Prepare to go off radar. If you are headed there after landing at Addis Ababa, chances are your mobile won’t register. After the motorway south from Addis comes to an end you soon find yourself, though still on surfaced roads, well into the sticks, passing through spaced-out African towns and villages such as as Asela, birthplace of Olympic gold medalist Haile Gebrselassie. As you travel further and further south there’s less and less chance (depending on your service provider) of mobile signal. It’s around 250 km on metalled roads to the edge of the Bale Mountains National Park, then to reach Bale Mountain Lodge (see below) it’s still another 65 km on a dirt track.

Your approach to the lodge over the Saneti plateau will be one of the strangest drives of your life. It looks barren and empty at first glance – but (see below) this is far from the truth. At more than 4,000 m, this vast lava plateau with isolated peaks rising to 4,600 m is higher than most of the European Alps. Twilight of the Gods-style cloud formations above (or below) add to the drama.

The terrain is sometimes rock strewn and sometimes covered as far as the horizon with high-altitude plant species, such as the white heather, giant thistle shrubs and giant lobelias. At the southern edge of the plateau you descend the escarpment past cloud forest into kinder habitats, through a large and isolated village, Rira, and then after eight hours on the road you’re at the lodge, in tropical forest at about 1,600 m.

Building the lodge, which opened in 2014, was an extraordinary feat of persistence and ingenuity by English couple Guy and Yvonne Levine. Everything, literally everything except local vegetables and meat is bought in from Addis or produced on the spot. It has its own hydroelectric system and its own water supply. The wifi is intermittent and the daily changing menu is adequate, but unsurprisingly, there’s no choice. The stone cottages are also adequate but not luxurious. If you have a choice, book one of the imaginative tree houses. Perhaps the star feature of the operation is the quality of the intelligent and well-trained local guides who take you on local forest walks and on wildlife safaris up on the plateau. One worries that external forces are a threat to the lodge’s commercial survival: what if the mountain stream driving the hydroelectric turbine dries up? They do have back-up generators, but the government cuts off fuel supplies to the region if there’s unrest. And so on.

The National Park is one of Ethiopia’s top four birding places – which is saying something in a country renowned for its 1,000 bird species. Highlights of the Seneti Plateau include endemic species such the blue-winged goose and the augur buzzard. However, the show stopper is not a bird but a dog: in this case the rarest dog in the world, the Ethiopian wolf. It was under threat when we visited because of an outbreak of distemper. Two of the packs had been all but wiped out but another two were very much in evidence. People come from all over the world to see this elegant rufous-brown canine preying on the plateau’s huge population of mole rats, and it is relatively tame.

Don’t go to Bale Mountain Lodge for less than three nights – it’s not worth the drive. The price of around $285 per night includes guides, otherwise it would be over priced. More information in right hand column.