filled with little packets of gunpowder - there was such a great sense of joyous satisfaction at hitting one of the packets and causing an explosion!
Other personal highlights of Colombia, which don't get mentioned in guidebooks, include: going into shops that sell both motorbikes and washing machines;
seeing people on the street making calls from "public" mobile phones that are chained onto the vendor (the guy holding the sign, who is standing in Bogota's main plaza, has half a dozen phones chained to his belt - its common to see a bunch of people all making phone calls standing around these guys);
and seeing roadside posters calling the army today's heroes of Colombia. The army certainly are all over the country (it was the norm to pass through several army checkpoints on every bus trip). I just thought it was interesting to see them portrayed like movie-heroes.
My time in Colombia was a nice reminder to avoid the trap of blindly following the Lonely Planet or of putting too much faith in other people's recommendations. The fact that we did some of our own things made my time in Colombia a nice end to my Latin American adventures.
to several statue-filled sites;
to the "Lost City of Tayrona". 
I will remember this trip for our two hour stint in the back of the local milk truck as it did its daily rounds collecting milk from the local farmers and in the process bringing us and some locals from one village to the next.
and did a lot of swimming and animal watching - we saw monkeys, river dolphins, snakes (a boa and an anaconda), countless spiders (including tarantulas) and birds, and we heard a jaguar in the distance during a night hike. I also went fishing for the first time in my life, and I caught a piranha!
