Africa & Middle East > Ethiopia > Addis Ababa > Addis Ababa > Articles > Ethiopia

In the grounds of St Mary of Zion’s church, Axum, our guide planted a kiss against the concrete walls of a squat building with a patched-up roof dome. But there were good reasons for Daniel’s unlikely reverence. ‘This is the place,’ he whispered. The structure, though it resembled a pretentious municipal toilet on the slide, supposedly housed the actual and original Ark of the Covenant, brought here from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of King Solomon and Axum’s very own Queen of Sheba.

In this part of the world, the ‘northern circuit’ usually refers to the famed wildlife itineraries of Tanzania’s Serengeti. But in terms of Orthodox tradition and culture, its Ethiopian namesake proves every inch its match. There’s a dizzying array of unique monuments and antiquities on show at the former capitals of Axum, Gonder and Lalibela. Add to this the island monasteries of Lake Tana, Ethiopia’s Mount Athos, and the country makes a strong case to be considered Africa’s outstanding cultural destination.

All of which has practical consequences, not least adapting to the calendar. You don’t so much adjust your watch in Ethiopia as reconstruct notions of time measurement from scratch. The Julian Calendar puts the country back seven years and eight months, making it 2000 at the time of writing. Perhaps of more immediate concern to visitors is the fact that the 24-hour clock runs from dawn instead of midnight, so you might not want to rely on the locals for vital wake-up calls. We were in an organized group, with a guide on European time, though I wondered how independent travellers generally coped with this oddball destination. I spoke to a well-travelled Belgian couple who ‘would not recommend it as a first destination for a backpacker. Public transport is very uncomfortable and finding the right bus is hard. The biggest problem we found visiting churches and villages were the fleas.’

Then there was the altitude. An aid worker I talked to in Addis Ababa, at 8,500 feet the world’s third highest capital, told me that he hadn’t slept for two weeks after his arrival. We soon came to appreciate that initial broken nights and headaches were a small price to pay for the balmy climate, warm during the day, brisk at night and the blissful lack of mosquitoes.

We flew north to Axum – the journey is a three-day endurance test by road – and were set down among landscapes so persuasively biblical that our bus and the receding airport seemed like strange intrusions from the future. The Axumite empire once ruled much of East Africa and even parts of Arabia - a thousand-odd years on and its capital had shrunk to a modest country town but hardly changed in the essentials, save the common sight of outdoor ping-pong tables. The roads thronged not with vehicles but with beasts of burden, donkeys, camels and the shockingly common sight of women bent beneath back-breaking loads of firewood and animal pats. Men stood in yellow chaff clouds, winnowing the local grain called tef. Four figures shouldered an elderly invalid on a wooden bier.

Axum’s carved granite stones, known as stelae, soared skywards in honour of the kings that commissioned them some fifteen hundred years ago. Others lay shattered on the ground, the largest measuring 33 metres and weighing 500 tons – the world’s biggest manmade monolith. It lay broken-backed upon a hillside, challenging me to explain how such outsize memorials had ever been raised to the vertical. Daniel was poker-faced. ‘We believe that the power of the Ark was employed,’ he said.

A long dirt road led through the province of Tigray, where neat stone-built villages interrupted the chickpea fields and stands of eucalypts, junipers and giant figs. A flock of superb starlings, their plumage iridescent, flashed like leaping fish as they took flight from an umbrella thorn. An Abyssian ground hornbill lumbered past like an outsize turkey. Tanks and trucks rusted by the roadside; Daniel figured that their drivers had used them to get home when the long war with Eritrea ended in 1991 and simply abandoned them when the fuel ran out to continue on foot. The road climbed towards the jagged peaks of the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia’s trekking heartlands and home of strange endemic creatures including the Gelada baboon and the Simien wolf.

At Gonder, Ethiopia’s 17th -19th century capital, Portuguese-inspired castles and frescoed churches conspired with Italianate villas to create an impressively eclectic collage. With its coffee bars with faded leather banquettes and espresso machines dating from the time of Mussolini, it was a good place to lounge in. But the repetitious European fare on offer at the operator-preferred government hotels, most commonly in the form of something dubiously called veal cutlet (various spellings), was getting us down. We headed for a recommended private pension to sample Ethiopia’s singular cuisine. We were shown into a round straw hut where a girl danced to a country lute while a meal appeared before us on low tables; little heaps of stews, lentil and chickpea purees, and curry puddles served on injera. This local pancake, which happens to look like underlay, doubles as tablecloth and cutlery (you eat off it and you also rip bits off as food scoops). We washed it down with tej, a rough honey mead and followed with coffee, roasted from the green beans before our eyes.

At Bahar Dar, we crossed Lake Tana to the remote island and peninsula monasteries of Ethiopia’s Mount Athos. Our modern skiff docked among papyrus tankwa boats with raised prows; pharaonic images which served to remind us the Blue Nile rises here to begin its great journey to Egypt. A woodland walk brought us to the church of Ura Kidhane Mihret. It was strikingly round in the Ethiopian fashion and decorated internally with a dazzling array of frescoes. The priests, bedecked in richly gilt green, purple and yellow robes but finished off with woollen Rasta scarves and 1970s shades, were High Church meets Huggy Bear. The earthen floors were littered with ceremonial drums and with wooden crutches to keep communicants upright through the 6-hour services. There were holy books made from goatskin. Hundreds of years old and written in Ge’ez, the ancient language of the church, they lay about the church, casually functional as Anglican hymn books.

And so to Lalibela, a remote mountain town where a 12th century king’s religious vision spawned churches not so much constructed as carved - inside and out, complete with detailed pillars and pediments, windows and roofs - from the solid rock. Rock-cut ramps led from ground level to the deep pits where the churches stood. Tunnels led on to hermits cells, monks graves and other churches. Lalibela was conceived of as a New Jerusalem, with replica tombs of biblical big-hitters including Abraham and Isaac, Adam, even Jesus himself and a carved channel known as the River Jordan. In this ancient religious theme park, monks and priests had burned incense and worshipped for over 800 years. Ethiopia in short was balm for the travel-blasé, as wondrous and unique a place as you could expect to find.

• More from Jeremy Seal