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Bahir Dar
For all the travellers the starting point of any visit to the Blue Nile falls, or to the Island of Lake Tana, is the bustling market town of Bahir Dar on the lake’s South-Eastern shore.

Bahir Dar: although quite pretty, and in fact one of the most beautiful towns of Ethiopia, with wide, palm lined avenues and gardens, overflowing with tropical vegetation, the town has little historic interest except easier access to clean hotels with hot and cold shower. Today’s Bahir Dar is the commercial center of the Amhara province.

Nearby the town is an old palace of Emperor Haile Selassie and beside the lake - modern Ethiopian Orthodox Church of St George. A Spanish Jesuit - Pero Paes, who came to unsuccessfully convert the country to Catholicism, built the fine old structure in the early 17th century.

Tis Issat - one of the fabled sources of the Nile
The Blue Nile Falls is a waterfall on the Blue Nile river that starts in the vicinity of Bahir Dar from Lake Tana.

The power of the Blue Nile may best be appreciated just 30 km downstream from the point where it leaves Lake Tana. In turn, the gentle deluge produces rainbows that shimmer across the gorge changing in the sunlight - and creating the perennial rainforest. The pillar of the clouds in the sky above, seen from afar, explains the local name for the falls ‘water that smokes’ - Tis Issat.

After crossing the castellated 17th century Portuguese bridge - the first stone bridge constructed in Ethiopia, built at the command of Emperor Susenyos - that spans a deep basaltic rift, a grassy rise must be climbed before the amazing waterfall finally appears, an unfaltering flow of the Nile into a boiling cataract and sending it foaming down into the gorge below.

Blue Nile falls, 400 meters wide in the rainy season and between 37 and 45 meters high, were finally discovered by the expedition of Bruce, Burton and Speke. The expedition confirmed that the White Nile originates in East Africa’s Lake Victoria, while the Blue Nile pours out of Ethiopia’s Lake Tana. The two rivers merge into the Nile proper at Khartoum in Sudan. In its 800 km course from Ethiopia to the plains of the Sudan the Blue Nile begins its journey with a thundering 50-meter cascade over Tissisat Falls.

Ethiopians claim that the true source of the Blue Nile is at the base of the Gishe Mountain. The place is considered to be holy and surrounded with exceptional cult. Ethiopians also believe that the Blue Nile is the Gihon River from the Book of Genesis one of the four holy rivers which flow out of Eden, with one of them flowing through the country of Kush meaning Ethiopia in Hebrew.

Nomadic Ethiopia Tours, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, tel. Etiopia (00251) 911121424, Email: info@nomadicethiopia.com,
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