Mulu Eco village has recently been awarded with the Best Special recognition in the 2022 tourism award organized by Oromia tourism commission for the second time. Eco village founder Mr. Abiy Alem received the award at the Skylight Hotel award ceremony.
The Eco village is located on Choke mountain, the third highest mountain in Ethiopia and it is the first community-wide eco-tourism village in our country. It is a place where a unique tourism experience that combines environmental protection, community wide tourism and unique tourism experience is held.
Food tourism, participatory tourism, eco-tourism, community tourism, sustainable tourism is a joint tourism that takes place all together.
The ancient volcanic Choke Mountain/Choke Terara rises to an elevation of 4,070m around 40km northeast of Debre Markos. Many tourists heading for the north never visit this area which remains largely undiscovered and untouched. Through building the Mulu Eco Lodge the owners wanted to bring sustainable Eco Tourism to the mountains and to create jobs for the locals in this rural area. The lodge is located in a substantial patch of indigenous forest that supports the Guereza monkey, Menelik’s bushbuck and the Common Duiker as well a variety of endemic birds and is surrounded by fields and houses of farmers and their families.. It is also close to a mountain river that forms many waterfalls. Valerie, was volunteering in Ethiopia in her gap year after high school graduation. “I fell in love with the country and its people and now I am living in the Choke Mountains in Ethiopia while doing a distance study of energy engineering in Germany, my origin.”
“In Ethiopia I got to know my partner, Abiy, an Ethiopian, who grew up as the son of a farmer in the mountains of our current project area. As a child he moved to the capital, later studied Ecotourism and always dreamed about going back to his roots and helping the people there.”
As a couple they moved to the mountains to start the project in July 2017 and opened the Mulu Eco Lodge in 2018. They brought the idea to the community but the main pillars of the project are the farmers themselves! About 200 farmers and their families are involved and benefiting from the Mulu Eco Lodge. which supports the surrounding farmers by buying food directly from them and follows their rhythm of eating meat only on special yearly holidays when the farmers slaughter an animal. There is a very strong community feeling between the farmers. The Eco Lodge is self sustainable and off-grid. Each guest room has a little solar home system which provides light and a 12V output for a phone charge. Mulu also has one central solar powered charging station.
A portion of their proceeds from tourism goes directly towards social projects run by their non-profit association Enat Ethiopia whose mission it is to strengthen the local populace primarily by providing better access to education. Current projects are supporting the regional primary school and a flour mill.
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muluecolodge@gmail.com