Journal

A school built in 1876 for the children of liberated Africans, high on a mountain on Mahé, and a stop on the Indian Ocean slave route.

The first island of the group ever sighted, in 1609, and one whose heritage case rests on Creole tradition as much as on its wildlife.

A palm forest on Praslin kept almost in its original state, and home to the coco de mer, which produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom.

Ethiopia never became a diaspora through the Atlantic trade, and the reconnection it offers is a different one. There is also a warning to read.

Ethiopia keeps its own calendar, its own clock and its own alphabet, and it is the only African country never formally colonized.

Ethiopian eating is communal, seasoned by a fasting calendar most visitors never hear about, and built on a grain grown almost nowhere else.

Ethiopia has seven festivals and traditions on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, more than any other country in this series, with fixed dates.

On Ethiopia the honest answer to when you should go begins with where you are still allowed to, and then with two precisely dated festivals.

Stone terraces worked continuously for 21 generations, and carved wooden figures that UNESCO says record a tradition close to disappearing.

Where Lucy was reconstructed from 52 fragments in 1974, and one of the most important paleontological landscapes anywhere on earth.

The capital of a kingdom that traded with Rome and Persia as an equal, marked by giant stelae, in a Tigray region where flights and access remain disrupted.

A walled city said to be the fourth holiest in Islam, with 82 mosques inside it, and the most accessible of the World Heritage sites in this cluster.