Transit day - Wednesday

Did I say six hour drive? Well, it may be a six hour drive, but it takes what it takes. In this case it took eleven. We got two fifteen minute pee breaks and had about an hour and a half stop for lunch to mac some goat. The hotel here in Dire Dawa is nice. That is, of course, if your definition of nice is cold water only, no electrical outlets, and obviously no high speed internet. No low speed internet either; the lady at the desk told me they had one computer everyone could share, but the connection didn’t work, but if I had a phone cable I could plug it into their wall, and then gave me a big shrug. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’ve stayed in way worse joints than this. I’ve got a big lumpy bed and there aren’t any obvious bugs, the toilet flushes and the one lamp has a great bright bulb.

So here I sit in the Salam Hotel in dire Dawa Ethiopia, it’s a beautiful day at 7:38 AM, there is a group of US military dudes sitting with us in the bar drinking cokes and eating pancakes. We’re preparing for day one of the conference, and I think there are supposed to be a few field trips this afternoon. I am looking forward to getting this show underway. I’m feeling pretty caught up on the whole “halfway around the world” thing and what time zone I’m in, though I still wake up way early every day after very fitful nights of sleep and grinding my teeth. It’s times like these that I totally crack up to myself when people at work tell me they want my job. Really?

I took lots of pictures yesterday, mostly from the bus window, so the jury is out on how well they will turn out. I enjoyed the sights along the way – the little villages, the fields, the hills, the wildlife. The two big ones for me were the camels, that were dispersed through the scrub brush like deer, eating leaves off trees like giraffes. The small ones were very cute, even though they weren’t really very small. The other thing I saw was a baboon. Pretty good-sized sucker, too. They have a number of primates throughout this area that live mainly around the national parks (we were near the Awash national park when I saw this dude) including colobus monkeys and two types of baboons.
So I crossed from one side of the Great Rift Valley to the other. Where we are now is smack in the middle of where they’ve traced coffee back as far as they can. From this side of the valley, coffee spread northeast to Yemen before being taken to Amsterdam and then the rest of the world. That’s all good, but can a guy find a decent semi-washed Djimma anywhere?