Ethiopia: Simien Mountains

🏔️ Road Trip to the Simien Mountains

We’d set off from Gondar with the Simien Mountains as our destination — roughly 90 minutes up the road, or so we’d been told. Now, for those of you who’ve not heard of them, the Simiens are no ordinary hills. This range stretches for approximately 400 kilometres, forming a dramatic backbone across the Ethiopian Highlands — a region so lofty it’s been dubbed the “Roof of Africa,” and you can see why when you’re standing in the middle of it all. The landscape is something else entirely: jagged peaks, valleys that look like they’ve been carved out with a giant’s chisel, and cliffs that shoot straight up from the plains below. The crown jewel is Ras Dashen, which tops out at 4,550 metres (that’s 14,928 feet for those of you still working in old money), making it the fourth-highest peak on the entire African continent. It’s a wild, formidable place, and UNESCO clearly agreed — they slapped a World Heritage Site designation on it back in 1978, which was well deserved.

The mountains aren’t just a pretty backdrop, mind you. The Simiens are home to some genuinely remarkable creatures that you won’t find anywhere else on earth. The gelada baboon is probably the most famous — a stocky, charismatic primate with a vivid patch of red skin on its chest, which the locals apparently call the “bleeding heart monkey.” They’re all over the highland meadows and rocky outcrops, and they’re quite unbothered by humans, which is brilliant. Then there’s the Ethiopian wolf — a rare, rust-coloured animal that’s critically endangered and found only up in these highlands. We also kept an eye out for the Walia ibex, a wild mountain goat that treats sheer cliff faces as if they were a gentle stroll along the Thames, and the lammergeier, a truly magnificent vulture with a wingspan that’d make your eyes water, often spotted wheeling lazily over the gorges below.

🚗 Getting There — Armed Escorts and All

As we travelled north from Gondar, we passed through a patchwork of cultivated fields — teff, barley, and all manner of crops — with farmers and their families already out moving their livestock to pasture for the day. It was a lovely, unhurried scene.

What was rather less serene, though, was the conspicuous presence of heavily armed military units — both at the roadside and in trucks rumbling along with us. Ethiopia, let’s be honest, is still a country with its tensions. Just the previous year, militants in the Amhara region — precisely where we were — had clashed violently with the government after attempts were made to disarm local rebel forces. It didn’t go down well, as you might imagine. Things appeared more settled by the time of our visit, at least in the towns, but the guns were a reminder that the calm was a relatively recent development. Having spent time living in the US and travelling across Africa, we’re no strangers to seeing military and police openly armed — it’s even common to see farmers with rifles out here. Both the UK and US foreign offices had issued “Do Not Travel” notices for Ethiopia at the time — which, after doing our own research, we chose to politely ignore. I’m very glad we did.

The further we pushed along the route, the more the landscape started showing off. The road climbed steadily, and even deep into the mountains, there were farms clinging to improbable hillsides. The people up here are predominantly Amhara — one of Ethiopia’s major ethnic groups — and they’ve been working this land for centuries, herding livestock and farming in ways that haven’t changed a great deal.

🥾 Into the Park — Cliffs, Wildlife and a Very Armed Ranger

We made a stop in a small town to pay the national park entrance fee and collect our guide — plus the Park Ranger who’d be joining us. The Ranger was a slight, wiry fellow of advanced years who looked, if I’m honest, not entirely unlike Gollum on a particularly tired day. Charming chap, though. We made one more stop so he could collect his rifle — and I think we can safely rule out that this was for protection against the local fauna, given there’s nothing particularly ferocious roaming the Simiens. No, this was very much a precaution against dangers of the two-legged variety.

After another 30 minutes or so driving deeper into the park, we pulled over and got out to stretch our legs. The trail wound through open brushland — grasses, shrubs, and all manner of interesting plants — and our guide was terrific at explaining them as we went. Some were medicinal, some poisonous, and others — like the acacia and the thistles — were very much in the “give these a wide berth” category.

Eventually the trail brought us to the edge of a cliff. And when I say cliff, I mean a proper, stomach-lurching drop of several hundred metres straight down into the valley below. The view was genuinely breathtaking. Stretching out before us were mountains, deep gorges, rocky plateaus, and extraordinary stone pinnacles jutting up like nature’s own skyscrapers. We were, frankly, blown away.

Far below us, barely visible, we could make out a small village tucked into the valley floor, surrounded by impossibly green fields. Our Ranger explained — through translation — that there are no roads in or out. If you need anything from the outside world, you climb. Using ropes and long, rickety ladders in places, it takes two full days to get out. These are people living an entirely self-sufficient, subsistence existence, cut off from the modern world in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. It was humbling to stand there and take it in.

We eventually rejoined the road, the car picked us up, and we pressed on.