Ethiopia: 12-Day Epic Simien, Lalibela & Danakil Journey

This trip allowed me to see a big part of Ethiopians beauties. Both in a cultural as natural way. Simiens mountains and Danakil were amazing unique places of the world. While Lalibela and Tigray churches were beautiful and breathtaking. There were some hiccups in the logistics sometimes, and ETT should improve their attention to some details. But overall it was a great adventure with extremely good guides and good hearted staff.

Let me start by saying this tour was a great experience for myself and my partner. The tour was an incredible experience with a great range of activities and locations. I want to thank you and all the staff at Ethio Travel and Tours who helped make our trip so much fun and interesting. The whole trip was fabulous, but the highlights for me were seeing the Danakil Depression.

We travelled in Ethiopia on tour arranged and coordinated by the Ethio Travel and Tours. At every stage of the trip we had local guides, Omo valley three days we paid a fee to the tribal villages we visited and we paid to visit a number of natural parks so I believe money from our visit was spread widely. Internal flights are reliable as the vast distances and state of the roads made this the only way to visit. Overall, an excellent, well organised, trip which I would definitely go on again. Many tour companies offer similar trips – we chose to go with ETT, which is the largest, with tours leaving every day.

My wife and I booked a custom tour of Ethiopia through ETT Travel. Our handler Simoneh organized the entire trip for us according to the places we wanted to experience. He was a very good communicator both during the planning stage and the trip. The itinerary was challenging considering part of the area we wanted to visit recently was a war zone. In spite of this everything went extremely well and we were very satisfied with our adventurous experience in Ethiopia. We can also assert that we felt safe and secure at every step of our trip. Upon arrival in Addis ETT set up a bonus city tour for the day with driver and guide. We were able to visit all the main attractions that we had heard about and wanted to see. Our tour began the next day. We flew to the Affar region in the early morning and were met at the airport there by our driver and cook. In a caravan consisting of three SUVs we proceeded to drive through the barren landscape to the end destination for a night under the stars. A very nice police officer rode with us as this is mandatory in Affar. The next day we went to experience sunrise over the salt lakes, where you literally "walk on water". In fact, we drove on the lake that was covered with salt strong enough to take the weight of all the three SUVs. Next we visited the Danakil Depression to see the amazing bubbling and colorful formations formed by the hot sulfur springs. The remainder of the day was spent driving to the Erta Ale volcano. We made the easy trek to the crater twice: Once for sunset and once for sunrise. The next part of the trip was in the Tigray region. The first day was spent driving from Affar to Tigray. On the second day my wife climbed a mountain to visit an ancient Orthodox Church hewn into the rock at the top. I chose instead to attended a coffee ceremony at ground level. Simoneh had found out from the guide that I was interested in Axum, and to my delight he had managed to arrange a visit to this town as well on our last day in Tigray. From Tigray we flew to Lalibela for the Orthodox Christmas. During our two day stay we visited the 10 famous churches, and took part in the overnight Christmas ritual. This was an unforgettable experience. The last part of our journey was the Omo valley. During our four-day stay we visited 8 of the 16 tribes. This part of Ethiopia is something very special, offering a cultural experience that should not be missed. Thanks to our wonderful guides and the hospitality and friendliness of the people of Ethiopia we had a most interesting and rewarding vacation.

Our trip to Ethiopia was absolutely great! Aklilu was a terrific guide and perfect for our group. His knowledge, ability to communicate, guide. The itinerary worked well, with some adjustments which we suggested.

Absolutely! Meseret was amazing and helped me build my personalized itinerary from scratch with all the activities that I was most interested in. We worked together through the “What’s App” app. She was very responsive and readily available, energetic and supportive.

I know that the holiday was quite complex, but all went pretty much to plan. It was an excellent trip and very memorable. I would like to thank you personally for your patient and attentive support both before and during the holiday. I have made lifelong friends and created lifelong memories which will be hard to match. Thank you to the ETT Team for creating the space to have so much fun.

A heartfelt thank you to ETT and our guide for coordinating our recent trip to Ethiopia. Our expectations were extremely high as we began our journey, surprisingly our driver and hotels experience fits our expectations. You are in for a great time traveling with Ethio Travel and Tours.

ETT and there staff carefully planned a trip for us, after talking with us and testing out some suggestions to see if they were what we had in mind. We made a few revisions to the plan, and then, having completed an itinerary, at the last minute we had to indefinitely postpone the trip. They were gracious about it, and patiently waited for us. After months, we revived the itinerary, but of course that necessitated a few more revisions. They carefully refined the details and we put the trip on the calendar. It was just what we had in mind. We were very glad to have hired them to guide us to the right places, and to make all the arrangements. We were especially glad to have them available when we wanted to make one or two more changes, in the middle of the trip. But the real benefit to us came near the end of the trip. We had arrived in Ethiopia unconcerned about the epidemic in Asia. But while we were there it had become a pandemic that had reached into Ethiopia. Travel bans upended our itinerary. In the middle of the night our travel planner (Maria) responded to our anxious call and helped us to make arrangements to leave the country within hours. She was committed to taking care of us and is an experienced professional.

We leave with wonderful memories! Thank you for leading us on paths less traveled so we could sample the essence of Ethiopia. We’ll treasure those moments always! Thank you ever so much! We really enjoyed it. The arrangements in the hotels were also very good, the breakfast they served also was very good. And the best hotel out of all the 7 hotels is the Atranos hotel in Axum