Inatye

Inatye is the kind of place a guide saves for last, because nothing afterwards quite matches it. We reached it on the third day of our Simien trek, walking up from Geech camp across high moorland that looked almost Scottish — tussock grass, giant lobelias standing like alien sentinels, the air thin enough at 4,000 metres that I had to stop talking mid-sentence to breathe. Then the moor simply ended. The grass ran to a clean edge and beyond it was nothing: a sheer escarpment dropping the better part of two kilometres into a haze of ridges and lowland that faded out toward Eritrea. Lia sat down well back from the edge. I, predictably, did not, and our guide Tesfaye gave me the patient look of a man who has watched many tourists not quite fall off this mountain.

The Edge of the Plateau

The Simien escarpment is the eroded edge of an ancient shield volcano, and at Inatye you stand at one of its highest, most dramatic points, at around 4,070 metres. The view is almost too much to hold — pinnacles and buttresses of dark rock march off in both directions, the famous Simien skyline that looks like a chessboard kicked over by a god, and beyond them the land falls away in stages into a soft brown infinity. Clouds boil up from the lowlands in the afternoon and pour over the edge like slow water, then evaporate before they reach you. I have stood on a lot of viewpoints. This is the one I think about.

We ate lunch up there — injera wrapped around lentils, gone cold in the pack but somehow exactly right — sitting on the grass a sensible distance back, while lammergeier vultures with three-metre wingspans rode the updraughts off the cliff face below us, close enough that I could hear the wind in their feathers.

Geladas on the Brink

The other inhabitants of Inatye are the geladas — the bleeding-heart baboons found nowhere on earth but the Ethiopian highlands. There were hundreds of them grazing the slopes near the summit, whole families shuffling along on their backsides pulling up grass, the big males with their lion-like manes and the bright bare patch of red skin on the chest that gives them their name. They are not predators and they have nothing to fear up here, so they ignore people almost completely.

I sat down a few metres from a foraging group and just watched. An infant tumbled over its mother’s back and was scooped up without her breaking the rhythm of her grazing. Two males had a brief, theatrical argument, all flashed teeth and lip-flips, then went back to eating as if nothing had happened. They grazed right up to the cliff edge and over it onto ledges I would not have trusted, entirely at home on a precipice that made my palms sweat. Lia, who had been nervous about the trek’s altitude all morning, forgot about it entirely the moment the geladas arrived.

Walking back to Geech as the light went gold, I understood why people who trek the Simiens get a particular faraway look when they describe it. It is not just the scale, though the scale is enormous. It is that the mountains are full of life right up to the edge of the impossible — baboons and vultures and wildflowers thriving on a precipice — and standing among them, slightly breathless, you feel briefly like you belong there too.

When to go: October to early December, just after the rains, when the highland air is clearest, the moorland is green, and the gelada herds are large and active. Nights are genuinely cold at this altitude, often near freezing, so come prepared with proper layers; acclimatise lower down before tackling the high viewpoints, and walk with a guide and scout as the park requires.