Travelling in Ethiopia can be uncomfortable – but the sights make it all worthwhile.
Ethiopia is renowned for its famines and wars. It is less well known as a tourist destination, despite a history that goes back to the age of Solomon and its extraordinary 12th-century monolithic churches – 11 of them tucked away beneath a 
remote mountain in the town of Lalibela.
There were no queues to visit the churches or anything else – not even to see Lucy’s 3.2 million-year-old skull in the scruffy museum in Addis Ababa – and after two weeks I understood why. The roads are mostly unsealed, some hotels barely warrant a star, and when there’s running water you’ll be lucky if it’s hot.
Yet the countryside in the populous northern provinces of Amhara and Tigray is a dream – and a remarkably quiet one because there are few cars and few signs of public transport.
These two northern provinces used to be known as the Abyssinian Highlands; most of the area is above 2000m and some above 3000m. Temperatures are rarely uncomfortably hot, and much of the terrain is spectacularly rugged and steep.
But every patch of soil flat enough for cultivation was being ploughed when we were there in May, a few weeks before the rainy season. We watched bony oxen whipped by equally skinny ploughmen as they dragged a single-bladed plough back and forth across a hillside. We saw threshing as it was done in the days of Solomon: a group of boys chasing gaunt long-horned beasts around and around over a stack of wheat sheaves.
Less picturesque were the grimy yellow jerrycans stacked outside houses – for which “hovel” or “hut” seems a more appropriate word. They’re small, round stone structures or, most often, rectangular and made of eucalyptus branches sometimes plastered with mud. Roofs are thatched or sheets of iron, frequently held in place by rocks. Piped water is non-existent in rural areas, where 80% of the population live, and only 2% have electricity.
Bouncing along in our 16-seater bus, we were as much a novelty to local people as they were to us. If we stopped for a photo (or some other necessity) on a hairpin bend in the middle of nowhere, children suddenly appeared, piping, “Gimme money, gimme pen!”
The urge to give was strong but forbidden by our Ethiopian guide, who distributed discreetly the store of gifts – pens, notebooks, a huge pile of clothes – we had previously handed him. The children were always delighted to be photographed and then to see their image on our camera screens.
Our itinerary roughly followed that described in guidebooks as the “history circuit”, starting at Bahir Dar, a town at the southern tip of Lake Tana, and heading north towards the Eritrean border through the ancient town of Axum, then south, finishing at Lalibela from where we flew to Addis Ababa. That’s a lot of travelling in two weeks, but there was never a moment when we weren’t transfixed by the views through the windows.
A boat trip on Lake Tana took us to several of the monasteries and round churches famous for their murals, painted in the lively and highly original style of Ethiopian Christianity, which has been the dominant religion since the 4th century. Somewhere between a third and a half of the population is Muslim.
Monks proudly showed us parchment books from the 16th and 17th centuries written in the ancient language of Ge’ez with illustrations in the same colourful style as the murals. We were forbidden to use flash, and we winced as the monks turned grimy pages with bare hands.
Lake Tana is also famous as the source of 80% of the Nile’s water. It leaves the lake through the Blue Nile and cascades over the renowned Blue Nile Falls – accessible from Bahir Dar but reduced to a pathetic orange trickle by the dry season and by the effects of a hydro dam.
Poverty has its shocks and the sharpest of these occurred in Debark, where water was provided by jerrycans in our bathrooms and we were told at dinner that what we didn’t eat would be shared among “the people outside”.
Yet this small town serves as the gateway to the Simien National Park, a spectacular wilderness area that lies off the main road between Lake Tana and Axum. At 4554m, the park’s Mt Ras Dashen is the fourth highest in Africa and a destination for mountaineers.
The park is home to 30,000 people who scratch a living from its more accessible slopes and to red-breasted gelada baboons, which are so numerous they are on the point of being culled because they compete with livestock for sparse pasture. Tourists were as rare as the elegant little walia ibex that now exist only in the Simien and which we glimpsed among the lobelias.
The climax of our trip was Lalibela and its World Heritage rock-hewn, or monolithic, churches. It’s hard to imagine how thousands – perhaps millions – of hands chipped away, starting at ground level and working downwards, then slowly back up to hollow out the insides and create these structures whose proportions resemble small gothic cathedrals.
They were the brainwave of the king whose name is also that of the town – Lalibela. His aim in building the churches underground was to conceal them from Muslim invaders. The work took the miraculously short time of 23 years.
As for the cuisine, Ethiopian food requires an especially stoic palate. Their traditional pancake, called injera, has the texture and taste of dishcloth, but the sauces that go with it use a lethal mixture known as berbere, which consists of spices, chilli and yet more chilli. The options for wary tourists are spaghetti, rice or goulash.
It’s uncomfortable being a Western tourist in a country where extreme poverty is ubiquitous and the opportunities for change seem so slender. I wondered how long it took to plough a field, making a single furrow, or how children could be spared to go to school when they’re needed to cart firewood or take animals out to graze. Fewer than half of primary school-age children are enrolled, but so scarce are the resources that school lasts only half a day for those lucky ones. An almost equal number of children are considered underweight.
Change is in sight, though. Road gangs are constructing highways, under the watchful eyes of Chinese supervisors. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi wants to make Ethiopia the “energy giant of Africa” by building the Gibe 3 dam in the Omo Valley, 250km south of Addis Ababa, with Chinese help.
It’s questionable whether selling electricity to the rest of Africa will enable farmers in Tigray to buy tractors. Or bring clean water to villages during droughts. Will the money provide schools with teachers and books? There must be other ways Zenawi could lift these people out of semi-starvation subsistence and into the 21st century.
Promoting tourism would be one small step. My next trip will be to the Danakil Depression, the lowest point on Earth, where camels still carry slabs of salt along trade routes centuries old. And there are several rock monasteries I want to see whose murals won’t survive the dust and damp of many more years.