When Tony Blair was attending the recent Commission for Africa meeting in Addis Ababa, there was a rumour that his plane had been sent on a 1 600km round trip to Nairobi to pick up his dinner.
The story turned out to be a myth, but it suited the popular image of Ethiopia as a country continually beset by drought and famine. However, Live Aid and those horrific newsreel images were 20 years ago, and any traveller who has been there in the past few years will tell you that it is an undiscovered jewel.
Most visitors come for the historic route, which includes Bahar Dar, Gondar, Axum and Lalibela.
History and legend merge into one another in Ethiopia, nowhere more so than in Axum. History tells us that the Axumite trading empire was known to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Axumite coins have been found in places as far away as India.
Legend, on the other hand, says that Axum was the home of the Queen of Sheba, who travelled to Jerusalem and was seduced by King Solomon. She returned to Axum where she bore a son, Menelik, who later travelled back to Jerusalem to meet his father. When he left, he stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple and took it back to his birthplace. It is said to reside in the Church of St Mary of Zion to this day, locked away in the Holy of Holies, which only deacons are allowed to enter.
Fact or fiction? You try convincing an Ethiopian that the story isn’t true. But no one can argue with the evidence of their own eyes, and Axum’s tall, monolithic stelae, or grave markers, stand testimony to a once great empire.
Gondar, to the south, was the capital of Ethiopia dating from the 17th century. Known as Africa’s Camelot, five impressive castles stand in a royal walled enclosure. Fasilidas’s palace is the oldest and most imposing, mixing Indian, Portuguese, Moorish and Axumite architectural influences.
Bahar Dar is the closest that Ethiopia has to a garden city with its wide boulevards flanked by rows of palm trees. It sits on the edge of Lake Tana, which, as well as being the source of the Blue Nile, is also home to 26 islands with 36 monasteries, which can be explored by boat.
The monasteries don’t appear to have been touched in hundreds of years and the murals that adorn some of the interiors are breathtakingly colourful.
Bahar Dar is also the jumping off point for the Blue Nile falls, the second highest waterfall in Africa. Try to see them in the morning when the sunlight creates rainbows in the mist: when I visited, three of us had the entire spectacle to ourselves.
For most people, the highlight of the historic route is the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela. Designated as a world heritage site, they are unofficially the eighth wonder of the world. The 11 churches, each different in design, were carved from the living rock during the reign of King Lalibela during the 13th century.
Legend again tells us that when the workers rested, angels continued the work at night. Up to 9m high, the deep holes that have been gouged out of the cliff faces are linked by a network of trenches. Imagine a religious version of Petra in a mountainous setting as remote as Machu Picchu.
You are likely to share the site with monks and pilgrims, dressed in their traditional white cotton shawls, or gabis, leaning on prayer sticks in quiet contemplation or reading from an illuminated goat-skin Bible hundreds of years old.
Lalibela only comes alive during religious festivals when thousands of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians flock to the churches. It may be an architectural wonder to the rest of the world, but for them it remains a spiritual headquarters.
The Victorian explorer Richard Burton was the first European to enter Harar, which is the fourth holiest city in the Muslim world. He did so in disguise, and had he been discovered he would have been executed on the spot.
Today, Harar is a far friendlier place. It is a completely walled city, which you enter by one of the large wooden gates, and is known for its markets, traditional round two-storey houses, and intricate and colourful basketware. Every evening, you can see the hyena man feeding these ugly looking animals outside the city walls.
Although Ethiopia can’t compete with Kenya and Tanzania when it comes to big game, it boasts many national parks that are among the most beautiful in East Africa. These include the Simien mountains, another world heritage site and a trekker’s paradise with stunning vistas; the Bale Mountains National Park; and the Nechisar National Park, or White Sands National Park, which gets its name from the colour the midday sun turns the savannah plains. They are all different but have something in common that anyone who has been herded around in a convoy of buses on a Kenya or Tanzania safari will appreciate — chances are you won’t see another soul.
But for real solitude, head south to the Omo valley, home to the least-visited peoples on the African continent, including the lip-plate-wearing Mursi people, and the animist Konso and the Hamer, whose way of life has not changed for centuries.
Wherever you go in Ethiopia, there’s little chance of avoiding Addis Ababa. And why should you? Addis is one of Africa’s most surprising and cosmopolitan capital cities.
Highlights include the National Museum where you can see Lucy, the oldest, most complete skeleton of a hominid — providing a link between man and ape — ever found. She was discovered near Hader in north-east Ethiopia and named after the Beatles’ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, which was popular at the time.
The Institute of Ethiopian Studies, housed in a former palace of Haile Selassie, is an ethnographic museum that brings the art and culture of many of the peoples of Ethiopia together under one roof.
And the absolute must-see attraction is the guided tour of Mercato, reputedly the largest open-air market in Africa. On Saturdays it seems as if the whole country has descended on it, and everything imaginable is for sale.
Because Addis Ababa is the diplomatic capital of Africa, a number of top-quality restaurants have sprung up to serve the needs of the visiting diplomats and politicians. You will be faced with a choice of Chinese, Indian, Thai, Korean, French, Italian, Armenian and even American-style burger bars, not to mention traditional Ethiopian restaurants where the hot spicy main dishes, called wat, are served on top of injerra, a traditional pancake that is served with everything.
Addis also boasts the Sheraton Addis, which has been voted the most luxurious hotel in Africa for the past four years, and wouldn’t look out of place on the Las Vegas strip. But then that’s Ethiopia for you — it’s not at all what you’d expect. — Â