For every heartwarming and wonderful character you meet while traveling (i.e. Isharak), there is rude or mean person that annoys you at the time but makes your trip so memorable when you think back upon it. On our voyage to Bahir Dar, there were a few such characters. On a previous backpacking voyage in Europe, my friends and I came up with various names for people we met on our travels that were particularly mean, difficult or rude. We often named them after villains from cartoons. For instance, we had Cruella De-Ville who was the downright unpleasant manager at our Paris hostel.
Well this trip was no different. Let me introduce you to Beastley. Beastley is the name of the mean side-kick on Care Bears. He is the assistant to the villainous No-Heart, but is generally considered pretty harmless. Beastley was our tour guide on Lake Tana who quoted a price and then demanded an additional 300 birr for a guide fee after he had only quoted 50 birr. He was quite shifty and rude and we had to tell him his services were no longer required for the Blue Nile Falls after he dropped us off at the hotel for lunch.
Then there is Iago – Jafar’s assistant in Aladdin. In our particular story, Iago is our shady mini-bus driver who drove us back from Bahir Dar to Addis. After we had paid 1300 birr ($130 Cdn) to rent out the whole mini-bus for our drive back (we wanted to lie down on the return voyage), he randomly started picking up people on the side of the road to drive with us. He refused to listen to our requests and when we phoned his boss on our cell phone to complain, he asked us to lie and say that nobody else was on the bus with us. Furthermore, he would repeatedly wake up Eric on the bus by calling his name and then when we would ask what he required, he would simply giggle. Finally, he refused to drop us off at our home in Addis, dropping us instead at Piazza, because he did not feel like driving all the way to our house.
