Ethiopian Great Rift Valley

After the tribal tour, I drove to the Ethiopian Great Rift Valley. It was so cool! The Rift itself was very interesting. Then when you add all the lakes it is utopia of nature! Let me explain to you what a rift is.  It is the pulling apart of two tectonic plates. After a couple of million years, the entire East African continent will pull away from West Africa along the rift and create its own island like Madagascar. If it were me, I would name the new island "Hubba Bubba Land."

If you've never been to Africa, you might think the rift looks like the Grand Canyon. I know I did. But it doesn't look anything like that.  It is very lush with vegetation. There is a series of seven major lakes in the Rift such  Lake Abayta, Chomo and Swae.  On the plains between the lakes there is a national park called Nech Sar. There we glimpsed animals I'd only seen in zoos like zebras, Grant's gazelles and hartebeest! I love that name.

The Rift is home to dormant volcanoes. I got to visit on the west wall of the Rift called Mt Yerer which is 30,100m high and extinct, so I was safe from ash or lava flows.  This is the second volcano I have climbed. The other one is in Guatemala, and it erupted recently but not while I was on it.   Mt. Yerer had one tourist attraction, its' hermit cave. In this cave is the mummified body of a hermit in a glass coffin.

Great Rift Valley

My favorite lake was Lake Chomo because of the wildlife.  There were hundreds of hippos along the banks and thousands of Nile crocodiles.  I also got to fish, which is a lot different from the creek fishing I've done in Houston. We fished for Nile Perch, fighting tigerfish, catfish and more.  Some of these I'd seen and heard about on River Monsters. We didn't catch much, but it was fun.

There is a group of people called the Dorze who live near Lake Chomo. They say they were once warriors but now are farmers and weavers. I bought a souvenir there of their weavings. One of the unique things is their houses. They are really tall beehive shaped buildings with dirt floor but beautiful woven domed ceilings.

The lowland of the valley are lush, but as you climb up the sides of the rift and increase in elevation the landscape changes a lot. Midway up are bamboo forests and at the top where it get colder are trees like juniper.