We did a 13-day tour of mostly northern Ethiopia, including the area called Tigray which has warnings against tourists going there. I can’t imagine touring in Ethiopia without locals arranging things. The main language is Amharic and it doesn’t use a Latin alphabet. Luckily, Google translate covers it!
We ended up doing 5 flights within the country to avoid land travel through certain areas that were considered unsafe. When we were driving through the country, we saw many police and national army carrying AK-47s and there were many checkpoints to get through. Having said that, we felt pretty safe, even when we strayed at night into a town’s red light district by accident. I had to point out to Mike why there were small rooms with red lights outside them…
Safety aside, our main issues with Ethiopia are the lack of tourist amenities. Many hotels don’t have hot water, adequate water pressure, A/C (or fans) and when we were in the Danakil Depression (desert with salt flats, volcanos, bubbling sulphur beds), we camped outside among dirt and rocks without any bathroom facilities. In fact the entire 3 days, I sullied the great outdoors where soooo many others had done before me. Some areas were so littered with human waste, toilet paper! But maybe my biggest gripe with the outdoor bathroom situation was that anywhere we stopped for a bathroom break I was usually the only woman. The men just moved a little bit from the jeep and stood next to each other, while I had to walk further out (mind you there are no bushes or rocks). And if that wasn’t difficult enough, then the children who inhabited the desert would come running towards us as I was trying to have some semblance of privacy. Ugh! Those who know me well, know I don’t mind roughing it, but this was a level more than I was ready for because of the total lack of privacy. I actually enjoyed sleeping outside. It was hot but there was a breeze both nights. We saw lots of stars, heard hyenas and felt a small earthquake right under me.
The other thing that was very hard to deal with was the amount of children begging whenever they saw you – through the jeep windows, when you exited the car and when you were trying to eat in peace. Our tour guide told us that one place had lost a lot of tourists due to this.
And lastly for me & Mike, the food was awful. Although I don’t like lentils, chickpeas, beans and injera (spongy bread) which are the major staples of their diet, I tried it, figuring that is what would taste best. But this didn’t work. So Mike and I tried to get more Western-style food, which turned out to be really bad (they don’t have the necessary ingredients for our food or anything like it). So mealtimes were just trying to figure out what I could tolerate to get calories and supplementing with store-bought ginger cookies. Mike tried an ice cream and it was the weirdest taste sensation – not really cold and the texture was slimy.
In spite of all that, I am glad we did the tour! The sites we saw were very unique to Ethiopia and I learned so much about their history and culture. We covered the desert, the thermal mineral areas that were extremely colorful, the salt flats, a church carved out of a rock pinnacle that involved a lot of climbing, a little technical rock climbing, and walking on an exposed ledge. We saw an incredible castle complex, large steles and about 11 churches hewn out of basalt rock. These churches have been used since they were built in the 6th – 12th centuries and are still in use! Amazing wonders of the world.
Oh yes, for those of you that read my Nightmare Inducing post about my binoculars – I DID GET THEM BACK as I was leaving Ethiopia!!! Not the easiest process and it involved paying a surprise “storage fee”, but I have them with me again.