The Ethiopian Highlands: The Roof of Africa That Most Travelers Have Never Considered

Ethiopia sits on a plateau roughly 8,200 feet above sea level. This is not a detail that shows up much in the standard narrative about Africa, which tends to focus on savanna, desert, and coast. However, the Ethiopian Highlands cover about half the country. They contain some of the most dramatic mountain scenery on the continent. The highlands also shelter an ancient civilization with a written history going back 2,000 years. There is a church tradition predating most of Europe’s. The highlands have rock-hewn architecture that has no real parallel anywhere on Earth.

The Simien Mountains

The Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most spectacular highland landscapes in Africa. The highest peak, Ras Dashen, reaches 14,872 feet above sea level. The landscape features vast plateaus ending abruptly in sheer escarpments that drop thousands of feet into valleys below. In addition, the towering spires, jagged peaks, precipitous cliffs, and huge gorges that thunder with cascading water have all been shaped by ancient volcanic eruptions. These features have also been carved by decades of natural erosion.

The wildlife is part of the draw. The Simiens are home to the gelada monkey, a ground-dwelling primate that lives in large social groups and exists nowhere else on Earth. Over 20 large mammal species and over 130 bird species reside in the park, including the Ethiopian wolf and the walia ibex, a wild goat found nowhere else in the world. Spotting an Ethiopian wolf in the high-altitude grasslands is not guaranteed. However, the geladas are effectively certain. They graze in herds of dozens to hundreds and pay almost no attention to humans walking among them.

The main trekking route runs three to six days depending on how much altitude you want to cover. Nights at high camps drop below freezing. The lodges and campsites are basic but functional. The guides and scouts, local farmers hired through the national park system, tend to be excellent.

Lalibela

Lalibela is the reason most people who visit Ethiopia’s north list it as a genuinely transformative travel experience.

In the 12th century, a Christian king named Lalibela constructed a complex of churches in the mountains of northern Ethiopia. Nothing quite prepares you for the overwhelming experience of seeing Lalibela’s extraordinary rock-hewn churches for the first time. The builders did not construct them upward from the ground. Instead, they carved them downward into the solid red volcanic rock, so the roofs sit at ground level and the churches descend into excavated courtyards. As a result, the roofs are at ground level as the churches were dug/carved out from the top down. The churches are connected by a maze of tunnels.

Eleven churches survive, each carved from a single piece of rock. The most famous, Bet Giyorgis, the Church of Saint George, sits in a deep pit with its cruciform roof perfectly flush with the surrounding earth. The church is still in daily religious use. While visiting, you see white-robed priests clutch precious icons or pore over religious texts, and worshippers kiss the ancient rock walls and pray silently in the cool courtyards.

Lalibela is a working religious town, not a museum. The experience of visiting during services, when pilgrims fill the courtyards and priests chant in the ancient Ge’ez liturgical language, sits in a different category from most historical tourism.

The Danakil Depression

About as far from the mountains as it is possible to get while remaining in the same country, the Danakil Depression in the Afar region is one of the lowest, hottest, and most geologically active places on Earth.

The Danakil is famed as the hottest inhabited place on the planet, a landscape of volcanoes, lava lakes, and brightly colored acidic hot springs that create a fantastic, alien environment. At Dallol, the Earth’s lowest land volcano, hot springs produce a kaleidoscope of neon colors across the crater floor as superheated water pushes sulfur and minerals to the surface. The colors are extraordinary: electric yellow, vivid orange, turquoise blue. The vibrant reds, yellows, greens and blues that characterize Dallol are formed as water is heated by underlying magma and pushed up through the volcanic rock.

Erta Ale, an active volcano to the south of Dallol, contains one of the world’s oldest continuously active lava lakes. Erta Ale has maintained its lava lake since the early years of the twentieth century. Reaching the crater requires a night hike of about three hours across cooled lava fields. You arrive in darkness, approach the rim, and look down at glowing, churning, boiling rock a few hundred feet below. This is not metaphorically a view into the Earth’s interior. It is literally that.

The Danakil tour adds two to three days to the northern circuit and requires specific logistics: accommodation in the Danakil Depression is exclusively camping due to the lack of hotels. The heat in the depression regularly reaches 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. Most tours depart from the city of Mekele in the late afternoon and travel through the night to reach the cooler temperatures of dawn at the volcano.

The Historic North Circuit

Most travelers combine these destinations into what tour operators call the Historic North Circuit, a roughly ten to fourteen day itinerary that includes Addis Ababa, the city of Gondar with its 17th-century royal castles, the Simien Mountains, Lalibela, and optionally the Danakil. Domestic flights connect the main stops, because driving the entire route would add several additional days.

The circuit also includes Axum, the ancient capital of the Aksumite Empire, which at its peak in the 4th century CE was one of the four great powers of the ancient world alongside Rome, Persia, and China. Axum’s towering carved obelisks, or stelae, mark royal tombs and remain among the more impressive monumental structures in sub-Saharan Africa. The largest standing stele reaches 79 feet. A taller one, stolen by Mussolini in 1937, was returned by Italy and re-erected in 2008.