I Hiked to the World’s Most Dangerous Church 🇪🇹

Part two, and the errand completes: Harry delivers the goat and the cross to a priest at Abuna Yemata Guh in Tigray, a church cut into a cliff at 2,500 metres and reached barefoot without ropes.

The climb is the advertised content and the drive is the substance. A military checkpoint at five in the morning asks him for 4,000 birr; there is a fuel crisis, so his car is running on poor black-market petrol; hundreds of soldiers are walking the road after fighting the night before; and his driver tells him to hide his belongings. Somewhere in the middle of it they give a lift to an elderly woman walking alone, whose children and husband died in the war.

Someone falls on the cliff ahead of him. He survives, and the guides say he was two steps from dying.

Key moments

• [00:30] Five in the morning, and an eight-hour drive ahead.
• [01:00] A military checkpoint in the dark asks for 4,000 birr.
• [01:00] There’s a fuel crisis, so the car is running on black-market petrol he describes as poor.
• [01:39] Hundreds of soldiers walking the road with Kalashnikovs and M16s. There was fighting the previous night.
• [02:10] His driver tells him to hide everything in a compartment — and says in the same breath that Ethiopians are good people.
• [02:10] An abandoned tank at the roadside, twenty or thirty years old, which Harry reads as the area’s symbol.
• [02:45] An elderly woman walking alone on the road. They stop and give her a lift.
• [04:50] Her children died in the war and her husband is dead. She lives alone, is nearly blind, and can’t afford a hospital.
• [05:57] The driver’s figure for the war dead: over a million (from video – unverified; Harry’s own narration in the previous video gives 600,000).
• [05:57] Harry gives her $20–30. His reason, said to camera: she wasn’t asking for it.
• [06:31] The driver’s reaction is the part that stays with him — she will remember it for a year and pray for him.
• [07:07] Tigray now: people displaced who still haven’t gone home, and schools and infrastructure destroyed.
• [07:41] Tourism is in low season. The visitors who do come are German, Spanish, French and American.
• [08:14] An African toothbrush — a stick with the bark peeled back, no fluoride.
• [08:50] The roads are much better than he expected, and new.
• [12:31] The taxi driver charges him $25 extra for what the goat did to the car.
• [13:04] Wukro, and a half-built town where construction stopped during the war and never restarted. He says Mekelle is the same.
• [14:13] The landscape changes completely — he compares it to the Rockies, then to Mars.
• [14:45] Why the church is where it is: 2,500 metres up, built high because an enemy would struggle to find it.
• [15:20] The goat is delivered.
• [15:20] The priest has made the climb more than a thousand times.
• [16:26] And the cross necklace from Addis.
• [17:00] An aside on thumbnails, offered as advice to other YouTubers: get the subject and the location both in, and take the sunglasses off so your eyes show.
• [18:12] Why Ethiopians look distinct, per Harry: centuries of Arab and sub-Saharan African mixing.
• [18:44] His guide’s own war — hiding in a cave in the mountains, unable to get food or water, and civilians shot at in their houses.
• [19:17] Someone falls on the climb ahead of them.
• [19:50] He survived. The guides say he was two steps from dying, and can’t explain how he didn’t.
• [20:21] The cliff section, climbed barefoot with no ropes and no harness. Locals climb it at midnight without lights.
• [20:51] An American on the way down tells him to be vigilant.
• [21:25] Inside. Abuna means father, and the church is named for its founder.
• [21:58] Paintings of Mary, Jesus and the twelve apostles — nine and three, because three are depicted separately.
• [22:31] Manuscripts around 900 years old, written by hand on goatskin in Ge’ez, with ink made from charcoal.
• [23:02] His conclusion: fear is mental, everyone has their own risk tolerance, and the magic is on the far side of discomfort.
• [23:37] His guide’s, which is the more useful one: politics is spoiling tourism, and if you actually come to Tigray there is no political problem — what you hear and what you see are quite different.

Extracted pages

• Place: Tigray
• Country: Ethiopia
• Tips: Judge a place for yourself, Reward honesty and hard work