Day 1 – Addis Ababa

Addis Ababa

Addis Ababa is a city that announces Ethiopia’s contradictions and complexities immediately and without apology, ancient and modern, chaotic and considered, deeply traditional and restlessly forward-looking all at once.

After breakfast, the city tour begins at 09:00hrs with Trinity Cathedral, the resting place of Emperor Haile Selassie and a building of solemn grandeur that speaks volumes about the role of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopian national identity. St George Cathedral, built to commemorate the victory over Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, one of the most significant moments in African history, carries a different kind of weight entirely.

The National Museum rounds out the morning with a journey through Ethiopia’s archaeological story, from the fossilised remains of Lucy, one of our oldest known human ancestors, to the art and artefacts of successive civilisations. Addis sets the tone perfectly for everything that follows.

Evening at one of the many fine restaurants in Addis.

Day 2 – Gondar & Simien Mountains

Simien Mountains

Commercial flight: Addis – Gondar Depart: 08:10

Gondar is where Ethiopia’s imperial history crystallises into stone — and it is a place that stops you in your tracks. The Royal Enclosure, known as Fasil Ghebbi, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of remarkable ambition,a walled compound of castles, palaces, and ceremonial buildings constructed in the 17th and 18th centuries by a succession of emperors who chose this highland city as the seat of their power.

Fasilides Castle, the founding structure of the complex, is the most commanding; its crenellated towers and arched windows carry a strange echo of both African and European architectural sensibility, the result of Ethiopian, Portuguese, and Indian influences meeting in one extraordinary place.

Debre Berhan Silassie Church, with its famous ceiling covered entirely in painted angel faces gazing downward, is one of the most beautiful interiors in Africa a space that has moved visitors to tears for centuries and continues to do so.

After lunch, the 2-hour drive to Limalimo Lodge in the Simien Mountains passes through highland villages and terraced farmland that have looked much the same for generations.

Day 3 – Simien Mountains

Simien Mountains

The Simien Mountains are not merely a landscape; they are a place shaped by centuries of highland culture, where the escarpment villages and mountain communities have developed ways of living in extraordinary terrain that are as fascinating as the terrain itself.

Today’s full-day excursion into the national park moves through that landscape on foot and by vehicle, encountering the Gelada monkey troops that roam the clifftops alongside the shepherds and farmers who have shared this high ground with them for as long as anyone can remember.

There is something deeply humanising about watching a Gelada troop going about its morning in the shadow of a farmstead that has stood for five hundred years, a reminder that in Ethiopia, the human and natural worlds have always been intertwined.

A picnic lunch on the clifftops at Chenek, looking out across one of the most dramatic vistas on the continent, before returning to the lodge in the afternoon.

Evening around the fire at the lodge

Day 4 – Lalibela

Lalibela

Commercial flight: Gondar – Lalibela Depart: 10:30 Flight time: approximately 50 minutes.

If Gondar is where Ethiopia’s imperial ambition is written in stone, Lalibela is where its spiritual devotion was carved into the earth itself.

Built in the 11th century under the direction of King Lalibela, who is said to have been commanded by God to create a new Jerusalem in the highlands of Ethiopia these churches were not constructed upward but excavated downward, entire buildings freed from the living rock by hand, connected by tunnels and trenches and ceremonial passageways that create a sacred landscape unlike anything else on earth.

After settling into Mazena Lodge for lunch, the afternoon begins with the first of three church clusters. White-robed priests move between the churches carrying ornate processional crosses. Pilgrims who have walked for days to be here pray in doorways worn smooth by centuries of devoted hands. To walk through Lalibela is to understand that faith, in Ethiopia, is not an abstract concept but a physical, lived, architectural reality.

Evening at Mazena Lodge or one of the restaurants in town. Minivan used in Lalibela for all site visits.

Day 5 – Lalibela

Day 5 – Lalibela

An early breakfast before driving out to Yemrehana Cristos, a church that predates even the Lalibela complex, built inside a natural cave in the Aksumite architectural style, its walls decorated with ornate carved woodwork and its floor still holding the remains of pilgrims who travelled here to die in a holy place.

It is a profoundly atmospheric space, cool and dim and ancient in a way that is felt physically, and the hour spent inside it tends to reorient one’s sense of what old really means.

Return to Lalibela for lunch at Ben Abebe Restaurant before visiting the final church cluster in the afternoon. The day ends with a drive and a walk up to Ashetan Monastery, perched high above the valley on a clifftop that commands views across ridgeline after ridgeline of Ethiopian highland.

The sundowner stop here, watching the light drain from the valleys below, is the perfect close to two days in one of the most spiritually and architecturally significant places in the world.

Evening meal at Mazena Lodge or one of the restaurants in town. Minivan used in all site visits.

Day 6 – Gheralta

Gheralta

Commercial flight: Lalibela – Axum Depart: 11:00 Flight time: approximately 45 minutes.

Axum is where Ethiopian civilisation began, the seat of the Aksumite Empire, one of the great powers of the ancient world, a trading kingdom that reached its peak between the 1st and 7th centuries AD and left behind a legacy of extraordinary monumental architecture.

The stelae, towering obelisks of carved granite, some over 20 metres tall, decorated with false doors and windows that echo the multi-storey stone towers the Aksumites built as royal tombs, are among the most impressive ancient monuments in Africa.

Standing among them, the scale and ambition of the civilisation that created them becomes suddenly, viscerally real. Axum is also said to be the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, a claim that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains with absolute conviction, and that gives the city a sacred weight that even the most secular visitor tends to feel.

The 3-hour drive south to Korkor Lodge passes through ancient Tigray countryside before the Gheralta Mountains rise ahead, and the afternoon brings the first of the remarkable rock-hewn churches for which this region is famous.

Day 7 – Gheralta

Gheralta

The rock-hewn churches of the Gheralta are older than Lalibela, dating from the 4th and 5th centuries. They represent some of the earliest Christian architecture on earth, and they are still in use, still tended by priests who climb the same paths their predecessors have climbed for over a thousand years.

Maryam Korkor and Abuna Gebre-Michael are the two standout visits, each requiring a good uphill walk that passes through communities where daily life has changed remarkably little over the centuries. Inside the churches, ancient murals cover every surface, saints and angels and biblical narratives painted in the flat, vivid style of Ethiopian religious art that is instantly recognisable and completely unlike any other tradition.

These are not museums. They are living places of worship, and the experience of being welcomed into them is one of genuine privilege.

Day 8 – Bale Mountains

Bale Mountains

The shift from the ancient stone cities of the north to the high wilderness of the Bale Mountains is one of the great transitions of this journey, a reminder that Ethiopia is not one place but many.

The Webb Plateau tented camp at 3,450 metres sits in a landscape of austere, treeless beauty that the highland Oromo communities have grazed and inhabited for centuries, their relationship with this demanding environment shaped by generations of accumulated knowledge.

The camp itself is simple and excellent, overlooking a waterfall and pond, with Mountain Nyala and Ethiopian Wolves visible from the dining area. The highlands of Bale have their own quiet cultural story, and the local guides and interpreters who accompany the journey here carry that knowledge generously.

The tents are A-frame with en suite bathrooms. Hot water provided. Professional guide and 4×4 vehicles with local guide and interpreter.

Day 9 – Bale Mountains

Bale Mountains

A day in the Webb Valley exploring the high moorland on foot and by vehicle, spending time with the Ethiopian Wolf in its natural habitat, and absorbing a landscape that feels genuinely remote and genuinely wild.

The Oromo communities of the Bale highlands have coexisted with these mountains and their wildlife for generations, and the local guides who work here carry a depth of knowledge about both the natural and human history of the plateau that enriches every hour spent in the field.

The walking is easy underfoot, and the pace is unhurried this is a day for looking closely, moving slowly, and letting the high altitude silence of the Bale do what it does to everyone who spends time here

Day 10 – Bale Mountains

Bale Mountains

The morning in the Gaysay Grasslands offers a gentler, more open landscape great herds of Mountain Nyala and Reedbuck, warthog, baboon, and the possibility of a market day visit in Dinsho, where the weekly gathering of highland Oromo farmers and traders is a vivid window into the rhythms of rural Ethiopian life.

The colour and character of an Ethiopian highland market — the textiles, the livestock, the coffee, the conversation is the kind of cultural experience that no amount of museum visiting can replicate.

The optional drive across the Sanetti Plateau, Africa’s highest commercial road, much of it above 4,000 metres passes through a landscape of surreal, otherworldly beauty, the giant lobelia standing like ancient sentinels across the open moorland. It is a place that feels at the very edge of the habitable world, and all the more remarkable for the communities that have made it home.

Day 11 – Omo Valley

Omo Valley

The flight from the Bale highlands down to the Omo Valley covers not just geography but deep cultural distance from the highland Oromo world of the south to the remote tribal communities of the lower Omo, one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse river valleys on earth.

Arriving at Omo Camp in the evening, set beneath fig and mahogany trees on the banks of the river, the atmosphere is warm, lush, and immediately different from everything that has come before.

The Omo Valley has been inhabited by distinct tribal groups for thousands of years, the Hamar, the Mursi, the Kara, the Dassanech, among them each with their own language, their own traditions, their own relationship with the river and the land.

The next three days are an immersion in that human complexity that very few travellers anywhere in the world have the privilege of experiencing.

Day 12 – Omo Valley

Omo Valley

The early morning visit to a Hamar village is an introduction to one of the most distinctive cultures in the Omo Valley, a semi-nomadic agro-pastoral community known for its elaborate personal adornment, its ochre-styled hair, its beadwork and copper jewellery, and its ceremonial traditions that mark the major transitions of life with rituals of extraordinary intensity.

The access here is intimate and respectful — this is not a performance but a genuine encounter, facilitated by guides with deep relationships in these communities.

The 3-hour boat cruise up the Omo River connects the human story with the landscape that has always sustained it, the river that gives the valley its name, its fertility, and its identity.

The day ends at a fly camp on the riverbank in Mago National Park, where Mursi villagers arrive in the evening.

The Mursi, known for the lip plates worn by their women as a mark of beauty and cultural identity, are among the most photographed and least understood people in Ethiopia, and spending time with them in this setting, around a fire on the banks of the river that defines their world, is a profoundly humanising experience.

Day 13 – Omo Valley

Omo Valley

The Kara are the smallest of the Omo Valley tribal groups, numbering only a few thousand and among the most compelling.

Living in villages perched on the banks of the Omo, they are renowned for their tradition of elaborate body painting, applying white chalk, charcoal, and ochre in patterns of remarkable intricacy that mark ceremony, status, and identity.

The afternoon spent in their company is unhurried and genuine time to sit, to talk through guides and interpreters, to understand something of how a community this small and this distinct has maintained its identity and its traditions in a world that has tried in many ways to erode both.

The evening dance in the Kara village of Dus, rhythmic, joyful, and deeply communal, takes place as the sun sets over the Omo River in a wash of warm light. It is the kind of farewell that a journey like this deserves.

Day 14 – Addis-Ababa

 Addis-Ababa

On reaching Addis, transfer back to your hotel to prepare for your departure flight or take one last opportunity to explore the city that started it all.

The Merkato, one of the largest open-air markets in Africa, is a sensory experience of colour, noise, and commerce that reflects the full diversity of Ethiopian society in a single chaotic, wonderful place.

The coffee ceremony, Ethiopia’s great social ritual, the country that gave the world coffee, conducting it with a formality and hospitality that feels like a gift, is the ideal final note.

Transfer to the airport for all outbound flights

Accommodation on This Tour

Accommodation overview: Where you will be staying on this tour.

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