Reserve eleven nights in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia

Eleven nights in the Bale Mountains split cleanly in two. The first half sits above the tree line on the Sanetti plateau, where the ground freezes on most nights of the year and the inside of the vehicle glass ices over before dawn. The second half drops off the southern rim into the Harenna forest, where the canopy closes over the road and coffee grows in the shade without anybody having planted it. You do both in one vehicle, on one road, with the same guide and the same driver, and the change from one to the other takes about four hours of driving.

The office holds the ground portion before you leave home: rooms, vehicle, driver, guide, park entry for every day inside the boundary, the scout who has to ride in any vehicle within it, and the two long transfer days at either end. Reaching the country is yours to arrange, and no air ticket is sold at this counter. You land at Addis Ababa, and somebody is standing with your name on a card when you come out of the hall.

What makes this trip hard is altitude and road surface, and both are worth saying before you decide anything. Goba, where you sleep four of the eleven nights, stands at about 8,900 feet. The plateau road crosses above 13,900 feet, and a rough spur climbs off it to the mast on Tullu Dimtu at 14,360 feet, the second highest point in the country. Most people notice the last thousand feet in their chest and in how they sleep.

The road out of Goba and onto Sanetti

The climb out of Goba covers about 12 miles and gains 4,500 feet. The first band is tree heath, six to twenty feet high, hung with pale lichen and blackened in patches where the grazing fires ran through. Somewhere above 11,500 feet the heath stops and the moorland starts, and that change happens over a few hundred yards rather than a few miles.

Then there is the ground itself. Freeze and thaw work it more than two hundred nights a year, so the plateau is pushed up into hummocks with sedge on the crowns and standing water in the troughs after rain. Giant lobelia grows between them, a single rosette of stiff leaves that stays low for ten years or more and then sends up a flowering column eight to twenty feet high, seeds once and dies where it stands. There are more than forty small lakes up there. Garba Guracha lies at about 12,960 feet in a rock bowl that held ice fourteen thousand years ago, and the moraine that dammed it is still a clear ridge across the outflow.

Hail arrives in the afternoon, usually between two and four, and it comes in fifteen minute bursts rather than settling in for the day. The crossing from Goba to the forest side is roughly 65 miles and takes four hours, not because the distance is long but because the surface is broken and because you will keep stopping.

What lives up there, and the hours it shows itself

Fewer than five hundred Ethiopian wolves are left, and about half of them use this plateau and the Web valley next to it. They are rust and white, built like a lean coyote, and they hunt alone in daylight instead of running the prey down as a pack, walking the hummocks and listening for rodents underneath. The pack only comes together twice a day, at first light and again in the last hour before dark, to greet each other loudly and then split up again. The animal they mostly eat, the giant molerat, exists on this massif and nowhere else; it pushes a plug of soil out of its burrow and then sits with the top half of its body out of the hole, which is exactly why a wolf can make a living at 13,000 feet.

Lower down at Dinsho, in woodland of hagenia and juniper at about 10,000 feet, mountain nyala browse at first light. Something near four thousand of them are left and this is where most of them are. Overhead the bearded vulture works the escarpment edge on a wingspan close to nine feet and drops bone onto rock to get at the marrow. On the wet flats you get wattled crane, spot-breasted lapwing, and the blue-winged goose, which breeds on this highland and on no other.

Your guide is out with you for the two windows that are worth anything, roughly 6:30 to 9:30 in the morning and 4:00 to 6:30 in the afternoon. The middle of the day is for driving, eating and sitting down.

Down the escarpment into the Harenna forest

From the southern rim the road falls from about 11,500 feet to 4,900 feet in some 25 miles of switchbacks, and the vegetation changes every thousand feet of it. Cloud sits on the rim most mornings and the road runs straight through it for twenty minutes. Rira, where you sleep three nights, is at about 7,900 feet, and the camp there is a clearing with permanent tents, mattresses, a long table and a cook working on gas bottles. Dinner is at seven because the generator runs from six to ten and not after it.

Arabica coffee grows under this canopy on its own, which is true of very few forests anywhere, and the villages pick it in November and December and dry it on raised beds beside the road. Beekeepers hang log hives thirty and forty feet up in the crowns and climb to them on a loop of rope. The Bale monkey lives on highland bamboo and has a range of a few hundred square miles, nearly all of it within a day of this camp. Colobus move along the top of the canopy in the first hour of light. There are leopard tracks in the mud of the road most weeks and almost nobody sees the animal that made them.

At night the tree hyrax starts up, a rising series of creaks that ends in a scream, and it will wake you the first time it happens. Rain here mostly falls between midnight and four in the morning, which is why the mornings work.

How the eleven days are laid out

Two of the eleven nights go on getting there and back. Addis Ababa to Dinsho is about 250 miles of tarmac and roadworks, eight to nine hours with a stop for lunch, and the same again in reverse at the end. Four nights are in a guesthouse in Goba with hot water in the evening only. Two are at the park headquarters end at Dinsho, and three are under canvas in the forest. One vehicle and the same two people, guide and driver, stay with you from the first morning to the last.

If you want the cave day at Sof Omar, where the Weyib River runs into nine miles of limestone passage and comes out the far side, it goes in as a long out and back from Goba, and it is 240 miles of driving for one afternoon underground. Ask for it early, because it decides which nights sit where.

Nothing on this page belongs to this office. Not the vehicle, not one bed, not the camp. The company that runs the eleven days holds the licences for the ground it covers, signs its own contract with you and sends you its own invoice; no money changes hands here at any stage of it.

Naming your actual dates and getting a firm figure back takes two to four working days, because the park office has to confirm the scout and the camp space for those exact dates before anybody puts a number on paper. Rira fills for December and January well ahead, so an answer for a February departure comes back quicker than one for the last week of the year. The Pine Gazette is the name used by Pine Gazette Bookings LLC, whose office is at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312, Metairie, LA 70001, in the New Orleans metro, a Louisiana agency that books and does not operate. Send the dates and the number of people to bookings@thepinegazette.com, or call +1 (504) 832-6194 and talk it through. Anything on this page that reads wrong to you should go to corrections@thepinegazette.com.