Although not something that we widely publicized here, one of our central plans for this African adventure was to travel all the way from Cape Town to Cairo in one uninterrupted overland journey in a sort of reverse Dark Star Safari.1 In pursuit of this goal – and the resulting opportunity to get to see Africa unfold and gradually transition from Southern, to Eastern, to Northern – we have endured some particularly long and/or arduous bus journeys between destinations which reasonable people would have otherwise flown.
Up through Uganda, we had been fairly successful in traveling overland from South Africa, through a circuitous journey over several months, snaking thousands of kilometers along the way through Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, and Rwanda.2 Aided by our American passports, we had been able to easily obtain visas on arrival at the borders of each of the countries we had visited in Southern and Eastern Africa. Unfortunately, this would not be the case for Ethiopia. Although visas are readily issued on arrival at the international airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia strictly refuses to issue any visas at its land borders. Our only recourse, therefore, would have been to apply for a visa at one the Ethiopian embassies we encountered along the way during our travels across Africa.3
The Ethiopian embassies in Kampala and Nairobi, however, do not issue visas to non-Ugandan and non-Kenyan applicants, respectively. Because we had read about the experiences of those who went before us, we did not even attempt to fruitlessly seek to obtain visas from these embassies – which apparently simply tell travelers to “cancel your plans“, or courier their passports back to their home countries and lodge applications at the Ethiopian embassies in those respective locations.4
Sadly, this left us with no other option but to fly into Ethiopia, disrupting our overland travel plans. At this point, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with Kenya, as this post is titled “Skipping Kenya,” not “Skipping Ethiopia.” The Ethiopian visa mess forced us to reconceptualize our trip. With our intended overland travel route from Kenya into Ethiopia now off the table, we began to question whether we really wanted (needed?) to travel to Kenya at all. When we juxtaposed the terrorist attacks that had taken place along the coast there this summer, significant lingering security concerns in Nairobi, and the U.S. State Department’s outstanding travel warning on Kenya, with our waning interest in paying large sums of money to see wildlife, it became pretty clear that we would just be going to Kenya for the sake of having been there. If we had been able to continue our overland travels up to Ethiopia, we would have traveled through Kenya. Not being able to do so, however, gave us little incentive to travel to Nairobi in some sort of symbolic pursuit, to only then immediately catch a flight up to Ethiopia.
Instead, we got tickets on an Ethiopian Airlines nonstop flight from Entebbe – where Uganda’s only international airport is located – to Addis Ababa. A flight that ultimately took only two hours saved us what would have otherwise likely been over a week of overland travel and untold hours of bureaucratic frustration.
After months of long African bus rides, being seated in economy on a Boeing 767 felt like the most luxurious form of transportation possible.
1 Astute readers might have noticed the caption on the featured image from our Bulwayo post – a point along the way where the likelihood of us completely the full journey to Cairo seemed to be at its lowest.
2 Our African adventure began with a few relaxing weeks along the coast in Mozambique, but we flew from there back to South Africa for the start of our overland journey.
3 As the Ethiopian embassy in Washington D.C. only issues visas with a three-month validity period, applying for one before the commencement of our travels in March would have been useless.
4 We did not consider surrendering our passports to FedEx and then sitting around in Uganda for weeks without them to be a viable option. Unfortunately, for those that are traveling overland with their own vehicle, this expensive waiting game appears to be the only option for getting into Ethiopia.
