In my opinion, any attempt to have a traditional American Christmas inEthiopiais guaranteed to be disappointing. You might see the occasional seizure inducing Christmas lights or lopsided plastic Christmas tree in the entrance to a nice hotel in a larger town, but the magic isn’t there. No candle lit Christmas caroling, no egg nog, no house after house of fluorescent icicles gently hanging from rooftops. No tree decorating, no stockings, no snikerdoodle cookies, no snow, not even fakeTexassnow. No family. Nope, the only way to celebrate inEthiopiais to have as un-traditional a Christmas as possible, and that’s what we did.
Slapped on the sun screen, hoped on a rickety minivan and headed south with some friends to Awassa- a lakeside paradise. The town attracts a large number of ferenjis (westerners) and its full of all those ferenji delights- delicious pizza, a beer garden, fresh juice, other ferenjis. If you follow the palm tree lined main road all the way to its end, you’ll reachLakeAwassa, one of the top 5 largest lakes inEthiopia.
Christmas morning dawned and anticipation prodded JD, Christina, Chelsea, Kelly, Dustin and I from our beds at The Circle of Life Hotel. It wasn’t the promise of presents from Santa that pried us from our slumbers that morning, it was the promise of hippos.
The guy doing push-ups on the asphalt just off the dock and wearing the highest high tops and shortest shorts turned out to be the guy with the boat, the guy who would lead us to these giant water mammals. After the necessary haggling we all tromped onto a leaky boat with peeling rainbow paint and took off for the middle of the lake. It was beautiful. Probably a dozen species of water birds were there, including gigantic pelican like birds that came up well past your hip.
As we neared one edge of the lake our guide cut the motor and we started creeping toward a swath of reeds. “Yes!”, he says, “They are out! Not just noses and ears. Look”. And he tries to point toward the supposed hippos. You mean those rocks? Whatever, those are totally just rocks, I’m not paying 100 birr to see rocks at a distance. But was we got closer we scared the rocks and they started moving around. HIPPOS! We probably got about 15 yards away from the most deadly animal inAfrica. There were about 9 of them, including at 1 baby and a couple adolescents. They were stirring about the reedy shallows doing things only hippos would understand. One started trying to mount the another and our guide jumped up and shouted “its sexy time!” Turns out it wasn’t sexy time, but it was hilarious. Hippos for Christmas, the best gift of all!
