Lounging in Langano

This morning I realized that I was at Lake Langano exactly one year ago today. I was looking at the scraps of paper in my birdbook where I write my bird lists and came across one from Lake Langano dated October 30! This trip to Ethiopia must have been meant to be.

I woke up this morning with awful food poisoning. I had spaghetti with tomato sauce last night for dinner, which I would have thought was safe, but I have a feeling that the sauce was sitting out all day and was not heated properly. So my birdwatching this morning was a little less energetic than I had hoped. I did see a few new species and the highlight was definitely watching Black-winged Lovebirds (which are endemic to Ethiopia and Eritrea) making out. They are spectacular bright green birds with a red patch over their beaks and like all parrots, they mate for life with one other bird. I had stumbled upon their nest and watched a pair preening each other and just rubbing cheeks. It made me a little jealous.

I am now back in Addis Ababa for the (hopefully) final four days of my trip. I checked back into the Queen of Sheba, and they gave me a different room which is complete luxury compared to my last room. It even has a balcony with a (distant) view of the Hilton – which is still fully booked for an African Union conference. This evening the streets of Addis Ababa were lined with machine gun toting military for protection of the dignitaries. I guess they tightened security ever since there was an assassinate attempt on Hosni Mubarak while he was visiting Addis 5 years ago. Hmmm, I wander if Mugabe is coming.