Situated on the southern tip of Lake Tana, Ethiopia’s largest lake, Bahir Dar was our first stop on our tour of the country’s northern historical circuit. The guide books describe Bahir Dar as a “booming business centre”. You soon learn to take anything the guide books say with a large pinch of salt while travelling around Ethiopia. To place the words “booming” and “business” in the same sentence to describe any town in Ethiopia is to demonstrate a great deal of imagination. Bahir Dar has two dirt roads running through it, continuously travelled by UNAIDS trucks, other NGO trucks, and the crowded minivans that serve as buses.
Having arrived in Bahir Dar a day late after our bmi debacle, we decided to take a raincheck on our friendly hotel host’s persistent offers of a boat tour and instead crash in our hotel room until 3pm, at which time we ventured in search of, yes, you guessed it, food. After some careful cross-referencing of guide books, our first meal in Ethiopia would take place at Tana Pastry, an inconspicuous, two-storey restaurant popular for its fresh fish dishes. Our first meal in Ethiopia would, in fact, turn out to be the best, and would be our introduction to real Ethiopian injera (a ubiquitous (no exaggeration), grey-ish, soft, steamed, hole-y flatbread made from fermented teff flour), and fir-fir, a stew of minced meat or fish cooked in a spicy berbere sauce.

Tana Pastry menu

Fish fir-fir and injera
Fish cutlet
Lake Tana is known for its many orthodox monasteries, almost all of which are dotted around the lake’s many islands. For a fee, a guide will take you around a selection of these, which you can enter (for another fee) and view with the help of the local priest. There are some, however, that allow entry only to men. The monasteries themselves are simple, round mud buildings with thatched roofs. Inside is a square structure, with colourful biblical scenes depicted on all four walls. The interior houses the “holiest of holies”, the most sacred part of the monastery, which only priests can enter. Some of the monasteries also house “treasures”, so it was with great intrigue that we were guided to the “museum” at the Bet Maryam monastery. The local priest made a great show of opening the doors of the museum for us, which constitutes a small glass cabinet with some silver crowns.

Bet Maryam museum of crowns

Monastery paintings

Goatskin book

Thatched roofs
Bahir Dar is also renowned for being close to the source of the Blue Nile, which travels northwest from Lake Tana to join the Nile in neighbouring Sudan. Your boat guide will also take you there, and point to something which he insists is the source of the Blue Nile, but which, as far as you can tell, could just be a bunch of reeds. Allegedly, you can also see hippopotami and crocodiles early in the morning, but we were too late to see these. The lake is also popular with bird watchers and our hotel, located right on the shore, was a perfect place to sit with an afternoon coffee and catch a glimpse of a whole host of colourful and unusual birds.

In Bahir Dar, we also learned of the Ethiopian obsession with gum. Meat and fresh produce may be in short supply, but there is certainly no shortage of gum, in any flavour you might care for, sold by enterprising children eager to make a buck.
Not surprisingly, one great disadvantage of being by the shore is the predominance of mosquitoes. Our hotel room conveniently came with a mosquito net. Unfortunately, it was full of holes, for which we had to devise some ad hoc strategies (tip: band-aids appear to be a popular method of sealing bednet holes. Trust me, it doesn’t work…..).

you have, but to play in it?! Here’s what we did in the London Snow Storm of 2009:











