I've said it before and i'll say it again, there is something quite heavenly about waking up in a bed with a mosquito net. My sleep was heavenly as well so I'm going to get one when I get back for sure.
For breakfast I had what the Ethiopians call cookies. They are like fortune cookies but doughier and the batch I bought yesterday were quite soft. The fact they're deep fried means they have a strange after taste similar to chicken strips and probably possess no nutritional goodness at all but I'm just happy they're going in and staying in!
A good start to the riding today. The first 15 miles or so were smooth, happy and trouble free. I stopped on the roadside to see what some tourists were looking at. They had got out their truck and the tour guide was pointing at something so I stopped to say hello. They were taking pictures of an elephant tree that had very beautiful flowers. If they had been a little quicker they would've spotted a huge group of monkeys/baboons that I had to stop for to let cross the road. I say monkey/baboons because they seem too big to be monkeys but they probably are, I'm not very good with my primates.
I hate doing it but I always end up asking how far to my destination and what the road condition is like. The tour guide said 60km and said the road was excellent...he lied. I suppose asking these two questions depends solely on whether the person is positive or negative and establishing what they class as a "good road."
Judging by the tour guide's greeting and his all in one tie die Bob Marley outfit I would take him as edging on the positive side of life and because he's Ethiopian I would take his perception of a road as being any surface that takes you from A to B. Taking this into account I will take back my "he lied" comment and say instead that the man was spot on if you expect a road to be gravel and dust with added piles of rock.
Again my progress was reduced to walking pace as I zig zagged back and forth in search of the least rockiest route. The road was an absolute bike and back breaker and one of my pannier clips broke off as I hit a bump. Simple things such as road condition can really turn your good mood the other way and as you turn each corner you find yourself praying to see some tarmac in the distance. Unfortunately for a good 20miles all I saw in the distance was clouds of dust from speeding trucks. It's just another thing that you don't realise you take for granted until you're bumping up and down and slamming the brakes on to avoid potholes.
Eventually the road came good again (perhaps the tour guide just forgot about the gravelly section) and it was actually so good that I made really good progress. Throughout the whole ride the kids were asking for my hilan. (Water bottle) I had a plastic bottle strapped to the back of Nigel and for pretty much the whole day, kids were all about the hilan. By the afternoon I had had enough and finished the bottle and gave it to a kid thinking this would stop the constant begging...it didn't, they wanted my ones as well.
My destination of Konso was situated on a hill which gave my tired legs one last challenge before i finished my 60 miles but I was happy that I didn't have to stop once the whole day (there wasn't really anywhere to stop!) I arrived at around 2pm which gave me a bit of time to chill and then find a good hotel. I decided to stay at the St Mary's Hotel, I'm not going to lie, it was the name that did it. The price was right as well and I got the same as last night but for half the price.
The people seemed a lot nicer than Arba Minch and Soddo which made me more inclined to sit outside for longer and enjoy dinner. Finding dinner was a mission in itself though. The first restaurant just did plain pasta, the second place was just a hotel despite it saying it had a bar/restaurant on the sign, the third restaurant was under construction and only did injera and vegetables so in the end I walked a full circle around the town and ate back at my hotel where the selection was just as atrocious as the first place. I ended up with bread, omelette and chips. The bread was average at best and the omelette and chips were nicely drenched with oil so its fair to say that today's overall culinary delights have been pretty horrendous.
I don't think I will have the "choice" of a restaurant for the next few days so I'm actually looking forward to cooking my own noodles! Konso, like many of my Ethiopian stops, is another town with nothing much to it. By sunset I was ready to go back to my room and I'm really now just begging for Kenya. I still have some very interesting and hard sections of Ethiopia to finish however and by the time I reach Kenya I would've been a month in Ethiopia!
I went back to my bed that I was pleased to see had a mosquito net but the heavenliness was tarnished somewhat by the bugs that I could feel jumping from one leg to the other.
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