This is the hotel we stayed in in Lalibela, the Yemereha. The rooms were quite comfortable and the staff was extremely friendly.
This is the Yemereha's dining room. The food was pretty basic, but fresh, and its coffee must be commended. At each meal a handwritten menu for that meal was brought around laying out two options for each course. There was also a large TV in the corner where we could watch everything from CNN to Vin Diesel movies and week-old editions of "Entertainment Tonight." We met some interesting fellow guests, including a British couple -- the husband is a surgeon who'd come to Ethiopia to train doctors, and his wife had joined him to see the country. We also met part of a group of Spaniards who were spending several weeks traveling across Ethiopia by bike!
I (Elizabeth) was really surprised at how small "downtown" Lalibela was. There are a few clusters of small shops like these. Still, the town seemed constantly busy with students heading to school, people carrying loads of firewood on donkeys or on their own backs, shoppers, sellers, and more.
You didn't have to go far to see bleak but beautiful landscapes like this. In the valleys you saw farmers who seemed to be preparing for the rainy season to arrive -- many of the streams were dry or nearly so. Wherever we went, we swerved along mountain roads, our driver honking his horn at children, rifle-toting men, herds of goats...
The airport, about 30 minutes from the town, was quite small -- so small that when we left a couple of days later we received handwritten boarding passes.
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