Friday 27 February 2009

The Cash

When I posted this ages ago, I ended with this tale:
One of the coolest things was that the day we arrived in Eritrea was the day they introduced their own national currency - the Nakfa, named after a town that was the stronghold in the border wars. They'd been using the Ethiopian money up to then. So I have a mint collection of first edition Eritrean notes - probably worth a huge 20cents, but I don't care, cos you don't have any Eritrean anything. Of course, when we crossed into Ethiopia they refused to change our Eritrean money as they had no idea what it was.
Having just done a bunch of scanning, I had a bunch of captioning/keywording to do. Sometimes it's surprising what you find in Lonely Planet Africa when you're trying to clarify some poor notetaking.

Some mint Nakfa.

There were some mint Birr in there too, cos Ethiopia felt they had to redesign their currency too, so as to limit confusion or something.

I'm sure it'll be worth something. One day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow!Thats some good looking, not so hard, hard curency

microphen said...

yeah. sure is.

it's not everyday you get to be around when a country changes its currency, but i think it was when i saw the nakfa that i decided i had to store it for posterity.

i've got coins from nearly every other country i went to, but only notes from ethiopia and eritrea. special.