Ethiopia

Ethiopia is the one African country that was never colonised, the second-oldest officially Christian state in the world, the place where coffee comes from, and the home of the oldest human ancestors ever found. It runs on its own calendar, seven to eight years behind yours, with thirteen months, and on its own clock, which starts counting at dawn. Nothing here is a version of anywhere else.

The headline sights are extraordinary by any standard. Lalibela: eleven churches cut down into the bedrock, still in daily use, still full of pilgrims. Aksum: the stelae of an empire that traded with Rome and India and that Ethiopians say holds the Ark of the Covenant. Gondar: seventeenth-century castles in the highlands. The Simien Mountains: 4,000 m escarpments with troops of gelada, a primate found nowhere else. The Danakil: the hottest inhabited place on the planet, with an accessible lava lake and acid pools the colour of egg yolk.

The honest counterweight is that Ethiopia has been through a very hard decade. The Tigray war of 2020–22 killed an estimated several hundred thousand people; the Pretoria agreement ended it but the conflicts in Amhara and Oromia have not resolved, and the security map changes. Several of the classic northern sites sit inside or beside affected regions. This does not mean you cannot go — it means the itinerary you can actually do depends on the month you go, and you must check current advice rather than a guidebook.

Go anyway, if the security picture allows the route you want. There is nowhere else remotely like it, the people are among the most hospitable you will meet, it is cheap, and the sheer historical depth — 3.2-million-year-old Lucy in a museum case in Addis, and a liturgy in a language nobody has spoken conversationally for a thousand years — is not something you can get anywhere else on Earth.

Ethiopia comes from the Greek Aithiopia, "land of the burned faces", used by Homer and Herodotus for the lands south of Egypt. Ethiopians call the country ኢትዮጵያ (Ityopia), and there is a national tradition deriving it from a legendary figure Ityopis. The old European name Abyssinia, from the Arabic Habasha, is now considered dated and is not used domestically.

Ethiopia is a high plateau split by the Great Rift Valley, ringed by lowlands, with a range of altitude that is genuinely extreme: from 4,550 m at Ras Dashen to 125 m below sea level in the Danakil. It is landlocked — it lost its coast when Eritrea became independent in 1993 — and it is the second most populous country in Africa.

The classic route is the northern historic circuit — Addis, Bahir Dar, Gondar, the Simiens, Aksum, Lalibela — traditionally flown between with Ethiopian Airlines. The Danakil is a separate expedition from Mekele or Semera; Harar is east; Bale and the Omo are south. Distances are large and roads are slow.

Ethiopia's story starts earlier than almost anywhere. Lucy — Dinkinesh, "you are marvellous" — is a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis found in the Afar in 1974, and for decades the most famous hominin fossil in the world. Older finds have since come from the same region. This is, in a real sense, where people come from.

From around the fourth century BCE the kingdom of D'mt and then the Aksumite empire ruled the northern highlands. Aksum minted its own coinage, traded with Rome, Arabia and India, wrote in Ge'ez, and was described by a third-century Persian writer as one of the four great powers of the world alongside Rome, Persia and China. Around 330 CE King Ezana converted to Christianity, making Ethiopia the second state after Armenia to adopt it officially.

Islam arrived within the Prophet's lifetime: in 615 the first Muslim emigrants fled Mecca and were given refuge by the Aksumite king, an event Muslims call the First Hijra and Ethiopians cite constantly as the founding fact of their religious coexistence. Harar later became a major centre of Islamic learning, and the country has been roughly two-thirds Christian and one-third Muslim for centuries.

The Zagwe dynasty ruled from the tenth century and built Lalibela, intended as a New Jerusalem. In 1270 the Solomonic dynasty claimed descent from Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and ruled — with interruptions — until 1974. That claim is set out in the Kebra Nagast and is not a folk story here; it was written into the twentieth-century constitution.

Menelik II unified and expanded the modern state and, on 1 March 1896 at Adwa, destroyed an invading Italian army — the first time an African state decisively defeated a European colonial power, and the reason Ethiopia was the only African member of the League of Nations.

This section exists because you cannot plan an Ethiopian itinerary without it. The country is not at peace, the affected regions include places on the classic tourist route, and the picture changes month to month. Treat everything below as orientation and check your foreign ministry's current advice before you book anything.

Ethiopia is around two-thirds Christian and a third Muslim, and religion here is not a private matter but the organising rhythm of the week, the year and the plate. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the oldest in the world and one of the most distinctive.

Ethiopia keeps its own time in two separate ways, and both will affect your trip. The Ethiopian calendar is seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one, and the Ethiopian clock starts at dawn. Confirm every appointment in both systems.

Eleven churches carved downward out of solid volcanic rock in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — not built, not hollowed into a cliff, but cut down from the surface and then excavated from within, leaving free-standing buildings sitting in pits. King Gebre Meskel Lalibela intended a New Jerusalem after Saladin's capture of the original in 1187. It is a UNESCO site and, far more importantly, still a working place of worship.

The capital of an empire that ran the Red Sea trade from roughly the first to the seventh century, minted gold coins, and left a field of carved granite stelae — grave markers of extraordinary ambition, the largest of which would have stood 33 m and weighed over 500 tonnes had it not fallen, probably during erection.

Gondar was the imperial capital from 1636 to the mid-nineteenth century, and its rulers built something no one expects in the Ethiopian highlands: a walled compound of stone castles, with battlements, towers and balconies, in a style that mixes Ethiopian, Portuguese, Indian and Arab influence.

A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1978 and one of the great trekking landscapes on Earth: an eroded volcanic plateau whose edge falls away in a 1,500 m escarpment of pinnacles and buttresses, with Ras Dashen at 4,550 m, Ethiopia's highest point, at the far end of it.

The hottest inhabited place on the planet — average annual temperatures around 35 °C, summer daytime highs above 50 °C, and much of it below sea level. Three tectonic plates are pulling apart underneath it, and the result looks like a different planet: sulphur springs the colour of egg yolk, salt flats to the horizon, and an open lava lake.

A shield volcano in the Danakil with one of the very few persistent lava lakes on Earth — molten rock, open to the sky, that has been there since at least 1906. You walk to it at night across black basalt and stand on the crater rim looking down at the planet's interior.

The south is a completely different Ethiopia — Afroalpine moorland, cloud forest, Rift Valley lakes and the pastoralist cultures of the lower Omo. It is less visited than the northern circuit and, in parts, harder to reach.

A walled city in the east, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and one of the most atmospheric places in the Horn of Africa. Harar Jugol has 82 mosques and over 100 shrines inside walls barely a kilometre across, and by some Islamic traditions is counted the fourth holiest city after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

"New Flower", founded in 1886, at 2,355 m — one of the highest capitals in the world, home to around five million people, and the diplomatic centre of Africa as headquarters of the African Union. It is a construction site, a traffic jam and a genuinely good city to spend two days in.

Around 132 million people — the second most populous country in Africa — in more than eighty ethnic groups speaking as many languages. No group is a majority, which is both the country's richness and the fault line running under its politics.

Amharic is the federal working language, written in the Ge'ez script — an abugida of over 200 characters, each a consonant-vowel syllable, and one of very few writing systems in the world invented independently rather than borrowed.

Coffee is Ethiopian. Coffea arabica grows wild in the forests of Kaffa in the south-west, which is where the word comes from, and every arabica plant in the world descends from Ethiopian stock. It is the country's largest export and the centre of its social life.

One of the world's genuinely distinctive cuisines, and one of its great vegan traditions — because observant Orthodox Ethiopians fast from all animal products for something like 180 to 250 days a year, and the cooking had to be good enough to survive that.

The essentials

Honey wine, barley beer, a serious commercial brewing industry, and — in a country where a third of the population is Muslim and much of the rest fasts half the year — a more complicated relationship with alcohol than the beer lists suggest.

Ethiopian festivals are among the most spectacular religious gatherings anywhere, and they run on the Ethiopian calendar — so the Gregorian dates shift and are worth confirming. If your trip can be built around one, build it around one.

Ethiopia is close to the equator and mostly high, so the climate is governed by altitude and rainfall rather than by season in the European sense. Ethiopians divide the year into bega (dry, October–February), belg (small rains, March–May) and kiremt (big rains, June–September).

Addis Ababa Bole (ADD) is the largest aviation hub in Africa, and Ethiopian Airlines is the continent's biggest and best-regarded carrier — a Star Alliance member with a genuinely global network. Getting to Ethiopia is easy; the constraint is what you can do once inside.

From Prague there is no direct flight, but the connection is straightforward: one stop with Ethiopian Airlines via Frankfurt, Vienna, Brussels or Paris, or with a Gulf carrier via Dubai or Doha. Total travel time is 10 to 14 hours, and the time difference is only two hours in Czech summer, one in winter.

Ethiopia is rewarding and it is not easy. Distances are large, infrastructure is patchy, the bureaucracy has its own logic, and the two calendars and two clocks will catch you out at least once. A good local operator is worth what they cost.

Cheap by international standards, especially since the 2024 devaluation, with two significant exceptions: domestic flights (unless you fly in on Ethiopian) and Danakil expeditions, which are the single largest line in most budgets.

Ethiopia is a country where crime against visitors is low and armed conflict is the real risk, and the two get confused. Addis is safer to walk in than most large cities. Several regions are, at various times, genuinely off limits.

Ethiopia and Kenya have between them dominated long-distance running for sixty years, and Ethiopia started it. Abebe Bikila won the Olympic marathon in Rome in 1960 running barefoot, becoming the first Black African Olympic champion, and won again in Tokyo four years later — six weeks after an appendectomy.

Ethiopia is the most extraordinary country I know, and it is also the one I would give the most careful advice about. Nothing here is derivative of anywhere else. The alphabet was invented here, the calendar is its own, the church is a branch that separated in 451, the food is unlike any other cuisine, and the coffee is literally where coffee comes from. You do not arrive in a variation on a theme; you arrive somewhere with three thousand years of its own argument going on.

The thing that stays with me is Lalibela at six in the morning — priests in the trenches, pilgrims arriving in white after walking for two days, the smell of incense and beeswax coming out of the rock, and the fact that none of it is for you. It has been going on since the thirteenth century and it will continue after you leave. Very few World Heritage sites are still doing the job they were built for. This one is.

And be honest about the last few years. Several hundred thousand people are estimated to have died in Tigray between 2020 and 2022, and the conflicts in Amhara and Oromia have not ended. Some of what is on this page has been inaccessible for long stretches, and may be again. Nobody can write you a guidebook that stays true for a year. Read the current advisories, hire an Ethiopian operator who knows this month rather than last year, keep the plan loose, and be prepared to swap the north for Harar, Bale and the south.

If the route you want is open, go. Ethiopians are among the most generous hosts anywhere, the country is astonishingly cheap right now, and there is nothing else on Earth like it. Just do not go on the assumption that it will be simple.

— Radim Kaufmann