We are in Ethiopia but unfortunately the time has come to go home, we have made a wonderful journey through history, culture and nature; a different Africa, in many respects, to what we are used to, but still fascinating and intriguing.

At 8:00 pm we arrived at the Bole international airport of Addis Abeba, we have already been several times at this airport, but always in transit to other African destinations, we never left from here doing all the procedures.

Luckily we left the hotel well in advance because there is an endless queue of cars at the entrance to the parking lot and there are people everywhere; this is the typical African chaos.

We take our suitcases and head towards the entrance of the airport, as it happens at other African airports, before entering they immediately check all the luggage and even here we find a discreet, messy and chaotic queue, but we have time then we don't care.

Once inside the airport we look for the desks to check in but we don't find those of Turkish Airways, how strange, we look again and then we ask an employee of the airport and he tells us to go to the Lufthansa desks in a tone that sounded like "but don't you know?", they are characters!

Actually we have already checked in online from the hotel, so we only need to send the bags and have our boarding passes printed and then we can go to the control and leave the country; there are people everywhere, messy queues, people who go crazy, but we are calm because thanks to my mania for getting to the airport well in advance we have no stress from flight loss.

Once we arrive at the terminal there is still a bit of time before our flight, we are hungry so we decide to go to one of the few places that are in the old part of the airport but they do not accept credit cards, in practice no one does, luckily we still have some Birr in our pockets, we count them and look for something on the menu that we can buy, thank goodness it costs very little because otherwise we would have skipped dinner, as long as we can call dinner a cheese sandwich with fries.

We chat with our table neighbor, he is an Irishman who has lived long in Ethiopiaand Angola, while now he lives in Canada but came here for work, he does not expressly tell us what work he does but, putting 2 and 2 together, either he works in mines or  in the oil extraction; however, he is nice and too funny and it is also interesting to hear his stories from when he lived in Ethiopia.

When the time comes, we say goodbye to our friend and go to the gate, wherever gate 9 is marked, but there is a Lufthansa plane but nobody says anything and there is nobody to ask; at a certain point an airport chick arrives and tells us "follow me!".

The fact is that, both us and all the others, we followed her throughout the airport, we looked like on a school trip; well the organization remained African despite the fact that they built the new airport.

In the end we arrive at the correct gate and we board our flight, we did it!

Bye bye Ethiopia, sooner or later we will return to visit the North and the Danakil.

Once at altitude they serve dinner but we have already had dinner so we prefer to sleep a little.

We land at Istanbul at 6.30 am and we want coffee and breakfast; we have landed at the new airport, it is the second time we transit here and we know very well that we will have to walk quite a bit both to reach the food court area and to arrive at the boarding gate.

We are looking for a bar to have breakfast, then we take a trip to the Old Bazaar where we buy Turkish sweets, how do you resist, they are too good.

We have a total of 5 hours of stopover but time flies and then after a bit of relaxation we head to our gate; we board, the plane leaves on time and after about 2 and a half hours we land at Milan Malpensa.

We are back home but we are ready to plan new itineraries and leave again!

Data di inserimento: 
Tuesday, October 1, 2019