The Road to Woliso (Amelia's Home Town)

Our first trip outside of Addis was a one-day journey to Woliso,

where Amelia was born.

Unfortunately, we don't know anything about her birth family, or exactly where she was born. So we couldn't visit the exact places where she started her life. It was still wonderful, though, to see where she came from.

The country-side is way different from the "city-side!"

It was market day. All along the 2+ hour drive, the roads were filled with people who were walking--with whatever they had to sell--to the nearest market in the nearest village.

There is a beautiful vacation lodge near Woliso called the Nagash Lodge. Truly, there are probably just a handful of similar places in Ethiopia. Here is the entrance gate.

The view along a path at the Nagash.

There was a Treehouse Coffee Bar!

Bereket waiting patiently for chai-dabo

(tea and bread, a very favorite snack!).

The Coffee Bar is built into a huge old tree.

See the huge, um, rodent?

(Hint: It's sunning itself on the upper left-hand side of the rock!

I couldn't convince Dave to scamper up beside this guy so as to demonstrate how BIG it was!)

A cuter rodent.

A view through the trees....beautiful!

A view from the Tree House.

Stone gateway leading to the lodge buildings.

Real, wild monkeys. So, like, AFRICA!

The lodges are built in the style of traditional Ethiopian homes.

Beautiful day!

Dave takin' it all in.

With the hotel employee who proudly showed us around.

The ceiling of one of the lodges.

Back out the big gate.

We thought this roadside bread shop looked much like a patisserie in France. Only, of course, it's in Ethiopia!

And now we're coming back to Addis.

We enjoyed our beautiful trip to Woliso, and the time we spent at the Nagash Lodge. We also saw a lot of pain and suffering there, but it seemed...disrespectful to snap pictures as we traveled through the town. We realize Amelia's first family certainly lived a more difficult and painful life than the un-real life we saw inside the gates of the beautiful vacation spot. We will never know Amelia's first family, but we love them nonetheless.