Nosy Be is Madagascar’s premier island destination, renowned for its white-sand beaches, fragrant ylang-ylang plantations, and vibrant marine life. Highlights include snorkelling in the Nosy Tanikely Marine Reserve, hiking up Mont Passot for breathtaking 360-degree sunset views (🎟️15,000...
The drive from Toamasina to Mahajanga via Antananarivo is roughly 920 km in total, and it took us two full days’ drive with an overnight in Antananarivo and Beamilaka. The scenery shifted dramatically: we started with a lush, humid coastal rainforest, climbed into the cool highlands...
The evening before the visit, we did our research and spent two hours finding a reliable local tour operator in Nyeri. After some negotiation, we agreed on a safari van for 120 USD for a day in Aberdare National Park (🎟️70 USD). It is a diverse highland park in Kenya known for its...
The road from Chiro to Harar offers a mixed landscape with some beautiful scenery, but it is also marked by rough, chaotic traffic in the smaller towns along the way. The tarmac was good, with a few short, damaged sections, so driving through the Ethiopian Highlands was not so bad, with...
Today we did a rough off-road drive in a hired Toyota (200 USD) around the Gacan Libaax mountain range at 1,720 meters above sea level. The name “Gacan Libaax” translates to “The lion’s paw”. It is known for its unique juniper forests and ancient rock art...
Later, we slowly drove on perfect tarmac through the Sheikh Mountains, a part of the Golis Mountains that form the rugged northern edge of the Somali plateau and run parallel to the Gulf of Aden. The mountains have a significant range in elevation, with the highest peak in Somaliland...
For centuries, the church was extremely remote, requiring a long and arduous journey on foot or by mule. We had no mule, so we took a car and drove through villages controlled by the Fano militia to reach the parking area, from which we still had to hike for 30 minutes up a steep path to...
In the morning, we paid a pretty adventurous entrance fee (🎟️ 100 USD / 15,000 ETB) to see the Lalibela rock churches. The complex was built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries under King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty to create a “New Jerusalem” in Ethiopia...
We took a short flight from Gondar to Lalibela due to the situation in the Amhara region, where the ethno-nationalist Amhara Fano militia controls the road between the two cities. Before it was known as Lalibela, the town was called Roha (or Warwar) and served as the capital of the Zagwe...
Emperor Fasilides established Gondar as the permanent capital of the Ethiopian Empire in 1636, and it served as Ethiopia’s capital until 1855, a period marked by the construction of magnificent castles and a flourishing culture, and ending with the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the...