Ethiopia's highlanders live in a stunning basalt landscape of endless canyons and soaring volcanic peaks. It's a destination that even family-holiday-averse teenagers will fall for. And an Irish Aid project means that staying here benefits locals directly, writes MANCHÁN MAGAN
I MAY HAVE inadvertently unearthed the perfect holiday: affordable, unforgettable and in one of the most awesome, exotic and unexplored parts of the world. This is a trip that will enrich your life and that you will likely look back on from your deathbed with a smile.
Forgive my effusiveness, but this is something special: a journey to an undiscovered region that is entirely safe and utterly sensational, and will directly and tangibly benefit some of the poorest people on Earth.
What’s more, it costs only a fraction of the price of a normal holiday and is suitable for everyone, from adventure nuts to honeymooners to families, large or small – even the most family-holiday-averse teenager will grudgingly admit delight.
The destination is Ethiopia – to be precise, the spectacular basalt escarpments of the Ethiopian highlands around Lalibela, one of the world’s richest cultural treasure chests, set in a mountain range along the Great Rift Valley where the Blue Nile rises.
The trip involves a series of gentle hikes through the hills, staying with local communities in clean, elegant traditional lodges.
The cost is €26 per night, and that includes your food and accommodation, your guide, your porters and your donkeys. It might not seem like much money to us, but to the local communities that receive almost two-thirds of it directly it’s the difference between thriving and bare survival. The need of the communities is all the more acute right now, as the country struggles with drought and the threat of serious famine.
Now that I’ve laid out my stall, let me backtrack a little to a man called Mark Chapman, who visited Lalibela a decade ago and saw the potential as a prime tourist destination of this Elysian landscape of rolling hills, endless canyons, lush valleys and soaring volcanic peaks. As there were no tarred roads or any other type of infrastructure in the area, he knew that the usual rich white investors from South Africa or Europe could not be enticed in, and this provided an ideal opportunity to develop a network of community tourism sites in which the communities themselves could benefit in a tangible way, rather than be subject to the half-hearted, bungling attempts that are often the case.
He hiked out to what he considered the most beautiful spot in the region, a fertile meadow at the edge of a plummeting black basalt escarpment, and explained to locals that if they built a few tukuls – traditional circular homes with huge conical thatched roofs – he would bring tourists to them and give the community 60 per cent of what the tourists paid. The remainder, he told them, would be distributed to other local groups and used for promotional work and support offices.
They were initially sceptical, wondering where the catch was, but they grudgingly agreed, and in 2003 the first lodges were built on the edge of a precipice at Mequat Mariam, overlooking a tawny-coloured stretch of undulating paradise.
The first tourists arrived – and were blown away by the mountains and the hospitality and the opportunity to get so close to a culture as ancient and intriguing as this. It's hard not to be. Their isolation in the highlands has preserved traditional life to a remarkable extent. It's like Dervla Murphy wrote way back in 1968 in In Ethiopia with a Mule: "Travelling in Ethiopia gives one the Orlando-like illusion of living through different centuries."
Getting so close to a culture while still enjoying near-western levels of comfort, food and organisation is exceptionally rare.
So what does the holiday entail? Where you start the trail depends on whether you are coming from Lalibela, in the east, or Bahir Dar, in the west. Either way, you and your guide get dropped at the trail head, where porters from the community are waiting with donkeys. You set off walking the first eight kilometres along a tree-lined path up towards the escarpment, through a pastoral landscape of grain fields, terraced vegetable plots and soaring stony upland meadows, with clusters of mud-and-thatch farms here and there. It’s a magical land of olive groves, shepherd boys and women scrubbing cloths at acacia-lined streams, of hidden Orthodox churches made from stone and wood, and of processions of garlanded priests with gold- tasselled parasols. Although the land looks arid it’s remarkably bountiful, and everywhere men are ploughing with oxen and wooden ploughs and winnowing with forks cut from branches.
Most people's reaction when they reach the first camp is one of awe. The majesty of the location is hard to convey – mountains running on to the ends of the earth and surging outcrops of hexagonal basalt columns rising beneath you, with just the smoke from cooking fires hinting at possible habitation. Above is a profusion of raptors – auger buzzards, falcons, vultures, black and white eagles – soaring on the thermals. You are served tea and a freshly baked snack as you take in the view. Then, while dinner is cooking, you head out to an over-hanging rock ledge for a sunset beer with gelada baboons scrambling along the cliff beneath you. Dinner is served around an open fire in one of the tukuls. As there is no electricity, one goes to sleep early.
The days continue more or less like this. One can trek for between one and six nights, the landscape and people becoming ever more alluring the deeper one goes. Each trek between the camps is beautiful for its own reason; perhaps the most spectacular and challenging of all is the walk into the remote highland sanctuary of Abuna Yoseph. This new route leads up through a forest of giant heather to a community-run camp at 3,500m and onwards, the next day, over a highland plateau farmed by resilient mountain people to a 4,300m peak in an Afro-Alpine ecosystem of giant lobelias – huge cabbage-like trees – and rare Ethiopian wolves.
It’s hard to overstate the sheer other-worldliness of the Ethiopian highlands. The mountain light heightens colour, so that the hand-dyed, hand-woven skirts and jumpers of the women and the scarves of the men seem to dance with colour. Everything is more vivid: the lime-green patches of sugar peas at the valley bottoms, the umber-walled cottages and the biscuit-coloured tonsured threshing circuits of the wheat fields.
The highlight for me was being invited into people’s homes, ushered into tall, airy circular mud-and-thatch buildings and offered a cup of milk or fermented barley beer and a break from the sun. Chickens and goats are shooed aside as you are offered a perch by the fire and a handful of freshly toasted grain kernels. There is something indescribably rejuvenating about spending time in such areas, where light is provided by candle or oil lamp and water is fetched from a well, where Christianity is still practised much as it was when it first arrived here, straight from Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago.
The highland terrain has helped shelter this part of Ethiopia from foreign influence, and as a result it is now one of the best-preserved and most culturally distinct regions left on the planet. The fact that one can experience it directly while benefiting the local communities is genuinely exciting.
Chapman is aware that a true community-tourism project would have no European involvement, and he is busily working to extricate himself from the organisation, which is called Tourism in Ethiopia for Sustainable Future Alternatives, or Tesfa.
Already, the manager and all of the staff are Ethiopian. Chapman’s presence until now has helped attract vital funding from organisations such as the British embassy, Save the Children and, most importantly, Irish Aid, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ development arm. We, as taxpayers, have played a pivotal part in helping to develop this organisation, and now as tourists we can reap the benefits.
As the people here have never been colonised, and have a heritage far older and richer than ours, they possess a sensibility that is almost aristocratic and ensures there is none of the awkwardness one occasionally feels in community encounters, no sense of having to smile through difficult situations. Nor is there any hint of artifice in the relationship between the tourists and the communities. If they sing for you it is only because they are in the mood for singing; the food they cook for you at dinner is local fare adapted to western tastes, while at lunch you eat genuine highland food. You get to experience life as they live it, albeit with a comfortable bed in a beautiful tukul to sleep in at night and camp showers overlooking the mountains.
It is a rare pleasure to holiday in a developing country where there is no sense of exploiting the less well-off. The local communities involved in this project are thriving. They will show you the grain stores and wheat mills that they have been able to pay for through the scheme. It means that their food supply is guaranteed even during the lean times. There is no sense of charity to this project; the locals work for the money, then co-operatively decide what the community should do with it.
Tesfa recognises that it takes relatively few tourist nights for the communities to earn significant income, and as a result they are constantly extending their network of camps, so that the income gets spread over as wide an area as possible and no community is inundated with tourists.
In an ideal world this would be the model for all community tourism, but whether it would really work in an area less isolated and economically disadvantage is uncertain.
Either way, we ought to celebrate the fact that it exists at all and try to support it. On top of the €26 per day, the flight from Ireland to Lalibela, via Addis Ababa, will cost €550 from London on Ethiopian Airlines, and while you’re there you ought to include a few extra days in Lalibela. This former capital of Ethiopia contains some of Christianity’s most important sites, including a series of 13th-century churches carved out of rock, some cut straight into cliff faces, others excavated from the base rock.
So does it sound like something special or have I over-egged the pudding? The only fact that I can’t vouch for is whether you will actually look back on it from your deathbed with a smile – but I’d be interested to know.
** Tesfa is at 00-251- 11-1225024 and community- tourism-ethiopia.com
** This article was supported by Irish Aid’s Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund
Go there
Ethiopian Airlines (ethiopianairlines.com; contact Premier, its Irish agent, on 01-6633933 or ethiopian@premair.ie) flies to Addis Ababa from London Heathrow. Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) flies to Heathrow from Dublin, Cork, Shannon and Belfast. BMI (flybmi.com) flies from Dublin and Belfast.
Where to stay
If you supplement this holiday with a stay in Lalibela, you could try Jersusalem Guest House (00-251-33-3360047, lastajerusalem@ethionet.et), at about €30 a night; Tukul Village (00-251-33-3360564, messay_2005@yahoo.com), also at about €30 a night; Alief Paradise (00-251-33-3360023, alparahotel@yahoo.com), at about €15; or Lalibela Hotel (00-251-33-3360036), at about €10. Tesfa can help you book.