When To Visit Omo Valley
The best time to visit the Omo Valley is at the end of June to September or from November until early April. October tends to have slight rains that may at times hinder accessibility.
Temperatures in the Omo Valley range between 14°C and 41°C over the course of the year, with the hottest months of the year being June, July, and August.
How do I get to the Omo Valley? How do I travel from place to place?
Arba Minch is your springboard into the Omo Valley. Most visits will start with a short domestic flight to Arba Minch, with an overnight at Haile Resort before beginning your exploration of the Omo in earnest the following morning. From Arba Minch, you’ll be heading into the Omo on road via Toyota Landcruiser.
Over the next few days, you’ll be driving to different regions of the Omo, with drive times typically 2-4 hours at a time, depending on your itinerary. The drives are comfortable enough, but some of the roads are a bit bumpy.
It’s also possible to access the Omo via a drive down from Addis across the Rift Valley, where you can spend a couple of nights at the various lakeside lodges and resorts. Or, combine an inbound flight with an outbound drive if you want to experience the best of what southern Ethiopia has to offer (you might want to consider spending a couple of nights in the Bale Mountains as well).
Why should I visit the Omo Valley?
The Omo Valley, often more precisely called the Lower Omo Valley, is a place like no other. Home to a number of tribal communities, the variety and diversity of life – truly a melting pot of humanity – will blow you away. We think it’s a must-visit if you want to understand Ethiopia and Africa more broadly.
The concentration of experience and variety, often so juxtaposed to your own daily life, forces you to reflect on what it means to be human in today’s world.
The Lower Omo Valley region has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since the discovery of human remains dating back nearly 2.5 million years.
As you explore the region, you’ll discover fortified hilltop settlements, terraced fields, anthropomorphic grave-markers, and rock engravings dating back 5000 years.
The Omo also has some beautiful landscapes; Nech Sar National Park frames much of the region with mountains, lakes, and forests, and harbours 70-plus mammal species, as well as prodigious crocodiles and the endemic Nechisar nightjar – the latter arguably the world’s rarest bird.
How many Omo Valley Tribes can I see?
We’d recommend taking your time. Lift the veil of these communities and you’ll discover so much more, beyond the first-encounter experiences.
That being said, if you’re short on time you can see as many as 3-5 diverse tribes in a day and still get a flavor for this wonderful region, as long as you don’t mind spending some time in a vehicle.
We recommend spending a minimum of 6 days in the Omo Valley. Any less than that and you spend a lot of time in a vehicle and don’t have the opportunity to get beyond surface-level interactions. Most visits to the Omo don’t extend beyond a week or so.
