Blogs from Lalibela, Amhara Region, Ethiopia, Africa - page 4

Lalibela - Underwear, Churches and Cool Priests Security Alert Today is a bad day for the women. We have to leave the hotel by 5a.m. to get the early flight to Lalibela. Everyone - even me(!) - makes it on time. Our bus is on time and we get to the airport on time! It's all good. At the airport, though, we have to go through bag scans and body scans twice. The second scanner seems to be set a bit too sensitively, though, as all the women set the scanners off because of the metal in their bras. Eventually, after the women have walked through the scanner several times and had other searches, we get through. The first conversation of the day is inevitably a detailed discussion about the design of bras and underwear in ... read more

The main tourist trail in Ethiopia, although not particularly well trodden, is the so called historical circuit, which consists of a loop to the north of Addis Ababa. Due to limitations in both time and enthusiasm for historical sites, we chose to carry out a truncated version of the circuit. Our first port-of-call was the town of Bahir Dar on the shores of Lake Tana. Here we organised a boat trip, taking in some of the many monasteries populating the islands of the lake. The monasteries were adorned with some impressive, centuries old paintings and the resident monks took great pride in showing us some equally old, beautifully decorated religious texts with pages made from goat skin parchment. Our next stop was Gonder, which has been dubbed the “African Camelot” and although the Ethiopian Tourist Board ... read more

The atmosphere in Lalibela was incredible, with the population of the sleepy village swelled by an estimated 20,000 pilgrims, who were visiting one of the major Christian sites in Ethiopia for Christmas. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I went for a walk to the market and ended up walking past the major church of Bet Maryam, where people were securing a sleeping space for the night. As darkness fell, I went back to the church for a few minutes to soak in the atmosphere - a sea of white-clothed pigrims. I asked one person how many people he thought were there. He paused for a moment, the replied "Oh, many thousands!" On Christmas day, I joined a group of four young British (three of them medical students) to visit the churches. Our guide was not ... read more

Lalibela is certainly the most famous and the most visited place in Ethiopia. There were at least 30 tourists in the town… It deserves to be that famous as it contains 11 absolutely amazing rock hewn churches within 10 minutes from each other. The churches were built on the order of King Lalibela which as the legend has it visited Jerusalem and on his return wanted to build a Jerusalem in Ethiopia. There is even a River Jordan ... carved out of solid rock! Allegedly all churches were built in the early 13th century within 23 years by the King himself with a little help from Angels. Whoever did and however long it took they did a great job. The churches are built into solid rock and in some cases that means 11m down. That together ... read more

From Bahir Dar where we are based we took a chartered van to Lalibela an arduous 10 plus hours of driving on bad roads, along the way we hit a hailstorm that lasted a good 10 minutes. We finally made it to town of Lalibela and checked in at the Green Olives hotel. We made a deal at reception since it is not peak time, 3 of us shared a room, me Craig and Sam. We talked to some people about hiring guides that will not over charge and Bod found one for the group. Dinner at the horel then off to bed after a few St.Georges. The next morning we strated our tour of the rock hewn churches, I should have listed all the names now can't remember them in sequence so just enjoy the ... read more