Ever since I was a little kid, I remember my parents always ready to pack up and dive head first into an adventure. It really didn't matter to them, nor to my sister and I if it was a holiday or if was just a week of my parents managed to arrange, we were always ready to go. This adventerous spirit in my parents was very much a product of their upbringing. They grew up with friends from all around Ethiopia, valuing each others unique identities and hearing about the beauty all oround our divers nation. This passion of theirs is what led the to want to give all they had to show us our country, even when we didn't understand what they were doing.
The very same seed, and the very same sense of adventure is what also found my parent's and I in the summer of 2023, like most of our summers together. This time around however, I realized that even though they had become and embraced the empty nester lifestyle, we, as a family were still able to be transported to our younger days and still find joy being around eachother and deepening our bond. Unlike our previous adventured, which took us to the eastern and central pasrt of Ethiopia, this summer, we tried something new. The South. Neither my parents or me had been to the city of Arbaminch before but we were intrigued by the natural beauty we kept on hearing about and seeing on social media and the TV.
So we packed up, like we had many many times, and started off at the Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa to take a short flight to the city of Arbaminch. Even before we landed, the landscape our eyes were used to began changing. Suddenly, from up in the air, the green of the land and the blue of the sky were the only colors. Every highland turned into a lush forest, every wheat field into a thick vegetation and that was when I realized that this was indeed going to be such a different experience. And I was not wrong.
Arriving to the eco-lodge we had booked, we were even mesmerized and stuck in unbelief at the beautiful landscape. The Lodge sat on the top of the city, secluded and hidden away. So from the point we were at, we had an unrestricted view of the 40 springs forest, two lakes sitting side by side(Chamo and Abaya) as well as the strip of land that separates and extends to becoming a chain of mountains, directly translated from Amharic to "God's Bridge". The fresh air, the stillness and the sound of nature and nothingness left us all and me personally longing for the vacation to last a lifetime. The natural beauty is made even more better and meaningful by the incredibly warm and welcoming people of Arbaminch. Their heartfelt smiles and their interraction with nature really made me take a step back and appreciate the immense beauty my country still has up her sleeves.
