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> I can imagine that will be somewhat easier in Ethiopia than in many other countries. Ethiopia has one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles in the

by grecy 3y ago

> I can imagine that will be somewhat easier in Ethiopia than in many other countries. Ethiopia has one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles in the world, in fact out of 195 ranked countries Ethiopia is 189th (tied with Burundi, and just ahead of CAR, the DRC, Somalia and Sudan). These are the kind of conclusions you can get yourself into just from reading numbers on screens when you've never actually set foot in a place and experienced reality. I drove across Ethiopia in early 2019, from a remote border on Lake Turkana into Addis, down into Djibouti, back into Ethiopia and then north into Sudan. I assure you, there is a HUGE number of ICE vehicles and infrastructure for them. Traffic and parking in Addis Abba is a real thing. Here's some footage of me driving in the city so you can see what it is really like https://youtu.be/hPVuc1of4XI?t=418 https://youtu.be/hPVuc1of4XI?t=418

jacquesm 3y ago
Incredible footage. Your trip is the kind of thing that a few hundred years ago would result in some kind of epic story told from one generation to another.
- grecy 3y ago
  Haha, thanks. Some days I kick myself for not doing a better job filming the trip so I could put together a proper documentary, and some days I think I should just do it anyway with the footage I have. I'm also really happy I often just put the cameras away and experienced the place I was in and talked with people. That was the point, after all.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That last part is the reason I hardly have any pictures of my own trips. I'm just too busy to be making pictures all the time and I don't want to be the 'cameraman'. It also tends to immediately mark you as a tourist (though in Ethiopia you would be marked as a tourist anyway but I have never been there). Some of the most amazing sights I've seen were in Colombia and even if I regret not having pictures I have them in my head and that's good enough. But your trip and your footage are on a different level and I think just as an unadorned record it has immense value.
sdenton4 3y ago
The way this squares up is that the protein of the population that is urbanized is very low compared to many other countries. In lots of African cities the road infrastructure is underbuilt for the amount of usage, but also there's just a lot more people still not living in urban areas. A good short hand for this is proportion of the country that works in agriculture. It's about 66% for Ethiopia (according to first hit in Google search), compared to about 2% for the US. Lots of those Ethiopian ag workers are going to be subsistence farmers, probably using animals where the us would use tractors, and public transport for personal transit and moving extra goods to market. It'll be interesting to hear how they plan to handle freight and public transport (buses/matatus). Random link source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/agricultural-workers-by-country/#:~:text=Ethiopia%20(66%25)%20and%20Tanzania,income%20African%20countries%20close%20behind https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/agricultural-workers-by-.... (I spent about a month in Ethiopia back in 2012ish, amidst a year in Kenya. So thoughts and observations are largely based on that time.)

by grecy 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

Incredible footage. Your trip is the kind of thing that a few hundred years ago would result in some kind of epic story told from one generation to another.

grecy 3y ago
Haha, thanks. Some days I kick myself for not doing a better job filming the trip so I could put together a proper documentary, and some days I think I should just do it anyway with the footage I have. I'm also really happy I often just put the cameras away and experienced the place I was in and talked with people. That was the point, after all.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That last part is the reason I hardly have any pictures of my own trips. I'm just too busy to be making pictures all the time and I don't want to be the 'cameraman'. It also tends to immediately mark you as a tourist (though in Ethiopia you would be marked as a tourist anyway but I have never been there). Some of the most amazing sights I've seen were in Colombia and even if I regret not having pictures I have them in my head and that's good enough. But your trip and your footage are on a different level and I think just as an unadorned record it has immense value.

sdenton4 3y ago

The way this squares up is that the protein of the population that is urbanized is very low compared to many other countries. In lots of African cities the road infrastructure is underbuilt for the amount of usage, but also there's just a lot more people still not living in urban areas. A good short hand for this is proportion of the country that works in agriculture. It's about 66% for Ethiopia (according to first hit in Google search), compared to about 2% for the US. Lots of those Ethiopian ag workers are going to be subsistence farmers, probably using animals where the us would use tractors, and public transport for personal transit and moving extra goods to market. It'll be interesting to hear how they plan to handle freight and public transport (buses/matatus). Random link source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/agricultural-workers-by-country/#:~:text=Ethiopia%20(66%25)%20and%20Tanzania,income%20African%20countries%20close%20behind https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/agricultural-workers-by-.... (I spent about a month in Ethiopia back in 2012ish, amidst a year in Kenya. So thoughts and observations are largely based on that time.)