An all day layover in Addis Ababa? Funny enough, this layover option has come up for us numerous times. Since we use airline miles for most of our international trips, and we sometimes don't book far enough advance, there are often limited options for flights at the lowest mileage trade-in. It's come up as an option coming home from Thailand and coming home from the Philippines and both times we reconfigured our trip so we could avoid the long layover and the city entirely. Why avoid Addis? Well, I'll be honest. From the quick research I had done in the past, Addis didn't seem like a city I was dying to go to, and I was a little intimidated about trying to spend a full day there. There didn't seem to be much to see and it didn't seem like the most tourist friendly city and I was honestly just a little overwhelmed by the idea of it. For this trip though, the only option home from Seoul (at the mileage point we wanted) was the long layover in Addis so it was either skip Seoul, or go to Addis. We decided to finally go to Addis. We had a 14 hr. layover and because that was a forced layover through Ethiopian Airlines, we were entitled to a free hotel room and a free transit visa so at least we wouldn't have to pay for that. We ended up not even going to our free hotel after all and didn't have a problem spending the day in Addis. Luckily, we found a tour group called GoAddis (that incidentally also was feature in an epsiode of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown) and they took great care of us!
We signed up for a half day tour with Go Addis and since it was an off-peak time, it was just the two of us, one other guy (European dude), the tour guide, and the driver. Our tour guide was super nice and friendly and took us to some great places!
First, we went to Shola Market where they sold all types of goods and spices. It was really neat going there with our guide because our guide was friendly with the vendors and was able to really show us things up close. It also helped that he would keep any aggressive salespeople at bay.
