MULUGETA GUDETA
The 36th ordinary Session of the African Union (AU) is taking place this week in Addis Ababa. Signs welcoming visitors to historic Addis Ababa are usually common sites as you travel along the newly-built highways of the capital or as soon as you reach the Bole International Airport or reach the gates of the major hotels in the posh areas closer to the amazingly modern airport. Addis Ababa has everything it takes to become one of the major international destinations for visitors’ as well as conference attendants.
Wealthy as well as middle class visitors come descend on Addis at this time of the year. They may be out to discover new sites, new distractions, new foods and new drinks as well as a new climate where they can go with only T-shirts on their backs at the height of this European cold season. Addis Ababa is a city created by the Ethiopian gods to reflect the greatness of its cultures and faiths, and reveal its mysteries to foreigners who come to this legendary city. Writing about the modern face of Addis, a website called Brilliant Ethiopia, wrote that, “Addis more than enough history and sights to warrant more than just a stopover.” Most foreigners who come to Addis for the first time most fall in love with the city, its cultures and its people and decide to return any time of the year and during seasons of festivals in particular.
Addis Ababa is not only one of the biggest and most modern cities in Africa but also home to one of the biggest tourist attraction sites in Africa that are not yet fully exploited or fully revealed to outside as well as local visitors. In the last one or two decades, Addis Ababa has become one of the most important tourist destinations in Africa because of its history, legacy and its diplomatic importance as a city of major conferences that attract thousands of visitors every year. This description hardly provides the full picture of Addis Ababa’s importance or potentials as ‘a conference city’ that boasts of modern hotels, banking services, new hangouts for the growing number of African elite visitors and ordinary tourists.
In a recent Ethiopian Television (ETV) morning news program, the tourism and hotel authorities disclosed that the forthcoming AU conference in Addis Ababa would be a good opportunity to promote tourism in the Ethiopian capital by improving hotel services to the expected guests. According to him, Preparations have been going on for the last six months in order to inject creative ideas and improvements into the tourism and hotel sectors in Addis with short and long term expected benefits as far as boosting the number of visitors and the services they get from hotels as dual objectives are concerned.
“We have a long experience in accommodating guests to annual AU conferences…In fact we have a 35- year experience in providing hotel accommodations to high-level guests and visitors.” The chairman of the Addis Ababa hotels association was quoted as saying. According to him, the latest initiatives might include organizing visits to the guests in and around Addis Ababa’s satellite towns like Bishoftu and Adama, among others, as well as creating good impressions about the capital and its environs so that the guests would convey their positive impressions to their nearest and dearest back home and encourage new visitors to visit our tourism sites.
The face if Addis Ababa is changing fast as new tourism outlets are being added to the older sites, like the Ethnological Museum, Meskel Square, St. George Church and the National Museum of Ethiopia. These are historic sites located in Ethiopian capital where the country’s past is kept in order to hand it over to new generations. These are also concrete and tangible proofs of our country’s ancient glories and achievements that are still serving to cement our common identity and inspire new generations to greater deeds.
According to the local website TripAdvisor, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 2023; Best Places to Visit, “Sometimes referred to as the capital of Africa, Addis Ababa is a buzzing hub economic, social and political activity and home to such notable offices as the African Union and the United Nations Economic commission for Africa. The diversity of its people is reflected in the many churches mosques and museums, including the Ethiopian National Museum which houses the fossilized skeleton of Dinkinesh, or Lucy, the Australopithecine discovered in the area in the 1970s.”
According to another information, “Addis Ababa is the world’s third highest capital city at 2,665 meters above sea level. It is a city with a temperate climate that has not yet lost its original features to modernization with its attendant noises and chaos. It has not entirely lost its old bucolic nature, particularly on Sundays when the streets are engulfed in eerie calm and pedestrians are less hectic than ordinary days while hotels, bars and recreational facilities are unusually busy with fun-loving people who frequent the famous beer and raw meat joints where meat is eaten in the Ethiopian way: raw, peppered and minced, downed with mouthfuls of foaming draft beer.
Addis Ababa also boasts of several must-go sites such as the biggest open air market in Africa known by its Italian name as Mercato that was established by the fascist Italians who occupied the country for some five years in 1933 and established a separate market place for the indigenous population according to the racist policies of the colonial administration in place at that time. Mercato has now become perhaps the biggest modern Market place in Africa with state of the arts buildings housing large malls where the foreigners and local shoppers brush shoulders, enjoying the services of local restaurants and cafes as well as other recreational outlets. Mercato is a must go to place for Africans who visited it a long time to see how ago and do not have any idea how much it has changed now. Revisiting Mercato would not only be a moment of nostalgia but also an opportunity to see how the market and Addis Ababa at large have changed with time.
The Holy Trinity Church or Saint George Cathedral is a historic site where Emperor Menelik started his victorious journey to Adwa to face the invading Italian forces at the northern Ethiopian locality of Adwa where the decisive battles took place. There is a new building under construction a little farther from the cathedral as a reminiscence to ‘point zero’ of the long and difficult journey to Adwa, more than 100 km to the north. Nearby Piazza is also a historic place in its own right as the first modern boutiques, restaurants and cinema halls were built there during the Italian occupation and after.
North of Addis Ababa is emerging a new and state of the art park that has a Disneyland look and amazing facilities that have already given the old forest area a new attraction and a gathering and recreation center for Addis Ababans who flock to the place every weekends to savor the fresh air of the mountainous site as well as enjoy the sports facilities and the modern restaurants, that cater for local and foreign clienteles. Addis Ababa is also home to some of the best hotels in Africa with the classic Hilton and Sheraton hotels and new additions like Marriot Regency, Yod Abyssinia traditional restaurant, 2000 Habesha Restaurant as well as the historic Tomoca café where the best Ethiopian coffee is served and fashionable residents of Addis as well the literati and business people meet to discuss the latest trends in culture and politics, sipping Tomoca’s coffee at an old Italian-era building where the legendary Ethiopian smell of coffee is floating in and out of it night and day.
A short trip by modern taxis or buses would take visitors down to the Rift Valley town of Adama via Bishoftu town or ‘the town of the seven lakes’ where the annual Irreechaa festival in honor of Waqqa or the God of water, light and fertility, takes place. Both towns are budding and assuming new features that developers have invested to give them the services and amenities of bigger cities like Addis further north. These are towns that any visitor to Addis can see within an hour or two and enjoy the warm weather and the lakeside hotels with super-modern facilities.
According to the same TripAdvisor website Addis Ababa is great and famous for having a full day tour with hotel pick up and drop off, for enjoying Ethiopian food and drink culture, for a day trip to Debre Libanos monastery and for its inner city tours, among other things. Any visitor who has more time to spend on their hands, they can perhaps travel down to the picturesque Omo Valley and go to wildlife safaris at the Awash National Park and the Semien Mountains.
Addis Ababa is of course the departure points for all these and other tour areas and the positive impressions visitors or tourists get in the capital are bound to influence their moods as well as their decisions to go north or south according to their preferences. What make Addis Ababa so unique are not only its facilities as a ‘conference city’ but also the fact that almost every country on earth is represented by represented by its embassy, some of which are more than a century old while others were established in the last ten or so years. That is also what makes Addis Ababa the political capital of Africa that has remained so since the Organization of African Unity (the current African Union) was established back in the 1960s.
Addis Ababa is indeed a modernizing city but also a city whose tourism potentials are far from being adequately exploited. Traditionally, tourism development is considered to be the business of government institutions but this is far from the truth. The private sector needs to be increasingly engaged in the sector as it has started to do in recent years with the construction of hotels and other tourism and recreational facilities. As most hotel developers often say, the Addis Ababa and federal administrations need to provide various incentives to private developers so that tourism becomes one of the biggest if not the biggest income generating activities in the Ethiopian capital.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 15 FEBRUARY 2023
