Ethiopia

Few countries are so obscured by misconception as Ethiopia. Associated by most outsiders with drought and famine and often presumed to be a tract of featureless desert, it is in reality one of the wettest, most fertile and most scenically beautiful countries in Africa. Remembered for the murderous communist regime that held power in the 1970s and 1980s, and too often lumped together with its war-torn neighbours Sudan and Somalia, Ethiopia is in reality a peaceful, functioning democracy cohabited by two of the world’s oldest, and most mutually tolerant, Christian and Islamic communities.