The Blue Nile Falls – an amazing waterfall on the Blue Nile River. The impressive plums of mist bellowing from the depths of falls led Ethiopians to name it Tis Abay, which in Amharic means „smoking water”. The path to the falls starts west of the ticket office. After couple of rocky footpaths there is a 17th-centurury Portuguese bridge, which I am mentioning about as it was the first stone bridge constructed in Ethiopia and it is really beautiful.
Blue Nile Falls are around 30 km from Bahir Dar (10 km on tarred road and 20 km on gravel, muddy, bumpy/corrugated road) The scenery around is really beautiful, but the road itself horrible. One way drive to the Falls took us more than 2 hours! Yeap, We did 20 km in 2 hours!!! Even kids who were running behind or along our Rusty, sometimes were faster than us and they were overtaking our van! Seriously!! Although, driving was frustrating we were enjoying landscapes and villages. Kids were rather nice and except shouting: „pen, pen, pen”, „you, you, you”, „give me money”,„give me cold water” or „bon, bon (give me some sweets)” they mostly were friendly waving towards us”. There was only one bizarre child, who was throwing some animal poo into our and Terri’s car. His throwing was really well-aimed as later on we noticed animal dung splattered on the back of our vehicles. Not nice!!
After bumpy drive we finally reached the ticket office. We paid entrance fee (it didn’t cost much, 30 Birrs or so) and 10 Birrs to a guy for watching our car. And of course we got surrounded by local kids and teenagers who were offering themselves as our tour guides. We refused any kind of guidance and help, but it didn’t really matter to them as they anyway walked with us. There were two kids who spoke English quite well; one of them was walking with Terri and one with Charlie. Due to the rainy season, the whole place was very slippery and muddy. My shoes unfortunately were not gripped enough and all the time I was being left behind. Because of that I also needed to deal with rest of the kids, who were nice but persistent as well. One girl was really cute and asked me if I could take her to my country and adopt her as my child or sister. Adorable:)
One of the attraction to us was walking through a suspension bridge (sort of new construction over there). While I was looking down, someone told us that recently a donkey fell into the river and drowned. Really sad story!
We spent around 1,5 hours at the Blue Nile Falls. Because of the rainy season the waterfall was very full of waters and looked very powerful – amazing views! When we got back to our cars, my „not that long ago clean shoes” were covered by mud again. A group of teenagers came to us and one of the boys asked whether he could clean my shoes. I answered that because of that bad weather it was pointless as they would get dirty again very soon. Then he said that actually he really liked my speakers and asked me if I could give them to him, because he never had proper shoes and he want to become a professional Olympic runner. It was really sad to refuse– but on the other hand they were not able to understand that I didn’t have any spare pair of proper shoes with me.
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