The Great Ethipian Road Trip!

The bulk of our time in Ethipia was a road trip through the North of the country. The North has the majority of the historically significant cities and sites.

We covered over 1200 miles in 1 week and some of the roads were even paved.

We started in Addis and drove to Bahir Dar which is on the south shore of Lake Tana to see some historic monasteries, see the source of the Blue Nile and visit the nearby Blue Nile Falls. From there we headed a few hours north to the very interesting city of Gondar which has some very nice castles and other historical builds. Castles in Africa? Who knew? After being wowed there we took a nature break at Simien Mountains Lodge to see the endemic Galada Monkeys and Ibex. We returned to human history at our next city of Aksum where we saw Stalea, the chapel that supposedly has the original Ark of the Covenant and other cool sites. Our longest segment took us to the really cool town of Lalibela which has the very unique 11 churches hewn out of solid rock as well as some of the most spectacular scenery of the trip, which is saying a lot.

Each major stop has it's own page devoted to the stuff we saw there but this section covers all the really cool stuff we saw along the way. If we flew from city to city we would have missed all this great stuff.

Addis to Bahir Dar

The first leg of the trip was a long 7-8 hour drive from the capital of Addis Ababa to Bahir Dar on the banks of Lake Tana. On the way we took in the Ethipian countryside for the first time. Addis was interesting but since 80% of Ethiopians still live in the country, this is where Real Ethiopia is found.

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Bahir Dar to Gondar

This segment was only about 3 hours and relatively uneventful.

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Simien to Aksum

We left Simien first thing in the morning and hit the road to the historic town of Aksum to see the amazing things there. This segment had us leave the extreme mountainous terrain of the Simien Mountains where it was pretty green and got progressively more arid as we got further North. On the way there we saw Camels used for the first time.

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Aksum to Lalibela

This segment was the longest. We were originally scheduled visit Aksum in the morning then drive to Mek'ele in the afternoon where we would spend the night and continue on to Lalibela.

Since we decided to stay in Simien for the day and spend the night there we instead drove from Aksum early in the morning and drove all day and made a stop at a small town called Woldia. We were warned there were no tourist appropriate hotels there. Yeah, it was a little rough but acceptable to spend the night. We were then able to leave early in the morning and drive 2-3 hours to Lalibela and see the cool churches there.

Along the way we enjoyed some more of the spectacular scenery we were finding consistently around the country. One highlight was the lush green valley around Lake Hashenge. Tsenga told us just two weeks prior it was dry but they got some much needed rain and now it's green and lush again. We of course ran into another festival in a little town and the kids got a kick out of us as always, as we did of them.

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