Once Dave joined our family adventure, we headed south and out of the city. We followed the main road down the Great Rift Valley to a resort on Lake Langano. The resort was posh and totally fun: a mini-two-day vacation of luxury (it also happened to be our wedding anniversary). Not that we were exactly roughing it elsewhere, but this place had a spa!
Though I am unclear why, the water in Lake Langano is full of brown flouride. Presumably this has something to do with the lake's volcanic origins(?), but the really good part is that it makes the lake uninhabitable for certain parasites, so you can swim worry-free. The water was definitely a bit salty, and just look at that milk chocolate color against the distant bluish walls of the volcanic caldera! There was a constant breeze and the water was not exactly warm, so you may notice my hesitance to fully submerge -- the boys got the better of me in the end, of course. |
| The beach was covered in pumice and various versions of "lava rock" (as Zenebe liked to call the basalt, etc.), so a fun game was to throw rocks into the water to see which would float. |
The next day we took a short drive to a different set of crater lakes in the Abiata-Shala National Park. We spent a lot of time collecting rocks on the lakeshore; the boys were after as much obsidian as they could carry!
The variety in rock colors captivated me; all those little cinder cone eruptions spewing rocks different mineral content. Amazing!
One side of the lake had active hot springs. The mud was actually boiling! Folks came to bathe or cook potatoes (and stare at the tourists).
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| The microbiologist among us was (understandably) very excited by the biofilms in the steaming water. Pretty tough microbes making pretty colors! |
