Clear the fog over Addis Ababa

The world map in FOG starts completely hidden. Only the streets you physically walk get revealed. Addis makes you earn every one of them, uphill, at altitude.

The altitude is the whole story

Addis Ababa sits at roughly 2,350 to 2,500 metres, and the ground never stops tilting. The city climbs from the Mercato and Piassa area up toward Entoto in the north, and that climb is real. If you have just landed, your first day of walking will feel wrong. Short breath on a modest slope. That passes after a few days, but plan the first walks short and flat and do not be proud about it.

The layout radiates from a handful of big junctions rather than following a grid. Meskel Square, Arat Kilo, Sidist Kilo, Mexico Square, Megenagna. Roads run between them and everything else hangs off those spokes. Between the main roads the residential lanes turn to unpaved tracks fast, and the condominium blocks on the edges are laid out in long repetitive rows. The light rail line cuts a straight north to south spine that is easy to walk alongside.

An afternoon that clears real area

Start at Meskel Square and walk north up Churchill Avenue toward Piassa. It is uphill, but steadily so. From Piassa you can drop west into the edges of Mercato, one of the largest markets on the continent, where the streets are dense and clearing them is fast because everything is packed close together. Keep your phone away and your wits about you there.

Coming back, swing east through Arat Kilo, past the National Museum and the university area at Sidist Kilo, then down toward Kazanchis. That loop covers the old core, the institutional district and a decent slice of the market side, and it will show up on the map as a genuinely filled-in patch rather than a thread. Four or five hours with coffee stops, and the coffee stops are the point.

Why the fog behaves oddly here

Two things make Addis different. First, the unpaved lanes. A lot of residential ground between the main roads is not on any tidy street grid, so walking there fills the map in irregular blotches rather than clean lines. That looks good, actually. It reads as territory rather than a route.

Second, the weather has a hard season. The big rains from late June through September are not a light drizzle. Afternoon downpours turn dirt roads to mud and the walking season effectively narrows to October through May. That is a long dry window, so it is not a disaster, but it does mean the map fills in bursts.

FOG shows the percentage of any city you have lit up. In Addis that number moves slowly because the metro is large and hilly, and quickly if you concentrate on the dense core. Both approaches are valid. The core is the satisfying one.

What FOG does and does not do

FOG runs with the app closed and the screen off, so a normal day of moving around the city gets recorded without you thinking about it. No account, no sign-up, no cloud, no analytics, no ads, no tracking. The map never leaves your phone, and you can export your data.

Free to start. One purchase, USD 5.99, unlocks unlimited ranks, every character and history import. No subscription. History import handles Google Timeline exports and GPX files, so old walks and runs around Addis can be painted in at once.

Ranks go Wanderer, Scout, Pathfinder, Explorer, Voyager, and they climb with the area you have actually covered. There is also a collection of 241 countries, 3,390 regions and 7,342 named places, and nothing in it can be collected except by standing in the place itself.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

FOG is free to explore. No account, no subscription, and your map never leaves your phone.

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