Where to stay

Bale Mountain Lodge Set in the majestic and atmospheric rainforest, there are eight rooms in this small, ecofriendly lodge. All feature wood-burning stoves and furniture made by local craftsmen using sustainable wood. The owners work closely with communities, which receive any activity fee, to provide visitors with remarkable experiences such as wild honey gathering, herb and fruit picking and visits to Manyate Coffee Village. There are also forest treks, wild animal spotting and trips with local guides. Open September to July. Rooms from £130 pp, per night, full board. Bale Mountains National Park, South Central Ethiopia, 00 251 912 790 802, http://balemountainlodge.com

Bishangari Lodge There are two types of accommodation here: bungalows known as gojos and The Village, built for guests who want to experience a traditional Ethiopian town. There are five unique ecological zones to explore: wetlands, beach and lake, forest, acacia shrub and pumice rock. Guides can take you hiking, bike riding, birdwatching and hippo spotting. Rooms from £100 pp, per night, full board. Lake Langano, Oromiya, 00 251 115 517 533, http://bishangari.com

Sheraton Addis Located near the centre of Addis Ababa and close to the National Museum and airport, this elegant building is an oasis of greenery and cool breezes in the heat. There are 11 restaurants, bars and lounges to choose from, two pools and a children’s club. Rooms from £245 per night. Taitu Street, PO Box 6002, Addis Ababa, 00 251 115 171 717, http://sheratonaddis.com

Travel Information

The Bale Mountains lie in the Oromiya region. The language of Ethiopia is Ahamric and the Oromo people speak Oromifa, so some dishes and foods listed may have slightly different pronunciation. Flights from the UK are around eight and a half hours and the time is three hours ahead of GMT. Currency is the Ethiopian birr, which can only be exchanged in Ethiopia. US dollars are accepted in large hotels and shops. Holiday periods and fasting are strongly observed in Ethiopia. Weeks of fasting precede two national holidays, Christmas (7 January 2017) and Easter (16 April 2017). In January the average temperature is 13C.

GETTING THERE
Ethiopian Airlines flies daily from Heathrow to Addis Ababa, which is a six and a half hour-drive away. Return fares start at £505 economy and £2,065 business class. 0800 016 3449, http://ethiopianairlines.com/U...
Kibran Tours organises bespoke and small-group tours throughout Ethiopia. 00 251 116 626 214, http://kibrantours.com

RESOURCES
Ethiopian Tourism Organisation is the national tourist board. Its website is packed full of advice to help you plan your trip. http://ethiopia.travel

FURTHER READING
Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood by Nega Mezlekia (Picador USA, £18) is a powerful memoir tracing the author’s journey from boy to man in and around the city of Jijiga. It explores the struggle between western European interests and communist influences that caused the collapse of Ethiopia’s social and political structure in the Seventies and Eighties.

CARBON COUNTING
To offset your carbon emissions when travelling to Bale Mountains, visit http://climatecare.org where donations go towards supporting environmental projects around the world. Return flights from London produce 1.62 tonnes CO2, meaning a cost to offset of £12.18.

Where to eat

Prices are per person for three courses and half a bottle of wine, unless otherwise stated.

Bale Mountain Lodge In the dining room and terrace overlooking the spectacular rainforest, chef Esayas Tesfaye’s daily changing menus comprise traditional dishes and more familiar ones made with local produce. A selection of drinks include herb or spiced teas, tej (honey wine), crisp Rift Valley chardonnay, fruity merlot and aromatic syrah, plus Ethiopian beers St George, Harar and Walia. Open daily, September to July, reservations essential. From £15 for lunch, £25 for dinner. Bale Mountains National Park, South Central Ethiopia, 00 251 912 790802, http://balemountainlodge.com

Bishangari Lodge Just metres from Lake Langano, the thatched dining area melds into a forest clearing. Chef Ararsa Henbeta’s menus include classic plates of kita (flatbread), pan-fried spiced perch, beef tib and the regional slightly tangy forest honey. Enjoy a drink in the two-storey bar, built around a 400-year-old tree, while listening to hippos grunting in the lake. Open daily, reservations essential. From £13 for lunch and £22 for dinner. Eastern shores of Lake Langano, Oromiya, 00 251 11 551 7533, http://bishangari.com

Bolt House The owners of this colourful family run Rastafarian restaurant and café arrived from Jamaica in the 1960s. Try Joan Douglas and Maurice Lee’s ambrosial fresh juices made from seasonal fruits – mango, passion fruit, watermelon – and enjoy mains of rice with meat, fish or vegetables, or a fine goat curry or jerk. Breakfast dishes include scrambled eggs or barley porridge. From £4. Near the Lily of the Valley Hotel, north Near Shashemene, Oromiya

Harenna Hoteela This cluster of traditional houses with a central dining area is run by Shamsu, wife of owner Haji Kamil. In this unmissable dining experience, the menu is entirely local and seasonal. You may be served kita with tukur goman (black cabbage) or mar, honey (from bamboo, dark and runny; from the hagenia abyssinica tree, golden and thick). Strong coffee is made and served the customary way: in small cups without handles. From £3 for two dishes, with coffee. Village of Rira, 10km from Bale Mountain Lodge

Shambal (Captain) Habte Friendly and casual dining room in Genet Hoteela, named after the Captain’s wife, Genet. Dishes may include bayonetu (or bayayenet) – a popular fasting dish of injera (flatbread) and vegetables – beef tibs and shiro tegabino, a thick, spicy chickpea paste served in clay pots set on top of burning charcoal. From £2 for vegan dishes and beer; £3 for meat dishes and beer. Genet Hoteela, on the road to Negele Borena, Dolo Mena, Oromiya

Food Glossary

Berbere

Berbere Spice mixture of small, fiery-hot red chillies, garlic, ginger, pepper, rue (see below), nigella, fenugreek and local herbs

Buna

Coffee – served strong and black, made the traditional way. If you are a guest, it’s polite to drink three cups. In a coffee shop, you can ask for buna ba wetet (coffee with milk) or wetet ba buna (milk with coffee) – it depends on the balance you would prefer

Firfir

(Chechebsa in Oromifa) Breakfast dish of shredded kita (flatbread), berbere and (sometimes slightly soured) clarified butter. Injera firfir is made with shredded injera and onions. For shiro firfir, add crushed chickpeas

Injera

National staple made with teff (see below) that resembles a large pancake. The best injera – smooth, slightly fermented – is said to be made in the highlands. Its taste varies from fresh to quite sour

Kolo

Toasted barley grains eaten anytime of day as a nibble or with drinks, especially with coffee. Often sold by kiosks and street vendors

Rue

(Ruta graveolens) A herb known as tenadom in Amharic, or ‘good health’, and named after the biblical Adam. It’s part of the berbere spice mix and is strong and bitter-tasting. A sprig is often briefly dipped in brewed coffee, yoghurt or cold milk

Shiro

Delicious mash of chickpeas, onions and chillies. Tegabino shiro is heavily spiced and served in a clay pot

Teff

An indigenous grass, cultivated as a cereal grain. Both high in iron and gluten-free, teff is becoming increasingly sought-after by the health-conscious in many western countries

Tej

Honey wine, or mead, that is made at home or served in tej houses. A little sweet, its alcohol strength depends on the fermentation time. You can also find non-alcoholic varieties

Tibs

Fish, meat or vegetables fried in a hot pan, with little fat and well-spiced with berbere. It is usually served on holidays and special occasions

Tilapia

Freshwater fish abundant in the Rift Valley lakes. It’s traditionally fried in a shallow, round pan over charcoal

Tukur goman

Black cabbage; iron-rich, dark green and looks similar to spinach. It’s a popular food on fasting days

Wot

(or wat) A stew spiced with berbere and served with injera. Doro wot is made with chicken, bege wot with lamb (popular in the highlands), bure wot with beef (in towns), figel wot with goat (in the lowlands) and dubah wot with pumpkin (in Oromiya)

Food and Travel Review

Savour an aromatic, dark and strong cup of coffee in Manyate Village on the periphery of Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains National Park and you will never look at your high-street coffee shop in the same way again. Coffee (coffea arabica) grows wild here, and the locals know exactly how to prepare it.

In a sankate tulu (traditional thatched-roof house), my host Munisa Usman brews coffee from forest-gathered beans – pan-roasted and ground in the village – in a jebana (clay jug with a lid) set over charcoal. This ceremony – a symbol of hospitality, friendship and an essential part of any negotiation – requires thoughtfulness and skill. It’s a moment to share with others. Munisa offers the first small cup (abole) to her guests and elders, refills the jebana with water and brews the grounds a second (tona) and third (baraka) time. This third cup represents a blessing to you from the host.

The Bale Mountains sit 400km south-east of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s vibrant capital on the edge of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. The road south out of the city, known as ‘the lakes road’, takes you through Oromiya, the largest of the country’s nine states. Soon, clusters of traditional houses and tall, domed stacks of teff (a grain) surrounded by protective brush fences appear alongside the two-lane highway. Local drivers are adept at guessing the direction that the donkeys, goats and distinctive hump-backed zebu cattle will bolt – the animals assign themselves right of way.

Donkeys are the hauliers here, transporting crops, firewood and the villagers who come to the roadside to sell their onions, potatoes and watermelons to passers-by. Oxen tethered together with a pole plough fields of teff and vegetables which are separated from the road by wide gullies that quickly fill with water during the rains. Small hoteela (hotels) line the highway as it passes through larger settlements and many offer a few simple dishes – fish fillets fried in batter and sprinkled with tiny nigra (black mustard) seeds, cabbage cooked with garlic, long green beans, beetroot and the ubiquitous bowl of scorching-hot chillies.

Lake Ziway, a large freshwater lake 160km south of Addis Ababa, is close to where ‘Lucy’, an incomplete human skeleton believed to be 3.2 million years old, was discovered by scientists in 1974. And there is still a marvellous synergy between man and the other residents here today.

As the lake’s fishermen fillet their Nile perch (tilapia), they throw the guts to dozens of marabou storks waiting patiently a few metres away. Standing at more than 1m tall, the ‘undertaker birds’ rarely fish themselves – they rely on humans to do the work – but they are excellent scavengers: each afternoon they leave the gutting area perfectly clean for the next day. Spoonbills, ibises, egrets, pelicans and herons wade in the still waters as the distant mountains turn from blue-grey to hazy violet in the afternoon sun. The surreal beauty is further enhanced when a young woman and her mischievous children pass us and an elegant man driving a horse and trap doffs his straw hat and smiles as he rides into the shallows towards a canopied boat.

Further south, the landscape becomes more arid and small cemeteries featuring tombstones adorned with the Islamic star and crescent appear alongside villages. We stay overnight on the edge of Lake Langano at Bishangari Lodge, where chef Ararsa Henbeta tells me: ‘I grew up 40km away, so I’m familiar with the local foods. However, we had no lake nearby so now I enjoy cooking tilapia and our beef, as both spice so well. I also love the range of foods that grow here – tropical mango and papaya, cool carrots and cucumbers. And our wild honey is deep amber gold,’ he says, pointing towards a barrel-shaped hive in the branches of a tree.

The next day we wake in time to witness the dawn antics of monkeys, large yellow-billed hornbills – known locally as flying bananas – and hippos before continuing our journey to the Bale Mountains. The road soon turns east and heads through Shashemene, the Rastafarian capital of Ethiopia. A farmer ploughing his field with his oxen pauses to explain his crop rotation. ‘I have sorghum (a grain), onions, corn and lentils. I also have a cow, three goats and a donkey. And this is where I sleep to protect them from the wild animals,’ he says, pointing to a small, single-room wooden house on stilts in the middle of the field.

We finally enter the Bale Mountains National Park, where the flat and swampy grasslands are a paradise of birds – waxbills, thrushes, hornbills, coots – regal deer with huge antlers, dark grey hogs with sweeping tusks and monkeys that are as curious about us as we are of them. I catch the scent of wild fennel and less familiar herbs.

Reaching the Sanetti Plateau (4,000m, rising to 4,377m), it’s cold and, at first glance, barren except for tall, sentinel-like flowers that bloom once then die. Then our guide, Yonas Amare, spots a lone and beautiful Ethiopian wolf, the world’s most rare and endangered canid, and the plateau comes alive to my less observant eye.

Descending through the cloud, a fairy tale landscape of tall ferns and giant heather shrubs covered in hanging moss appears, as do bamboo-framed houses with wattle walls and grass roofs blackened by smoke from the wood fires inside. Lower still, through the evergreen Harenna Forest – the second largest forest in Ethiopia – we reach Bale Mountain Lodge (2,380m).

As we relax over a glass of Rift Valley wine with the ecolodge’s co-owner Yvonne Levene, she tells me: ‘Our electricity comes from a micro hydropower system on a nearby river; our water is purified by slow sand filtering; our kitchen waste is minimal and we use locally grown food. Honey, coffee and many of the fruits we enjoy are from the forest and we buy vegetables in our local market.’

On our menu is tibs – fried lamb, cooked outside over an open fire in a huge dish that is first oiled with fatty lamb tail, plus tilapia from Ziway and myriad pulse dishes.

‘I especially love to cook habesha (traditional) foods such as shiro (chickpea mash) and doro wot (chicken and hard-boiled eggs in a spicy sauce), a dish for special occasions,’ Addis-born chef Esayas (Isiah) Tesfaye tells me. ‘And I like to make ferenje (foreign) dishes – beef in spiced sauce, sticky banana pudding, teff pasta and pancakes with mango ice cream – using local ingredients to prove how good they are. We make our injera (pancakes) and kita (flatbreads) the same way our neighbours do, over a wood-burning clay stove with a clay hotplate fitted on top.’

One of the lodge’s cooks, Saida, shows me how to make injera. ‘My firewood is here,’ she says, pointing to a large, neat stack. ‘I mixed the teff three days ago.’ Sitting behind the fire, she wipes a round pan with oil and stokes the fire with a stick. Working quickly and steadily, she pours the slightly fermented batter out of a clay pot on to the pan and, with a broad brush and bold hand, wipes it to the edges. A flat lid goes on top, she waits 30 seconds, then removes the lid to release a cloud of steam. With her hands, Saida gently lifts any edges that she thinks need neatening, and waits a few seconds longer. Wood smoke perfumes the air as she transfers the thin bread to a growing stack a few metres away, stokes the fire and starts the process all over again.

In nearby Dolo Mena, Shambal Habte leads us through his courtyard and past a large pile of bright red chillies to a shaded table where we enjoy bayonetu (or bayayenet) – injera topped with small mounds of shiro, shredded cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, onion, lentils, avocado (a seasonal luxury) and berbere (a spice mix). It takes some practice to eat injera with elegance: with your right hand, tear off a piece of the bread then scoop up the vegetables little by little. St George beer and cinnamon-spiced tea are welcome drinks with these searing hot but flavoursome foods.

Tuesday is market day in the village of Rira. After buying forest honey, spices and armfuls of tukur goman (an iron-rich dark leaf cabbage), we relish dishes of ground barley mixed with butter, turmeric-spiced potatoes, chechebsa (shredded kita served with honey and slightly soured butter) and cups of aromatic coffee at Harenna Hoteela. On our way back to the lodge, we stop to pick pretty, fragrant wild thyme (tosign) to dry out for tea.

This glorious, fragile environment is home to many rare and endemic species of reptiles, rodents, amphibians, birds, lions, monkeys and exquisitely patterned butterflies. It’s also home to one of the world’s most cherished foods – wild honey. Collecting it is something of a community activity. The bamboo-bound hives, set high in the trees, are often tricky to reach. Three men help Said, an expert honey gatherer, with his ascent. One throws a thick rope up and over a branch above the hive, then wraps the lower end around Saida’s waist. Another lights a large bundle of dry grass and hands it, smouldering, to Said, who climbs the tree, reaches out and carefully holds it under the hive. The bees then leave and Said scoops out as much honey as he can place into his cowhide pouch before descending, still carefully suspended by his mate.

The flavour of wild honey varies with the blossom – hagenia abyssinica (east African rosewood) is a popular tree for hives and coffee is a favourite – and it’s usually collected twice a year (December and May). After this dangerous work, I could only say ‘amansekanado’ (thank you or, literally, ‘I praise you’) and offer to shake Said’s sticky hand. Though here, if you have been using your hands and haven’t had a chance to wash them, this is done by knocking wrists.

The food, dishes and traditions of Ethiopia are already of interest to nutritionists. Now scientists are turning their attention to wild foods and their importance to our diet. It’s no coincidence that research is showing coffee has health values when it’s organically grown, processed without additives and boiled – exactly the way the magic bean is produced and enjoyed here.