Wondo Genet, Ethiopia (Center on Interactive Map)

Wondo Genet is the former resort of one of Ethiopia's emperors. It consists of a mainly agricultural valley.

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Trips

Africa: Egypt and Ethiopia

1/12/2011: From Lake Awassa, we headed toward Wondo Genet to spend the night, and perhaps the next morning we could walk around the forest. We passed through the Ethiopian pineapple capitol, and despite the mob of pineapple sellers, it was still difficult to get a good price.

I wasn't really sold on visiting Wondo since I figured that it would be too similar to the Bishargari forest. However, the first thing that I noticed about Wondo Genet is that there is very little forest remaining. Amazingly, some very steep hills above the town have been completely stripped of trees. A lot of the other trees in the area are eucalyptus plantations.

Our first visit was to the hot springs swimming pool. This was the first sustained hot water that we encountered since staying in the fancy hotel in Addis Ababa. Of course, all of the water around also meant mosquitoes. We were kept up much of the night by mosquitoes in our hotel room. You would think that when you pay double the going rate for a room that they would at least have a mosquito net.

Considering the massive human imprint in the area, I was not expecting to find many birds around. But, in the morning, we hired a guide anyway. We walked around the various plantations and squatter logging camps above the town.

Despite the sparse forest, we did actually see a lot of bird life. We also saw some larger trees lying on the ground, cut down by machete. The guide seemed extremely bored by the whole adventure, but he did find a lot of birds.
Still, by the time 10AM rolled around, I was looking forward to moving on. We arrived to the car to find that our driver had stocked up on papaya being that Wondo is the papaya capitol of Ethiopia.

Previous Visit (Hawassa Bridge: 1/11/2011)
Next Visit (Bale Mountains National Park: 1/13/2011)

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Lifelists

Africa
World