Spread out over 55 square kilometers on the southern Ethiopian highlands, right on the cusp of the famously cultural Omo Valley, the Konso woreda (district) is a place of dusty ridges and hoodoos, vast canyons and gorges. The landscapes here are arid and hostile, dramatic and untouched, save of course, for the cascading villages of timber lean-tos and chiselled rock terraces that thrust Konso onto the UNESCO World Heritage List back in 2011. It’s hailed as one of the prime examples of a “Cultural Landscape”, where human habitation has shaped and sculpted the mountains over a period of more than four centuries.

The town of Konso itself is a rather unremarkable place, housing a small clutch of guesthouses and hotels. This is however from where the Konso tour guide expeditions leave, to see the encircled towns of the Konso people, complete with their megalithic generation stones and anthropomorphic carvings. Having done that, travellers also head for the Mago National Park, the Stephanie Wildlife Sanctuary, or the Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary – with its zebras and bushcrows and red-rich soils.