Long Live The Sar

Driving in Ethiopia deserves its own short discourse. It’s a rodeo. Now to be fair, I’ve seen worse: Small-city China in 2005, Bangladesh, bumper cars at the state fair. But Ethiopia is remarkable for its danger, its unspoken rules, the shoddiness of the equipment, and the sheer novelty. At the time of my first trip in 2007, there were a handful of stoplights in Addis, a city of 8-10 million. They were cursory suggestions, merely slowing traffic but never stopping it. Today, there are tens, if not hundreds, of stoplights in the city. People come to complete stops at red lights, yield on turn signals, and generally follow the universal rules of the road. But heaven help you if you try to make a left turn without a light. That’s a process of slowly edging your nose out far enough into traffic until you nearly get rammed, and then magically, the next car swoops behind you, and then you’re home free. To be fair, you see fewer overturned trucks, shattered automobiles, or

It’s cold in Dinsho. More than 10,000 ft in the southern Ethiopian highlands, I’m nestled in below 5 thick felt blankets, at least one which I think was formerly a curtain based on the metal rings sown into it that are lying heavily across my feet. My shoulders and ever-growing bald patch are cool to the touch. Every 20 minutes or so, a rumbling CNCO truck rumbles into the compound shaking the building, the driver walks up and down the row of 10 rooms knocking on each door and shouting “hello” until the attendant wearily opens the door to the “reception” office.   So how did I come to be lying in a Pension Motel on the main/only road in Dinsho, 250km south of Addis? I came looking for trout.   During my last trip to Ethiopia, I had seen one sentence in the Lonely Planet guide book that mentioned, “a fishing guide can set you up with a rod and reel.” That was enough to get my mind racing. A quick google search revealed that at some point there were trout in Ethiopian mou

Tenastellegn! Time to commence Ethiopian Adventure #5! Like the Fast and the Furious franchise, this one gets better each time around (even if we're now straight-to-DVD). For a guy who loves to travel and explore new places, I just can't seem to get enough of this place (either that or I'm a sucker for 1970 Russian Lada taxis, copious dust, and endless coffee). This month, I'm tagging along as the +1 on my awesome wife's adventure here. Liz is an Oral & Maxillofacial surgery resident at Emory and this year she's participating in Emory's Global Health Service Partnership with Addis Ababa University. That's a fancy way of saying that she's spending the month in Addis working alongside the oral surgery residents at Addis Ababa University, learning from them, providing extra hands for retracting, and hopefully giving a few lectures. This is her first international surgery trip and I can't wait to see what type of shenanigans/surgery she gets up