"Sankabar: 36km" proclaims the sign on the road out of Debark, ominously. Thomas and I have decided not to take the usual guide and horse, which must have increased the curiosity of the crowd of children following us. There is a large school in town, so they all have enough English to exchange names, ask where we come from and tell us what grade they're in. Somewhere behind us in the crowd our scout Girimai is chatting to his friends, happy no doubt to be off to see his family again.

We met Girimai less than half an hour ago, after paying our fees for eight days at the park office. He came to meet us at the hotel, carrying a small cloth bundle that can't possibly contain food for eight days, a Chinese-made AK-47 and an ancient leather-bound radio. We stop at a shop on the way out to buy fresh bread and some more spaghetti, the Ethiopian brand instead of Italian this time.

The crowd thins out as we get further from town, giving time for Amharic lessons. I point: "English, river. Amharinga?" to which the boy answers "wenz." His turn, he points to a Eucalyptus tree, "English, trree, Amharinga?" but I don't remember the answer.

A few kilometres further on we are alone, and we farangis struggle to keep up with Girimai, who is fit, lightly loaded and used to the thin 2800m air. We follow a well-used path down into a valley, then start our first real climb up a spur. I slow down to a crawl, and am soon being passed at a great rate by the everyday traffic of herdsmen and their stock, people moving goods by mule, people just walking.

I'm the last one to the top of the hill, and promptly join Thomas lying flat on the ground in the warm sun. Girimai sits talking with an old man and two young women. Marriage plans are being made for us. An opportunist busker arrives to play his mesenko, a strange bowed instrument with one string and no fretboard. Soon Girimai decides it's time to move on: we have a long way to go, although fortunately we don't have to follow the road's full 36km.

The road winds its way on across the sloping plateau, always up. Water supplies dwindle, and we're keen to stop when Girimai indicates drinking motions. But instead of finding a well, we sit down in the shade and tins of t'ella are brought out. "Two beer, one Birr" jokes Girimai, proud of his English, but we can't be persuaded to try any.

Up and up, on and on, sections on the road, shortcuts through trees and fields. Girimai starts to worry about the time so breaks get shorter and less frequent. I dream for hours of waterfalls, crystal pools, ocean waves, iced cocktails. Eventually we find a tiny trickle from a spring, I scoop a hundred mouthfuls with a tiny plastic cup, and the taste is exquisite.

At last we reach the escarpment lip, and the last few steps up the steep grassy slope are amply rewarded by the view. We look down onto the lowlands to the North, little farmed plateaus deeply carved separate by the rivers, all 2km below us. Following along the top, we reach Sankabar just before sunset.

All too soon we wake to the sound of Girimai's radio playing Ethiopian music. He's sitting nearby waiting for us to get up: our horse is ready. We swallowed our pride yesterday and arranged to hire one, citing the long days plus altitude as excuses.

But first some breakfast. I sit and coax my stove into action, lighting the stubborn fuel with some dry hay. I've no idea what we bought, it was sort of greenish... By jiggling the valve I find I can clear the gunge enough to keep the stove going. We make sweet tea with loose leaves, keeping the rest of the water for oats.

Our packs are tied together and onto the horse, and we set off with bruised hips wondering what happened to day two's torturous hip-belt. The road winds down through steep wooded hills, the sun is pleasantly warm in the cool dry air and there are big bushes of bright yellow little flowers at the side of the road.

Leaving instructions for the boy who is leading out horse, Girimai leads us down off the road to a rocky outcrop with a spectacular view across a deep valley. Opposite us is an amphitheatre of dark shaded cliffs; a river runs out into space at a corner between facets, but is only a trickle in this the dry season. Flocks of white birds swoop up to the cliffs, huge soaring Lammergeyers climb the morning updraft in slow motion, spot-lit by the sun.

A short steep climb brings us back to the road, and by early afternoon we reach Geech camp, a cluster of concrete and corrugated iron rondavels built for the scouts. A Japanese TV crew's camp is being set up by the ruins of the old scouts' huts, destroyed at some point in the 15 year civil war. Three large communal tents plus a scattering of little ones, crates of fizzy Ambo water in glass bottles...

After some lunch and a siesta in the sun, we accept an invitation for buna in one of the huts. Smoke from a small fire on the floor clogs the air; we join the circle of scouts sitting on goat skins. While we wait for the water to boil we are offered korro, crunchy roasted wheat kernels served in a traditional basketwork bowl. The woman tending the fire pours the coffee into four little patterned china cups without handles. The first cup is medium strength, with a slightly dusty taste reinforced by the smoke in the room. We hand the cups back to be carefully washed out and rinsed before being refilled for someone else.

At first we manage to keep a conversation going with Girimai's friends: Thomas is from Austria, Europe, Michael from South Africa; we go to Ras Dejen, then Adi Arkay; the friends are Muslims but he is a Christian, and very proud of having two wives... Then we run out of words, and step out of the discussion to examine our surroundings. The woman making the coffee has strikingly beautiful features, not at all African in the East and Southern sense, and her clothes have little cowrie shells sewn along the edges; a child guards the grain spread out to dry in the sun from the hungry animals; the orange cat we disturbed coming in has resettled itself comfortably.

On our third or fourth round of buna, now very watery, we politely excuse ourselves and walk up to the escarpment edge. The light is beautiful and the air is clear, the larger birds are all cruising their late-afternoon beat in the updraft. Lammergeyers sail past so close we can see them feeling out the beat currents with their wingtips. We dangle our feet and gaze.

Too soon it's time to think about supper. We walk back to camp where I nurse my stove alight while Thomas fetches some rather dubious water. It's dark and very cold by the time we have eaten, we hurry to pack up and get out sleeping bags. I walk to the edge of where the land falls away towards sunrise and find a spot sheltered by some trees, with a tuft of grass to stop me rolling down into the view.

Fast-forward: the viewpoint of Imit Gogo, a pair of falcons and hordes of screaming children, Girimai's wives and families at Chennek and Mekarebya, USAID food bags and a mountain of new school desks, endemic Walia ibex and Gelada baboons but no Simien foxes, sharing Spanish biscuits and injera for lunch, irrigation canals and eucalyptus groves. Two days have past.

We arrive at Ambikwo late in the afternoon, and are warmly received by a family Girimai knows. The constant attention we've had for four days is starting to irk me. Leaving Thomas to get on with making some sweet tea to hand around, I make the mistake of walking off alone to find 180° of privacy to, umm, relieve myself. Mistake, because this immediately draw the attention of all the children, and also gets me attacked by a dog on the way back. Luckily the only damage is a tear in my trouser leg.

The whole family lives in fear of the dogs, which must be constantly kept at bay with sticks and threats of stones. So of course we aren't allowed to cook and sleep outside, and space is made for us inside the large round hut. Waist-high loose stone walls support a conical thatch roof, one side is walled off as a nursery-cum-master bedroom, a frame at the other side serves as an indoor stable with a heated upstairs sleeping platform. The centre of attention is the making of injera, the traditional flat spongy sour pancake, on what must once have been the bottom of a 44-gallon drum. This shallow pan is set over a hollow in the floor, with a small straw fire under it. The chef pours the fermented batter onto the pan with a calabash gourd, then covers it with a basketwork lid and returns to tending the fickle fire until it is done. She puts the injera aside to be eaten later and starts cooking the next. Injera is the base of all traditional Ethiopian food, and can only be made with tef, a diminutive version of our modern wheat which can be ground much finer.

Meanwhile we cook up a huge pot of spaghetti, unsure if we'll be feeding a couple or a dozen. In the end nobody wants any, and we retire to what Thomas christened The Bridal Suite, a raised earth platform with fresh straw on it, feeling very full. Tomorrow is summit day for Ethiopia's highest peak Ras Dejen.

Girimai had been saying things about starting at 4am (10 o'clock Ethiopian time,) but he wakes me just at first light. I pack biscuits, sweets, film and my altimeter into pockets, pick up my camera and a water bottle, and follow Girimai uphill out of the village. Thomas has decided on a rest day, choosing cultural appreciation over blatant peak bagging.

Warm orange sunlight creeps down the steep drop we descended yesterday, and reaches us while we're winding in and out of numerous folds in the landscape, alternately warm and freezing. This early in the morning we meet only one other on the path, driving a mule with a sack of grain on its back up to some remote settlement. The altimeter climbs past the 4000m mark and I feel less and less energetic. Eventually we emerge onto a rock plateau with three long outcrops. Girimai says the middle one is highest so we scramble carefully up it, and by 11 we're posing for summit photos and having lunch atop Ras Dejen, about 4600m depending who you believe.

The view is rather disappointing, and made worse by blue-sky midday lighting combined with dry-season dust and lack of greenery. Girimai points out the valley that leads to Lalibela, about 10 days walk from here, and I make out the airy ridge walk to the North that Lonely Planet describes. But for today all we do is retrace our steps down to Ambikwo, finding much more traffic on the paths and water in the streams at this hour.

Thomas attended a funeral this morning in the village's little round church, nestled in its grove of eucalyptus trees and the only building with a tin roof. I find him back at the hut listening to shortwave news of the fascists in Austria, and being guarded by Girimai's son Mekele, who was leading the horse. We pass the afternoon drinking buna in the hut, and cook supper outside while it's still light. Our third little tin of packed-at-sea-level tomato paste again manages to spray both of us, confounding elaborate attempts to avoid this by a delayed-action mechanism. Outside in the light we find volunteers to try spaghetti, which perhaps isn't the best food to learn to use a spoon with!

The next morning we walk back West, branching off our previous path to aim for Arkwasiye. Girimai has a sister living somewhere along the way, so while he pays her a visit Thomas and I have a siesta in the sun. I open my eyes to find us surrounded by a huge crowd, all eager to shake hands now that I'm manifestly awake. Apparently it's a school group, as their teacher soon arrives to round them up.

At another stop on a windy saddle we share out some peanuts with Mekele and some children who just appeared. We had first given one of them just a few to try, but now that they all have some nobody likes them, and their embarrassment easily crosses the huge language and cultural gap between us.

Yet a few hours further on in Arkwasiye, there is a school and a horde of students eager to practise their English on us. Neither my Amharic nor their English numbers go far beyond ten, so they can tell me their ages and grades but to say 21 and 16 I resort to hand signals. The children understand perfectly my flashing all ten fingers twice then just one finger to mean 21, and find it hilarious, whereas the adults in markets and shops made no connection between three fingers and 3 Birr.

We aren't the only farangis in Arkwasiye - a German-Argentinian couple are busy pitching a tent as we arrive, and half the town has turned out to watch this bright turquoise house come out of nowhere. Next on the afternoon's program is English lessons with Thomas the Austrian, following one of the workbooks. Apparently he got much better ratings than the real teacher!

We can make out the places we visited along the escarpment that towers above us: Sankabar, Imit Gogo, Chennek. And had we known what to look for, the blades of rock that poke out of the hills here would have been easy to spot from above. The village of Awasa lies snuggled up against the sharpest of these outcrops, if you don't count a needle piercing a conical hill nearby. It's only a day's walk from the road at Adi Arkay, so the outside world has seeped in a little: there's a tea shop in a little grass hut where you can sit in the shade drinking tea with sugar out of glass cups and listening to music off tapes. We ran out of sugar a few days ago, and all the black tea, unsweetened oats and dusty black coffee since then has made sweetness quite appealing.

After filling our water bottles we continue North to Mollie, our last night's camp. We are taken into an unusually well-kept hut, which turns out to be an inn selling food, drink and shelter. Girimai at last persuades us to try some t'ella, and we manage to get the owner-barmaid to give us just a half-full calabash mug. It's truly foul stuff.

Dozing off after supper and a magnificent sunset, it takes me a while to figure out what that growing rumbling sound is.. by the time I do, there are sheep running past in all directions, and all I can do is cover my face and stick my legs in the air to make myself visible. But the greatest surprise was reserved for Thomas, who was listening to the radio so heard nothing until he was being trampled! Apparently a dog growled at the other end of the enclosure...

Day nine finds us a little shaken, but unharmed apart from a bent radio arial. We make a leisurely start and walk down the ridge, off the map and into Adi Arkay, where we re-aquaint ourselves with crowds, Pepsi, beds and Ethiopian buses that set out on winding mountain passes before sunrise.