Simien Mountains – 4 Days

We booked the Simien mountains trekking with Ethio Travel and Tours and they provided a great service for us. Starting from the office the travel agents welcomed us very well and helped us to choose a perfect tour packages for us. And also the tour guide and the driver made the trip more amazing.

All my trip itineraries with ETT were lies. Semien 4 day does not go to geesh. Bale 3 day does NOT go to harena forest. And they didnt even book bale hotels! We got to goba to find out both hotels were full and had to drive back to Robe. Then they had the gall to try stuffing me in a filthy motel without tap water (they again lied to me the whole town didnt have water bc of fighting) and i had to insist for a better hotel (surprise surprise it had water and electricity). Their lies cost me precious visit time bc i only have the resources to visit ethiopia once. Semien camp condition is beyond filthy that we could not bare to use what they call toilet. No shower. 4 days of trekking without a single shred of meat. Cook hissed at me bc i hadnt tipped him yet. If you plan to go to ethiopia only once like me, do your homework avoid ETT. You need at least 4 days for bale and semien 2-3 day is quite enough unless you love trekking - but don't forget the unbearable toilet and filthy kitchen and no shower. Do not believe good reviews for ETT. No traveler would so eagerly mention company names. I find their names mentioned early in reviews too suspiciously often. Ive been on many many tours and don't ever remember or even know the company name unless its so bad that i need to warn others.

The nature there is stunning. We loved our group (11 pax is a great amount of people) and appreciate the hard work of the chef who served two amazing dinners in a really basic environment (we saw the kitchen, wow). Unfortunately we also have some major critical points that we want to share. First of all: the beginning. We were the first to be picked up and drove around Gondar for 1,5 hours for picking up food, people, more food, drinks etc. Samy is not the right guide for the mountain tracking. He didn’t know much about the environment, the plants or the animals. On the first day, he led us right into a thunderstorm, on the second day her led us right into ice rain. While everybody got wet he started to panic and didn’t know what to do. When the group started to criticize that, her ran off and didn’t care about the group anymore. Three people got sick because of the altitude. No one cared. The group complained about the hiking speed which he didn’t seem to care off. I wished he had listened to the scouts instead of showing off what a great guy he wants to be. I personally find it very odd to pose like a Taliban with a Ak47 and ask people to take a picture of him. And is it really necessary to wear the exact same T-shirt three days in a row? But what really pisses me off is the accommodation. I don’t mind sleeping in a community lodge but they were full of bed bugs. I hate bed bugs! There was no possibility to wash your hands after trecking and there was also no campfire to warm up after you got soaking wet while hiking through the thunderstorm. On the second day we shared the lodge with at least 20 Ethiopians and I think The guide subrentet the lodge. There was also no first aid kid or rope in case of an accident what I personally find quite dangerous. We also run a bit short on food. More food was coming only after the group complaint about the hunger (and assume food was bought and kept for other purposes). All in all I think it should be organized a lot better. On the way back to Gondar we got picked up in the base camp with a car that run short on gas. Surprisingly we ran out of gas some 20 km before Gondar after passing a couple of gas stations. We hope that this feedback helps to improve the next tours cause I think there is a lot of potential. We wrote a email to the company haven’t gotten any reaction.