Hello!
I arrive to Gondar on 24th February and I’m interested in doing 3/4 days trekking through Simien Mountains from 26th February aprox. I travel alone, but I want to do trekking with more people and share the costs of guide, scout, cook, mules, etc..
If somebody is interested do not hesitate to contact me!
May be you are able to do it with out fixer. Community houses on the way camp sites prepared local meals every night and morning at Geech and Chenek. Localy made foods cost us about 40 - 50 birr per meal.
Our organizer provided us transport from Gondar to Simien mountain pass Sankaber were dropped at Ayna Meda, got picked from Chenek at the end of trekking. We got our sleeping bag and tent from our fixer.
You can contact them
simienmountain@gmail.com
The terrain is quite physically demanding, but as an inexperienced trekker, I found that after doing a few weeks’ training before departure and then taking the walk at a steady pace, it was much more of an enjoyable experience
Avoid Simien_trekking to organize your trip
Apr 14, 2015, 7:09 AM
The trips was just incredibly poorly organized. We stopped on the two hour journey for the cook to do shopping, our car then broke (was fixed by driver) and when we get to the camp site in the evening we find that we have a 1 man tent when we specifically asked for a 3 man and were promised it as we had luggage. The fixer knew that and didn't make an effort to rectify the situation until we complained. Another couple had the same issue.
Can't believe the company also gave a guide who could barely speak any english - everyone else seemed to have guides who spoke at least enough to share what was going on and what we were seeing. For us, we were shown what was low country, high country, and goats - yeah, that doesn't make for a great experience. Thank God, there was no type of emergency or anything where we would have actually needed his help.
On day 2, Johannes (Yohannes W on tripadvisor) had told us that our bag would be wrapped in plastic and transported on the mules to the second sight. Needless to say, it was most definitely not wrapped and it was broken on the way there.
Day 3, we finally look forward to getting to a bed an shower and the van that was supposed to pick us up has completely broken down. We were lucky to be able to get a lift with a different tour company who charged us (Johannes did reimburse us).
If it had been just us, I might have thought I was being difficult, but the other couple with us had an equally bad experience with this tour company. Go with someone else and you will likely have a far better experience; from what other people told us on the trip, ethio-simienmountains seems to have been a good experience.
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