Ethiopia, about two thirds the size of Queensland, Australia, has an abundance of lakes which are mainly situated in the Rift Valley. Where ever we stayed in Ethiopia we were close to a huge lake, except for Addis Ababa! But some of the hotels in Addis had swimming pools!
On our very first trip out of Addis when being taken to work at Shashemane we stopped for lunch at the Koka Lake for lunch. It is man made and one of several man made dams on the Awash River for hydroelectricity production! Later when passing, we sometimes stopped to buy catfish. In the late 1960’s early 1970’s and even during the 1990’s when we arrived home they were still flopping around – 100+ km later to Kuyera or 300Km to Soddo – and the fillets even jumped around the frying pan when being cooked!
The two photos above are of Lake Langano which was about 20 Km from where we lived at Kuyera near Shashemane during our first stay in Ethiopia. It has a number of memories for us. We occasionally used to go for a swim on a Thursday afternoon, but were often called back to the hospital for an emergency! Annoying! There was a pizza fire-place, out in a paddock, on the way in from the highway to where we used to swim at an hotel and a camping area. There wasn’t a pizza hut in Addis at that stage! It was a holiday site on the Lake and as they supplied a real reminder for foreigners of their homelands. They did a reasonable amount of business! Not at that time but in the 90’s grandson Adam, visiting with his parents, had his first swim in that Lake (really his first splash not in a bath!) One of the quite interesting medical cases which came from in the water was….a lady washing the family clothing and bending over with her bottom pointing ‘seawards’! A hippo saw an opportunity and took a nibble. Fortunately it was a fairly large pair of buttocks and so he left a moderately huge piece of skin and fat, hanging downwards but with enough tissue still attached to allow the ‘mouthful’ to be cleaned up and sewn back on! I think after that she probably washed keeping her eyes ‘seaward’ after that!
The panoramic view above the animal pictures and the two below them are of the lakes near Arba Minch – Lake Abiya and Lake Chamo which are connected by a southward flowing connecting creek! The difference in their surface heights is 65 metres! Abiya covers about 1175 sq kilometres and Chamo 320 sq kilometres! As a doctor I have operated on dog, hippo, crocodile, donkey, monkey, baboon, snake, hyena and human bites. ‘Human bites?’, you may well ask. Two stand out – both from tiffs between ‘lovers’ or that is what they said! Both were on men (I could show photos but had better not!) One lost about two fifths of his lower lip and the other about 2 sq cms of the full thickness of the right side of his nose. So they have Domestic Violence in that country!
Lake Bishoftu is beautiful for swimming and boating! We used to go there for our annual holidays. It was owned by our mission but now the government has acquired the site!
Lake Zeway has many birds as seen above, Marabou storks are huge birds which either take a run up before ‘taking off’ or commonly rest high in trees and fly by dropping from the tree to let gravity give them some speed to allow them to fly! There are also plenty of delicious fish!
Dominic Cartier
Heated Stew 