We started early and continued our drive towards Turmi, passing through villages like Konso and Weyto, Konso being a kind of frontier town and gateway to the Omo Valley and beyond. It was basically another day in the car but with stunning views and fantastic scenery to admire (see pictures). What surprised me most was how green everything was. Misled by the media that only reports about Ethiopia during periods of famine, the images of starving skeleton-thin people and big-bellied children somehow had led me to the assumption that nothing would grow in Ethiopia. I expected the country to be dead and dry but instead the landscape was lush and green. It’s also quite hilly and if it hadn’t been for the abundance of exotic plants and trees all over the place, I could have imagined driving through a fertile mountain region back home in Europe.

Something quite un-European though, were the tubes we saw hung up in a lot of trees around Konso. As Mike explained, these were man-made beehives put up there on purpose to produce wild honey. The beehives would attract bees to populate them for a certain period of time until humans come and put the hives on fire. Well, not totally on fire but in such a way that the smoke drives out the bees. As soon as they are gone, people get up the trees and harvest the honey. This very interesting method of honey production was supposedly supported by something that looked like aluminium wrappings or metal plates stuck on the trunks of the trees. When we asked what they were for, Mike said they would facilitate identification of the trees for homeward-bound bees. I have no idea if that’s true or if he only said that in lack of a better explanation (which he would do sometimes as we learned later). Anyway, Xavier, Mohamed, Ihab and I would have liked to try some of the honey produced in this traditional way but as it turned out, we only could have bought huge pots with several litres of wild honey – it seems the local people haven’t discovered the benefit of “trial appetisers” on their markets yet…

At the end of the afternoon, we finally arrived in Turmi and pitched our tents at a camp site for the night. We had dinner in a tiny small “restaurant” nearby – basically the only one in Turmi and also the only place with a generator that could feed a fridge for cold drinks. Their menu was simple but the food was good, served at very simple tables in a traditional round hut. We would have our breakfast, lunch and dinner here for the time we stayed in Turmi and thus became some sort of regular guests. (I admit there weren’t many other tourists around anyway.) The woman who ran the place (yes, a woman!) was a very nice lady and apparently the only person in Turmi with a sense for tourist business. As we spent quite a bit of time at the restaurant, we started to get to know the people living in the immediate neighbourhood and were lucky to be able to make some contacts, especially with the children. Some of them were dressed in their traditional clothes, trying to make money by charging tourists for a photo. It was here, we started to get a glimpse of the Ethiopian attitude towards white travellers…