Touring Addis Ababa

Addis Ababa - 5 million people at 8,000 feet

With our Addis guide Biayow

 Itinerary Day 02: Full day in Addis Ababa

Today, you will have a full day city tour of Addis Ababa which include: National Museum, Ethnographic Museum, Selassie cathedral and Entoto Hills.

The Ethnographic Museum is very different to the National Museum, but equally absorbing, this museum exhibit, a varied array of artifacts and daily objects related to most ethnic groups in Ethiopia. We will continue our morning city tour with Merkato, the largest open-air market in Africa, other part of the city including Piassa and Churchill Avenue to make souvenirs shopping.

The National Museum. The National Museum of Ethiopia: This is one of the best museums in quality and diversity of the exhibits. Archeological exhibits include the 3.5 million-year-old fossil of Lucy (or Dinkinesh – ‘thou art wonderful’- in the native language), a hominoid woman of the specious of Australopithecus Afarensis. The discovery of Lucy’s fossil in 1974 forced a complete rethink of human genealogy, providing that our ancestors were walking 2.5 million years earlier than had been supposed. The National Museum also contains many wonderful artifacts dating back to pre-Axumite civilization. 

Journal:  The day went pretty much as advertised in the itinerary, although Sigird may have managed to squeeze in a couple of additional destination.  A long interesting day, and we'll need to get up in a few hours to start an even longer day of driving North tomorrow. Don't have the time or energy to sort these pics and provide a little commentary. I'm just going to upload a few pics now and call it a day. Hopefullly I'll get back to this soon and add a bit more color.

St. George Coptic Cathedral

Editiors Note: I intend to pre-load and schedule automated blog posts with our daily itinerary for our Ethiopian adventure. For those interested, this may be an easy way to follow along. Since we will not have internet access for most of the trip, my hope is this will make it easier to add some pics and journal commentary if and when we run across an internet connection. If there are no pics or commentary, you'll just have to wait until we get back. We'll see how it goes.UPDATED