Guest post by Cheryl Williams

I got to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, the night before Steph. Steph was coming from Kenya. When she arrived at the airport I was there with the hotel transport to pick her up. I would like to think she was super excited to see me after being away so many months, but I’m pretty sure more of the wide smile on her face can be attributed to the sunshine and warm, dry air around her after so much time in the rainy season.

The next morning we headed straight back to the airport to catch a flight to Lalibela. Lalibela is known for its centuries-old churches that are carved right into the mountain side. We expected to find it interesting and beautiful and were more than wowed by the entire landscape. The whole town is set on a hill, so we got our steps in as our guest house was near the bottom of the town. Everywhere we looked had awesome views. Within about 30 minutes of arriving we’d already picked out a great spot for a sunset beer and a few games of crib.

The first full day in Lalibela we figured was the time to go see the 11 churches in the middle of the town. We negotiated a decent rate for a guide (and by we, I mean Steph) and he took us around the churches. One of the most remarkable things about these churches is how actively they are used by locals and pilgrims. In this part of the country most people follow a Ethiopian Orthodox religion. They often wear white scarves and it just looks so pretty. We had got an early start and got to witness hundreds of folks praying before we started our tour. With the early start we also got to be the only tourists in basically every church we went to explore. It is an amazing place to explore and we definitely enjoyed ourselves. 

The next day we wanted to do a bit of a hike. We had heard there was a monastery with a great view up on a mountainside that would take just a few hours to get to. We had no shortage of locals offering to be our guide, but we politely refused all of them (a common theme in days to come), except a kid who was about 12 years old who kind of attached himself to us. Turned out to be helpful and kind, and I think was just looking for someone to practice english with. Anyway, the hike was gorgeous as it went through local farms and provided more and more beautiful views with each step. Once we got about 600m from the monastery we came to the ticket booth (a guy sitting on the sidewalk with an old receipt book). He told us the price to enter the monastery was an outrageous $10 each! (with the local price of a cup of coffee at $0.50, a beer at $1, and a very big lunch at $2.50, you can imagine that $10 seemed very steep!) I should mention that the monastery itself was apparently nothing too special – people mostly just come for the views. Anyway, Steph heard the price and we turned straight back around. As we started to walk away the price may have changed, but by then we weren’t interested any more. To be honest, we couldn’t imagine the views being that much nicer 600m away from where we currently were. And we knew we had many more churches in our future.

We took some of our savings and put it towards a tuk-tuk ride to special sunset spot that night where the views were remarkable!

The town of Lalibela and its surroundings were a great place to start our adventures in Ethiopia. It took me a while to get used to the constant attention from the kids, want-to-be guides and everyone else who wanted to talk to us but you could really see that the people were interested in welcoming tourists to see their remarkable town.