Free Sample
The Purple Culture Guide to Ethiopia
What Ethiopia is actually like, from a local's-eye view, before you step off the plane
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Impressions
The first thing that hits you is the verticality. Not the mountains of the north, which you've seen in photos, but the sheer volume of people moving upwards and outwards across the hillsides of Addis Ababa. You land at an airport that feels modern and oddly sterile, and within thirty minutes you are in a minibus that smells of eucalyptus oil and diesel, crawling up a steep road packed with blue-and-white Lada taxis, women in white shawls carrying massive yellow plastic jerrycans of water, and barefoot boys kicking a half-flat football against a corrugated iron fence. The altitude sits on your chest like a hand. You are two and a half kilometers closer to the sun, and your body knows it before your mind does.
Most people arrive with a mental image of Ethiopia as a dustbowl or a famine poster. The reality is a green, high-altitude country that feels more like a cooler, drier highland in Guatemala or Peru than the sun-blasted plains you might have imagined. The air is crisp the way it is in autumn in Colorado. The light is sharp and pale. The eucalyptus trees that line every road are tall and silver-green, and they give the entire country a strange, medicinal scent that you will never forget, but also never quite manage to identify.
What surprises you most, perhaps, is the racial and ethnic complexity. You have a rough idea that Ethiopia is African, but the people you meet don't fit