Churches of Lalibela

Drive from Bahir Dar to Lalibela even more spectacular than the other drives - as if it could be!! Up high again - 3500 meters for much of the way but this time we climbed up hills and down gorges a bit. Same farming but this time on hillsides. But even though it was hilly everywhere was being ploughed. And in the really steep parts by hand and hoe …

Lalibela is another famous city that is way off the beaten track in Ethiopia. It is very hard to
be accessed by any road. You have to change buses several times to get here and there is no guarantee that the bus will fill up for the bus to go to the next city. We stopped in a small town called Gashena. The bus tried to charge us more than …

I am not yet settled in Addis Ababa and now off to another small rural town in Ethiopia, Lalibela. Why here? It is home of the most famous Rock-Hewn Churches of them all. I am not sure exactly what to expect. I saw a picture of one of the Lalibela Churches - amazingly beautiful. A short hop on the plane from the capital city - I am here at a tiny …

... get hand outs for posing for photos every day. Despite this, we were able to appreciate the architecture and beauty of the churches. They don't have religious significance for me, but it's amazing how much faith the people who constructed them ...

... like the Treasury, are facades with the main part of the buildings simply dug out of the rock in cave like interiors. The churches of Lalibela are different. They were carved of solid rock, inside and out, from the top down, straight into the earth. A ...

... through it)             There are so many legends surrounding the churches of Lalibela that my laptop would run out of memory before I could write about them all.  They are still very active ...

... able to explore Lalibela for one day before returning to Addis.   In the 1200s, monks decided to construct the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and what makes them so impressive is that they were not built from the ground up but from the ground ...

Last stop in Ethiopia was the town of Lalibela. We hopped on an internal Ethiopian Airlines flight as to get there by bus would have taken 2 days! We landed at the airport ... a strip of flat land between mountains, the middle of the middle of nowhere! ...

Johannes offered to guide me for 75 birr through Lalibela's famous rock-hewn churches (11 of them, from the 15th century I think), but I would have to pretend that we didn't really know each other. For 25 birr more I engaged his friend Daniel who had ...

... since they were going on a 3 day hike trip. I enjoyed myself alone the next day and spent another day in this nice town of Lalibela. Then I heard that there was a special ceremony at night at the ancient churches so I also stayed there for an hour to ...

... guess at the beginning! We decided to travel the northern region by public bus with the first stop over being LALIBELA - the town of cave-hewn churches. We were told the bus would take "2 days" in true Ethiopian style. So we dragged ourselves down ...

... from a single piece of rock. So we ventured to the place which has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1978, the churches of Lalibela. We were dumbfounded by our first sight of Bet Medhana Alem (the house of the saviour of the world). A church ...

... we were up quite early (and had brekkie and Tea at Chez Sophie...becoming a big favourite!) to head for the Rock Hewn churches of Lalibela Town. There are several in the town itself and then some more in the local vicinity. I don't want to list too ...