Loud, uncomfortable, rusty, dangerous, and slow; local buses typically don’t have the best reputation when it comes to a reliable choice of adventure transport. However, given the choice between a busy and ramshackle public bus, or a spacious, air-conditioned private one, my heart will only be drawn one way…towards the more exciting and adventurous option…
Have you been thinking about taking a trip, but don’t really know where to start? If so then this blog post might just be for you! The following certainly isn’t a complete compendium of how to plan a trip, and I definitely don’t claim to have all the answers, not by a long way, but I have planned a few trips in my time, so I hope that the A-Z of Adventure Planning might give you an idea of the sort of things you might want to consider when beginning to plan your own adventure, however big or small it might be…
After asking around, we discovered that there were no direct buses from Lalibela to Mek’ele. In addition, the route was over 400km, on roads of varying quality. We knew it was going to be a bit of an ask to make it to Mek’ele in a day; still, it would be an experience if nothing else, and when some people laughed at our enquiries, and told us that it would be almost impossible to make it in a day, we had no other option but to accept this as a challenge, and commit ourselves to spending several hours crammed into the back of various buses, with no other plan than relying on chronic optimism to get us where we wanted to go.
Just outside town we turned on to the road heading east, and pulled over to the side; there weren’t any obvious passengers waiting to board the already packed bus, and surprisingly based on our experience so far, there weren’t any donkeys, carts, or young children threatening to leap out in front of us, in fact, there appeared to be no reason for us to have stopped at all. I looked at the driver, and he looked back with a cheeky grin, and asked if I was able to drive...
explore v. (ɛkˈsplɔː) 1. The action of travelling through an unfamiliar area in order to learn more about it
