From the highlands of Lalibela down through the Great Rift to Nairobi. Landscape, culture, and wildlife in sequence.
Lalibela
Arrive on the morning flight from Addis and give the afternoon to altitude — the town sits at about 2,500 m (8,200 ft). Walk the ridge for the layout: eleven churches cut down into the rock in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, still in daily use, still the point of a pilgrimage that fills the town at Genna in January.
The northern cluster
Enter at first light with the priests rather than at ten with the coaches. Bete Medhane Alem is the largest monolithic church in the world; Bete Maryam holds frescoes and a permanent congregation. The ticket covers all eleven churches for the length of your stay, and a guide is close to essential — nothing is labelled.
Bete Giyorgis, then Addis
Bete Giyorgis stands apart from both clusters, a cross cut fifteen metres down into solid rock with no scaffolding evidence and no obvious method. Afternoon flight to Addis Ababa, where the Ethnological Museum in Haile Selassie's old palace is the best single hour on this route for context.
South into the Rift
The road out of Addis drops into the Rift Valley within two hours and the string of lakes starts immediately. Ziway has pelicans on the shoreline and a fish market that draws them; Langano is the only one of the group where bilharzia is not a concern, so it is where people actually swim.
Up to the Bale Mountains
East and then up, to Dinsho at the park headquarters. The meadows behind the lodge hold mountain nyala and Menelik's bushbuck at close range without any effort at all, which is a reasonable introduction to a park where the endemics are the whole argument.
The Sanetti plateau and the Harenna forest
The highest all-weather road in Africa crosses the Sanetti at about 4,000 m (13,100 ft), through giant lobelia and Afroalpine moorland. This is the best place on earth to see the Ethiopian wolf — the rarest canid there is, with fewer than five hundred left — hunting giant mole-rats in the open. The road then falls through cloud forest to Harenna.
Down to Hawassa
Back to the valley floor and the lake city of Hawassa. The fish market on the shore works from dawn: marabou storks stand shoulder-height beside the filleting tables waiting for scraps, and nobody minds either way. The lakeside promenade in the evening is one of the more relaxed hours in southern Ethiopia.
Arba Minch and the Dorze highlands
Arba Minch sits above the twin lakes of Abaya and Chamo with the Nechisar plains between them. Climb to Dorze, at 2,800 m (9,200 ft), where the woven bamboo houses are shaped like elephant heads and are moved rather than rebuilt when termites take the base. Weaving here is a trade, not a demonstration.
Nechisar and the crocodile market
A boat on Lake Chamo runs to the sandbank the guides call the crocodile market, where very large Nile crocodiles haul out in numbers alongside hippo pods. Afternoon in Nechisar National Park for zebra and the bridge of God — the isthmus of pale ground dividing the two lakes.
The long road to the border
A full day south-east to Moyale on the Kenyan frontier — a hard drive on a mostly good road with police checks and a lot of livestock. Sleep on the Ethiopian side and cross in the morning when both immigration posts are staffed and the onward transport actually leaves.
Into Kenya: Marsabit to Isiolo
The crossing takes a couple of hours with a Kenyan e-visa already in hand. The road south is now tarmac the whole way, which is recent and has changed this journey completely — it was a two-day ordeal on corrugation a decade ago. Marsabit's forest crater sits in the middle of desert; Isiolo is where the north ends.
Samburu
Samburu National Reserve runs along the Ewaso Ng'iro and holds the northern specials you will not see further south — Grevy's zebra, reticulated giraffe, the long-necked gerenuk that browses standing on its hind legs, and beisa oryx. Drives are early and late; the middle of the day is genuinely too hot for anything.
Lake Nakuru
South through Nanyuki with Mount Kenya on the left. Nakuru is a soda lake inside a fenced park, best known for flamingo numbers that rise and fall with the water level — do not travel for them specifically. What is reliable is rhino: both black and white, and among the better odds in the country.
Naivasha, Hell's Gate, Nairobi
Hell's Gate is the one Kenyan park you may cycle through, between the cliffs that gave the animators of The Lion King their landscape, and the gorge walk at the far end needs a ranger after rain. Then the escarpment road up and over into Nairobi, which ends the traverse at the southern end of the Rift.
Good to know
The Moyale crossing is the hinge of this route and it is the part to research most recently. It has been open and routine for years, but northern Ethiopia has had periods of conflict and regional travel advice for both Ethiopia and northern Kenya changes — check your own government's current position before booking anything non-refundable.
This itinerary deliberately does not run down the Omo valley. Village visits there have become a paid photography circuit, and we would rather send you to the Bale Mountains than into an exchange that has stopped being one.
Ethiopia needs an e-visa in advance; Kenya replaced its visa with an Electronic Travel Authorisation that must be approved before arrival. Yellow fever certificates are checked at this land border in both directions.
Budget for altitude twice: Lalibela at 2,500 m (8,200 ft) at the start and the Sanetti plateau at 4,000 m (13,100 ft) in the first week. Neither is dangerous at these durations, both are worse if you arrive tired.
Shorter or longer?
Ethiopia only: Lalibela, the Rift lakes, the Bale Mountains and Arba Minch, flying out of Addis rather than crossing at Moyale.
Kenya only: start in Nairobi, run Samburu, Nakuru and Naivasha, and add the Masai Mara at the southern end instead of the Ethiopian highlands.
Add Ethiopia's northern circuit before Lalibela — Gondar, the Simien Mountains and Aksum — and finish on the Kenyan coast at Lamu.