by Virginia Barder
A guide to first time visitors…
- Many passports don’t need visas in advance of visiting (http://www.ethioembassy.org.uk/consular/Visa.htm) – if you arrive without a visa, follow the signs to “baggage reclaim” and you’ll come to a sign saying ‘Visa on Arrival’ and go into a little office. I had a $20 note with me – I don’t know if they accept other currency or credit cards. They say you need passport photos, but didn’t use mine. As well to have them just in case.
- You then come out the other door of the office, and then join the queue for passport control where you will get a stamp on your visa.
- You are then in the baggage hall.
- I picked up some Birr here while waiting for the baggage – I changed some cash (sterling) and don’t know if they accept credit cards here.
- There are free baggage trolleys.
- Once you have collected your baggage, you will be approached by men who look like porters, but who in fact check your baggage tags against your baggage.
- You then arrive at customs. Here you have to put all your luggage through a scanner. They are mainly checking for electronic items or other things you might be going to sell in Ethiopia.
- It says you also need to fill in currency forms here, but I didn’t have to.
- You then come out into the arrivals hall, and Owen will be found on your left in the yellow café drinking coffee and mixing with other ex pats.
(Note by Owen: many of the international hotels such as the Sheraton, Hilton, Queen of Sheba, Jupiter etc have booths after customs where you can get a hotel shuttle bus to your hotel. And there are plenty of taxis outside – the yellow taxis tend to be a bit better maintained, and bit more expensive, than the blue and white ones.)
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I changed most of my money to Birr at Addis Ababa airport. There were ony two places (both hotels) that I cam across where payment was expected in dollars. I’d take enough dollars to pay for a few nights’ accommodation, but otherwise, it’s perfectly easy to change sterling into Birr at the airport. I’d somehow got it into my head that I could only change dollars, so changed sterling into dollars before leaving the UK. Obviously, it’s going to depend what exchange rates are doing at any given time, but this two-stage exchange turned out to have been a bad move, losing me about 10%.
Flying back from Burundi in April 2009 we had a night in Addis Ababa compliments of Ethiopia Air – it took over 2 hours though waiting in queues for the transit visa to leave the airport and get to the bus provided to take us to our hotel for the night. We all hoped to get out and see some of Addis Ababa as our arrival time was early evening – this amount of time spent there standing around in one queue to another was quite disappointing really – a few of us diehards were still keen though to get out and see of the city so we jumped in a taxi about 11pm for a couple of hours being shown around the city centre – lots of people sleeping on the streets, barking dogs and police with automatic machine guns!
Our hotel was quite okay – Ararat Hotel but met a couple on the plane who said their overnight stay provided by Ethiopia Air on their way back from Malawi was ‘awful’ – cant remember the name of it.
Our return to Addis Ababa airport the next day was another 2 hours waiting in queues to get back through customs…but excellent views flying over Africa during daylight.