"Watercolours Diary 2" a Ethiopia Travel Page by SirRichard

This is a detail of the painted ceiling of the Debre Berhan Selassie church in Gonder. All the church is painted inside with many varied biblical stories, but the ceiling angels are specially famous and original. I sat at a bench inside the church and kept painting the angels until the priest told me it was his lunchtime and had to close. But as so far I had a complete angel painted and they follow a pattern (though slightly different as they are handpainted) I could complete it back at the hotel...

Travelling by bus in Ethiopia you'll come accross many incidents like this. This time a truck got stucked in the mud at a mountain track (near the Simien Mountains. All the passengers of the bus had to go down on the mud, take big stones from the hill, put the under the wheels of the truck, push and then help the bus pass that part of the road pulling with a rope. About 1 hour delay at the end, but a nice experiece to remember!

Aksum funerary stelae remind you to egyptian monolites, as they are made of a single granite stone and some of them are finely carved. The tallest standinfg in Aksum is 24 meters high, though there is one (fallen) which was 35 meters.
They were standing on top of royal tombs as a sign of power.

Yeha, near Adigrat, is one of the most remote and mysterious ruins in Ethiopia. A huge building of enormous pieces of stone, windowless, with only 1 entrance, said to be 52 metres high, standing alone on a hill and dating from before the first empires here in Ethiopia is certainly something enigmatic.
Tigray women wear most of them the classical hairstyle as shown in the pic.

Near the Eritrean border, in the north, close to Adigrat stands the isolated monastery of Debre Damo, on top of a beautiful rock. You can go either walking from the road junction (11 kms walking, 2 and a half hours) or hiring a private car trip in Aksum. I did the first, which means a hard climbing under the sun. AND when you think you are already there, you have to climb 20-30 metres with a rope to the very top. A priest helps you from the top but anyway is hard...

If you choose the walking option, you should take a guide in Aksum, as the road is not signposted. You have to take the Adwa-Adigrat bus and get down at a certain junction (ask the driver). But if you go walking, you will have to spend the night there. There is no hotel on the top, just the monks' houses in the monastery, so you'll have to share one of the houses. I did, and it was a nice experience, that place is so silent and isolated. You can go walking to the rock's edge and sit there to contemplate the landscape (Eritrea in the background) as many monks do.

In the Tigray region (from Sinkata to Wukro) in the north, there are many rock-hewn churches, not as impressive as those in lalibela, but still interesting. They have different shapes, some are standing, some are carved in the rock, some half-half... most of them have wall paintings, and most are hard to reach, you have to walk more than 1 hour and climb a few rocks to get into. The only reasonable way to see them all is renting a private car 4x4 in Mekele or Aksum, though is expensive.
A few of them may be visited by public bus (stopping on the road from Sinkata to Wukro) and walking a little bit.

Abraha Atsbeha is one of those. If you take a minibus in Wukro you can be there in 1 hour and is easily accesible by steps. It houses some beautiful paintings inside.

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