Tips, Itinerary, and Costs for Our Ethiopia Trip
One of the last trips we took before the world shut down for the pandemic in 2020 was our trip to Ethiopia.
A few tips I gathered from this trip follow.
- Many people prefer cash in big bills. You will make more money if you exchange your cash on the street with a reputable exchange person like someone in a tourist agency. USD seemed to be in high demand. A 100 dollar note would be preferred to five 20 dollar notes.
- Cash is king. I do not recall any place that took a credit card.
- At the airport in Lalibela, there are no taxis. Make sure you have a hotel reserved and they will send someone for you. Otherwise, you could possibly negotiate a ride to town with one of the drivers for about $35. The ride to town takes aobut 25 minutes on a very poorly maintained dirt road.
- A guide for Lalibela should cost about $35. This area is far larger than we had imagined and seeing it without a guide would have been very difficult. I think we would have gotten lost without a guide. I highly recommend a guide to walk you through the area.
- Entrance fee to Lalibela was $50. It is necessary to go to the ticket office first. We paid for our tickets in USD cash.
- We booked as much as we could online before we left. This included hotels, interior flights, and our tour to the Danakil Depression.
- Food can be sketchy. We packed our Mountain House meals to fill in when meals were not included with our hotel stays like breakfast.
- If you book your intercontinental tickets with Ethiopian Airlines, you should be able to book your internal flights as a resident and receive the discounted ticket price.
- When at the airports, keep your passport safe yet easily accessible. We needed to show ours to enter the airport grounds. Then again to enter the airport terminal. Then to pass security and another time before boarding the flight.
Below are the costs (approximately $3500 for two people=$1750 each) and the itinerary for our trip.
Feel free to ask any questions you may have.
~Bella