Visited December 2024

The easiest way to visit this site is to have an organized one-day tour from Addis Ababa that takes you to Gombore component of <Melka Kunture and Balchit> and Tiya, another site on WHL. (You can combine it with the visit to Adadi Maryam church, the only rock-hewn church south of Addis.) Many Ethiopian guides and tour operators can organize it for you, you can find them on different social media; check some of them before making the final decision or ask people from this world heritage travellers’ community for some advice. Our (I travelled with a friend) guides to Melka Kunture and Tiya were very helpful and experienced.

The guide with a car and the driver took us from the airport and we… off to the south. We visited MK after Tiya. We started at a small museum located in the middle of the forest. By the bridge over Awash River there is a small handmade sign showing the way to the museum. No UNESCO plaque yet. The museum – they called this way – consists of three African style huts. We were lucky ‘cos there was a museum director at the site, and he was very, very happy to welcome us and show around the museum and the area. We did not pay any entrance fee, at the end of the tour we simply tipped him. There was not electricity in the museum, we used our torches to have a close view of the artefacts – stone and basalt tools, fragments of bones (some are copies, the most important pieces are in the National Museum in Addis Abeba). The director of the museum gave us so many details about the site and the paleolandscape, and after that he took us to open air conserved site, to some archaeological digs and remains (on the picture you can see different layers of sediments), to the river and the place where many artefacts were found. We planned to spend one hour at the site, but thanks to our guide and the site’s director we were there almost two hours and a half! And it was not boring. Of course a bit of imagination can help to imagine the past…

We still wanted to visit more than one component, and the director suggested Kella – just on the opposite side of the river, four kilometres to the north. According to the director there’s nothing to see there – and he was right! Just a field with the remains of the archaeological works. Balchit basalt field is not far but it takes at least one hour of walking one way, he said, so we skipped it ☹

If you want to visit the site by yourself, you can take the bus from Merkato Bus Station or Zenebe Bus Station – irregular hours of departures. To get to Melka Kunture village takes around two hours. It is not possible to visit Melka Kunture and Tiya in on day using public transportation – that’s what my guide told me.