Ethiopia, Eritrea & Djibouti

Just a two-hour ferry ride from Djibouti City across the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea is the coastal fishing village of Obock. This was the old capital of Djibouti, when the French occupied…

After the remarkable landscape of Lac Abbe (see post), we figured we could not add much surprising to our Djibouti trip. Not so, due to the country’s remarkable highs (at the Foret du Day) and…

Djibouti City, the country’s capital, occupies a long peninsula with a history of split personalities. When the French made it their capital at the end of the 19th century (as French Somaliland), the town maintained…

Of the 80 or so tribes that live in the Ethiopian countryside, those in the far south - the Oromia region that overlaps Kenya – are both distant from the highlands capital and often remote…

With a surprising altitude range of 2500 to 4300 meters (8300 to 14000 feet) in the south of Ethiopia, the circular assemblage of Bale Mountains encompasses diverse ecologies and wildlife.  Along its sprawling lower valleys,…

The highlands of northern Ethiopia were the seat of empire in the Horn of Africa for nearly 3000 years, a crossroads for many cultures and far-flung trade routes. And the reputed home of the Ark…

The staple food of Ethiopia is a spongy, slightly sour or citrusy, flatbread called injera, a food dating back at least 6000 years. Tiny tef grains It’s made of the tiniest of grains, a superfood…

January’s cold nights and warm days at altitudes up to 4000 meters (13500 feet) characterized our trekking experience through these two spectacularly beautiful mountainous regions. Tigray The Tigray mountains in the north of Ethiopia offer…

Perhaps, we thought, as we caravanned for three days through the northern Afar region of Ethiopia, the intense religiosity of Coptic Christians here has been spurred by knowledge of the fiery, sulfurous features of the…