Why should you travel to Ethiopia?
What made the trip really outstanding for us were the people we met. Our local guides, a farmer’s wife, a priest or the lady who prepared the coffee – everybody made us feel welcome.
Safety note: I was in Ethiopia in 2019. There is currently a travel warning from the Federal Foreign Office. Please check before you book a trip.
Once you leave the plane, you feel like you have traveled to another time.
Cars are replaced by donkeys and camels - machines by manual labour.
Drinking coffee does not mean "coffee to go", but a coffee ceremony.
For this purpose, the beans are freshly roasted and you invite friends and neighbours for a cup. At Christmas, a church visit might easily last 24 hours and include 500.000 people.
What made the trip really outstanding for us were the people we met.
No matter if it was our local guide, a farmer’s wife, a priest or the lady who prepared the coffee – everybody made us feel welcome. In Lalibela for example, everybody offered me the best spot to take pictures and smiled at me – I imagined a person from Ethiopia going to the Oktoberfest and I feel really ashamed that the experience would probably be very different from ours.
Molla, who arranged everything for us, did a really great job, because instead of having one guide for the whole time, we always had a local guide in each place. That way we not only had people with the best local knowledge, but also met a lot of different men – unfortunately no female guides yet …
Click on the first picture to see who we met:
How to get there:
Ethiopian Airlines flies daily (at least from Frankfurt) directly to Addis Abeba. If you book with them, you get a discount on the inland flights, which you will probably need, as the roads are very bumpy and dusty …
Package:
We arranged everything through Lalibela Eco Trekking.
Molla Kassaw - the owner - organized our whole trip and everything worked perfectly. We didn't have a single guide, but always different local guides, who showed us their town/hike. That way we got to know a lot of different people, who knew their local attractions best.
You can watch a short Video here:
I didn't really film - I was too occupied to take pictures of all the beautiful things going on around me, but as I had the drone with me, and as I sometimes pressed the record button on my camera as well, I had a few (very shaky, sorry) clips, that I edited into a short clip. I hope you enjoy watching it …