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A Long Way Since the Eighties
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: May 24, 2004
DAY 216: Ethiopia has come a long way since the 1980s when a famine caused by political and economic struggle got worldwide attention, prompting American musicians to sing “We Are The World” as a benefit. The news of the famine also spread to the United Kingdom, prompting British musicians to band together in a similar collective known as Band Aid and ask in song, “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” My thinking is that the Ethiopians did know it was Christmas; the majority of the population is Christian after all. (However, in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, which uses the Gregorian calendar, Christmas is actually celebrated on January 7.)
Cradle of Humanity
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: May 24, 2004
DAY 217: Ethiopia lies in a region known as the Cradle of Humanity, the corner of the globe where it is speculated that Mankind was born—this speculation is supported by paleontological evidence. Many cultures derived from this Creation of Man in Ethiopia, the earliest written history of it recorded in the Bible. With such rich roots to explore in early Man and biblical civilization, Ethiopia’s history blurs the line between reality and folklore and has become a gold mine for paleontologists, anthropologists and archaeologists alike. For tourists, it is also a gold mine; in fact, some consider Ethiopia to be “travel’s best kept secret.”
Dominoes
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 03, 2004
DAY 218: With the weekend over, I could finally get the wheels in motion for my pilgrimage to the Ethiopian holy sites north of Addis Ababa. All my bookings were put on hold until I could confirm with Egypt Air that I could switch my flight from Addis Ababa to Cairo to a later date—after that, everything would fall into place like a set of dominoes.
Get A Room You Two
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 03, 2004
DAY 219: With everything set up in a tight itinerary, everything was all set on my week-long journey that would ultimate bring me to the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. In order for me to make it in my limited time, I didn’t have much room for error—which was a pretty dumb idea I discovered that day. Had I forgotten I was in Africa where, as a guide in Namibia told me, “Nothing comes easy?”
Change of Plans
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 03, 2004
DAY 220: On Day 218: Dominoes, I ran around Addis Ababa trying to book flights, buses and tours in a tight schedule where one thing would lead into the next and to the next like a row of dominoes. Doing so cost more money than it had to be; but I didn’t have the luxury of time, and time is money. It was my last month before meeting people in Spain and I really didn’t have much of a choice—or did I?
Sacred Lake
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 03, 2004
DAY 221: “Philippines!” the street boy finally guessed correctly. Since the day before it baffled him where my heritage was from and I had him try and guess. He told me that it it weren’t for my eyes, I’d probably pass as an Ethiopian with the color of my skin.
The Ethiopian street boys escorted us to a restaurant nearby where we picked up some sandwiches for later and then to a fruit stand for some snacks. We had to have enough provisions for us since there would be no places to get food on our full-day tour of Lake Tana’s monasteries.
From Guess to Gondar
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 03, 2004
DAY 222: Before I came to Ethiopia, my American conception of the country from from images of starving children showed on Sally Struthers commercials asking for money. However this stereotypical image continued to deteriorate the more I “discovered” the “real” Ethiopia. Present day Ethiopia may be developing from a state of famine, but past Ethiopia had already developed into former kingdoms, like the kingdom of Gondar in the Middle Ages.
Holy Land of Honey
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 04, 2004
DAY 223: According to legend, in the the 11th century, an Ethiopian king named Lalibela had a divine vision in a dream, which instructed him to building a bunch of churches. And so, eleven churches were built in his name in a mountain town of his same name, and it it amongst the holiest places in all of Ethiopia.
Where Am I From?
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 04, 2004
DAY 224: Great, another trek, I sarcastically thought to myself as I caught my breath hiking up the mountain, trailing behind my 16-year-old guide Adam. The two-hour uphill trek alongside faithful villagers took us to the Asheton Maryam monastery, carved out of the side of a mountain before King Lalibela ever had the vision to build his eleven rock-hewn ones down the hill.
Passing Through History
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 04, 2004
DAY 225: According to Hollywood folklore—i.e. Steven Spielberg’s 1981 Indiana Jones classic Raiders of the Lost Ark—the Ark of the Covenant was taken by an Egyptian pharoah to the city of Tanis and hidden in an underground temple known as the Well of the Souls, outside of Cairo, Egypt. However, if you follow history as recorded by The Bible, the Ark was actually taken from Jerusalem to the city of Aksum by Abyssia’s (Ethiopia’s) first emperor Menelik I, the son of King Solomon and Queen of Sheba.
Apparently, Hollywood was “digging in the wrong place.”
My Life in Airports
From the trip blog: "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World"
Posted: June 05, 2004
DAY 226: I had so many errands to run that day for when I got back to Addis Ababa that I had to make a checklist: get a taxi from airport to hotel, pick up bag in storage to get ATM card, go to privatized Dashen bank to withdraw cash, go to Commercial Bank of Ethiopia to wire payback money to Nugusse, go to NTO office to straighten out rejected AmEx mess, go back to hotel to sort out photos, organize a transport to the airport, go to the internet cafe to upload at least the photos, go back to hotel and type until my airport transport at 1 a.m.
Simple enough. And then my flight got canceled.
ABOUT THE TRAVELER
When he’s not making a living as an interactive designer, former Lycos travel columnist Erik R. Trinidad is a freelance travel writer whose work has been featured in the New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine, Pilot Guides’ GlobeTrekkerTV.com, and BootsnAll.com. He is a member of the National Geographic Society and has contributed news to National Geographic Traveler. His short story “Disbelief of Wonder” 
appears in the best-of-travel-humor anthology, Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why, which also includes the work of Tim Cahill, Doug Lansky, Jennifer Leo and Rolf Potts.
From Timbuktu to Kalamazoo, Erik has traveled to the seven continents of the world with a curiosity for exotic foods and a thirst for adventure (and writing material). In his travels, the ethnically ambiguous-looking thirty-something has been mugged at knifepoint in Cape Town, extorted by corrupt Russian police on the Trans-Siberian Railway, stranded in tornadic storms in the American midwest, and air-lifted off the Everest Trail by a helicopter that was thankfully paid for by his travel insurance. But it hasn’t been all fun; he has also donned a tuxedo amidst the penguins of Antarctica, paraded with Carnival-winning samba school Beija Flor in Rio, run for his life at Pamplona’s “Running of the Bulls,” cage-dived with great white sharks, gotten shot point-blank in the stomach in Colombia (while wearing a bulletproof jacket), and above all, encountered many people around the world, including some Peruvian musicians in Cuzco who learned and played “Y.M.C.A.” at his request. While some believe he has an iron stomach, he is not invulnerable to traveler’s diarrhea.
From October 2003 to March 2005, Erik traveled on a continuous sixteen-month trip around the world, blogging each day with his detailed and sometimes humorous style of storytelling. The blog, which has received over 75,000 unique hits from a global audience, originally began as a small on-line journal for a few family and friends, but evolved into an internet phenomenon within the travel communities of Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree and BootsnAll.com, and has been recommended by RickSteves.com, USA Today, and Travelocity’s IgoUgo travel network. 
In Spring 2005, it was selected by the editors of PC Magazine as one of the year’s “Top 100 Sites You Didn’t Know You Couldn’t Live Without,” in the travel category.
Erik writes stories and articles when he is at his base camp in New York City, and continues his blog when he is on the road. His travel writing is also a journey, one that has evolved from his early days writing personal travel journals to his published articles tailored to publication style. His travel and literary journeys will continually develop the more he travels and writes—provided he’s not occupied tracking down lost luggage.
To read about Erik from a real third person (as opposed to Erik writing this sidebar about himself in the third person), check out this feature article from Filipinas magazine by Amy Alipio, Assistant Editor at National Geographic Traveler.