After two successive night fights, we landed in Addis Abeba dead tired and were happy that everything went smoothly with our hotel pickup. We were able to have breakfast at the nice buffet and our room was ready soon for some much needed catch-up on sleep.

Slightly more rested, we ventured to Piazza, an older area of Addis with some old buildings and churches. Here, we had our first Ethiopian meal and booked our flights to Bahir Dar. We were a bit shy still with taking out our big camera for photos, so sticked to quick phone pictures mainly. We had a brief walk around the Merkato area too, said to be the biggest market of Africa. Having freshly arrived, we found it a bit overwhelming though, and also not as picturesque as expected.

On our second day, we roughly followed a walking tour described in our guidebook, which led us to a couple of squares, churches and other remarkable buildings (or not so remarkable ones). The Tiglachen monument and the Holy Trinity Church were our favourite sights. Most other things were not really interesting.

To move around in Addis, we used local minibuses which worked well mostly – only sometimes we had to search a bit for the correct one. There’s also a tram line which connects some areas and was easy enough to use. Both were crowded and hectic – our introduction to the Ethiopian transportation system.

After 2 days in the capital, we were happy to move on to a smaller place – Bahir Dar.