Site Report: Simien Mountains National Park

Visits

• 2011-01-20: From Gondar, we got another 4x4 and driver in order to more easily explore the Simien Mountains. The guidebooks all suggest trekking with mules from Debark, but in reality, given a five day hike, you will spend two of those days hiking through farmland. We cut the trip short by two days, and we drove to the best spots for day hiking. As it turns out, we would need those two days on our return to Egypt. There is always talk about how this place or that one is "just like the Grand Canyon". I heard this about Copper Canyon in Mexico which was nothing like the Grand Canyon. The Fish River Canyon in Namibia was a little closer if 1/10th the size. If you take the Grand Canyon, dry out the Colorado River, change all the red rock layers into monotone, and then scape every blade of grass from the earth with herds of goats and meager farms on every flat surface, then you will have an approximation of the Simien Mountains. On the other hand, there were probably only 100 tourists in the entire park, and that was during the high season. To be fair, there were some small remnant forests in the area of the campgrounds, and I may have witnessed tree planting near Sankober. Ok, back to the trip. We arrived near a village that was friendly with our requisite guide after a five hour drive from Gondar. The guide suggested a hike to see... wait for it... yet another Timkat celebration. We walked for about 45 minutes through dust devils and more dust to get to the procession. I was quite surprised to find that the children here had not learned to say "you you you" to foreigners, but we quickly became the center of attention nonetheless. This village seemed really removed from the mainstream, and many of the children had variations of the Mohawk for their haircuts. One thing I liked about this rural celebration was that some of the people were waving AK-47 rifles instead of the sticks that we saw in Gondar. After watching the festivities for a bit, we were invited into a house for a coffee ceremony. The house was built of sticks and mud, and it seemed that the only items owned by this family were their coffee set and a few used tin cans. Some plastic vegetable oil containers were used to hold water. There were a couple of extremely vicious dogs that were eager to eat us, but our scout chased them off. The coffee, hand-ground and roasted on a fire fueled by goat feces, was actually very good, even without sugar. Anyway, after breathlessly walking in the high altitude back to the car, we drove to the campsite at Chennek. Chennek was quite scenic with overlooks and a small Juniper forest. I found a herd of Walia Ibex while scanning the hillsides, and in the morning, I was fortunate to be standing in the path of an Ibex as it was chased by a group of tourists, giving me and not them the photo that they were looking for. The next day, we drove back toward Sankober, and we made a couple hour hike through some of the nicer natural areas there. At Sankober, we shared a pineapple that we had obtained in Dilla, and a few of the guides had never tried pineapple before. In the morning, we got an early start for our trip to Bahir Dar. We only had a short time to hang out with a group of over 100 Gelada Baboons.

Species Seen

Lifelists

• Africa
• World

Trips

• Africa: Egypt and Ethiopia