Global Atlanta's Dispatch to South Africa was made possible through a partnership with Ethiopian Airlines. Via its nonstop flight from Atlanta to Addis Ababa, the airline offers local business and leisure travelers convenient one-stop access to the South African cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town.
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It was a short ride to the Skylight Hotel, but the shuttle was long enough to discover that one of my fellow passengers hailed from my hometown.
Of all the places in the world, landing Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was surreal enough for this boy from Columbus, Ga., but to meet an insurance executive who worked in my birth city’s only skyscraper, the Aflac tower, was a small-world moment for the books.
Neither one of us had come to Ethiopia to stay — he was headed to Malaysia, while I was going to South Africa — but both of us were stopping over, a new option to at least briefly experience a country that remains an enigma to many Americans despite its 130 million people and unrivaled air lift across Africa.
A portal to a new world
Two years ago, Atlanta became one of nine U.S. gateways for Ethiopian Airlines. The inaugural inbound flight was welcomed with a party more intense than I had ever seen at the Hartsfield-Jackson’s international terminal. In addition to dances featuring Ethiopian women clad in traditional white linen, a student poetry reading in Amharic, and speeches from dignitaries, the event boasted a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony complete with popcorn. (The Ethiopian highlands served as the birthplace of coffee — the story goes that goats ate the coffee cherries and began to hop about, prompting shepherds to grind their pits into a new brew.)
The airline, now 78 years in operation, invited the crowd to experience Ethiopia, and Mayor Andre Dickens, returning from his own sojourn to the African continent, gave an endorsement, particularly for Black travelers in Atlanta.
“They say I look like one of them,” the mayor said at the time, prompting laughter and applause from the audience.
Read our report on the May 2023 launch:
Still, Ethiopia can be a hard sell for the mainstream American. If they can find it on the map at all, they might also be privy to news about tribal conflicts that have embroiled the country for many years.
Acknowledging that seeing is believing, Ethiopian Airlines decided to do its part to boost tourism, implementing a stopover program that lets passengers with layovers of more than eight hours to stay overnight for no additional cost.
I sampled the program as I headed to South Africa on a reporting trip sponsored by the airline, which has worked with Global Atlanta since shortly after launching the nonstop flight.
After indulging in the comforts of the Cloud Nine business-class on the 13-hour flight, complete with lie-flat seats and sumptuous cuisine, my 24-hour Addis adventure began.
Unity Park
I opted for a truncated tour that took me only to Unity Park, an attraction constructed on the site of the Grand Palace, a complex set up in the late 19th-century under Emperor Menelek II. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed inaugurated the new venue in 2019. I had set up some later meetings in the city, so I decided against visiting the natural history museum where skeleton frgaments from “Lucy,” one of the world’s oldest hominins (Australopithecus afarensis), is on display.
Unity Park is equal parts national monument and theme park, a blend of kitschy charm and weighty history. You can walk quickly from a 19th-century imperial throne room to a newly constructed zoo enclosure for the black-maned Abyssinian lion and other native flora and fauna.
It may sound like ancient history, but Haileselassie, depicted in wax upon his throne, crowns from earlier emperors encased in glass nearby, ruled from 1930-74. Like previous rulers, he eventually fended off invasion and occupation by Italian imperialists and fascists. If you hear it once, you’ll hear it 10 times: Ethiopia is one of the only African countries that was never fully colonized.
And that seems to be the thrust of the park: presenting a proud, unified nation of diverse tribal lineages, an aspirational view, to be sure, given the country’s recent history, but an altogether worthy ideal.
A few highlights for me were the banquet hall, where vassals once brought tribute, the palace compound, and an exhibition on why Ethiopians trace the origins of their unique form of Christianity back to the Queen of Sheba’s fabled encounter with King Solomon in Jerusalem, as outlined in the Old Testament. Ethiopia, according to Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, is home to the Ark of the Covenant.
Meetings Around Addis
Aside from tourist attractions, my stopover gave me the opportunity to conduct some business followups in a city that seemed everywhere to be under construction.
My first took place over espresso at the offsite Skylight (there are two — one inside the terminal near the B gates, and another reachable by shuttle).
Tamiru Kassa, deputy country director for Emory University Ethiopia office, explained how the university, known for its teaching hospitals in Atlanta, was helping the country’s health ministry with research and capacity building to improve maternal health and nutrition. We stopped by the office, otherwise closed for the day, where he showed me health forms that could not be distributed to outlying regions due to road closures over sectarian violence.
After Mr. Kassa, I connected with Semhal Guesh, an entrepreneur and manufacturing executive I’d met in Atlanta. The founder of Kabana Design, Semhal came as a Mandela Washington Fellow, a participant in the Young African Leaders Initiative kick-started by President Obama and organized by the U.S. State Department.
A rare female factory owner, she drove me to her facility turning out fashionable leather bags, showcasing the child care center she’d inaugurated to reduce turnover in her largely female workforce.
Semhal has been a darling of USAID, which contracted with her during the pandemic to turn out sewn feminine products. She has also sought to build her business in the U.S., acting as a white-labeled contract manufacturer for brands in Nashville and beyond. Impressively, she has figured out how to juggle an operation that spans 300 employees in a limited-capital environment, building out a back-end raw materials supply chain, cross-border retail outfits and an international e-commerce operation, all on her own. A few months later, she came to Atlanta on Ethiopian Airlines, bringing samples in the belly of the plane.
After the tour, Semhal helped me end the day with a literal taste of Ethiopia, as we sipped tej, local honey wine, and partook of injera and vegetables at Yod Abyssinia, a packed restaurant celebrating local culture, with a stage featuring varieties of Ethiopian folk music.
Accessing the Stopover: Practical Items to Keep in Mind
The transfer program, complete with a stay in the Skylight, is free when you have a layover for more than eight hours and less than 24.
One caveat to keep in mind: According to others who have participated, you can’t qualify by intentionally booking your trip with a longer layover; there have to be no sooner flights available to reach your destination.
I would make sure to talk to both the ground crew before you leave Atlanta and the flight attendants about the logistics of the stopover, which were a bit unclear and were not explained upon arrival. Make sure to get instructions before you leave Atlanta about where to go and how to get stamped with your transit visa, which will be essential for you to leave the airport.
If you’re going to another African country and plan to stay in Ethiopia for more than 12 hours, make sure to carry proof of your yellow fever vaccination. In many African countries, this is a passport-sized paper booklet, appropriately yellow in color, but other forms of proof are acceptable from the U.S. My lack of foresight on this caused a delay at my onward destination, where I was required to get another jab that would not have been necessary if I were a pure transfer passenger in Ethiopia.
Other than that: Enjoy the chance to see a storied nation and dynamic economy, at no additional cost. For me, the stopover offered a chance to visit the capital of the African Union, a place that is linked to Atlanta in many ways, en route to South Africa, while breaking up the trip.
That’s something you can’t do with a nonstop flight.