JOURNEY TO AN ETHIOPIAN VOLCANO
An unforgettable trek to one of the hottest places on Earth
In one hand I held a flashlight; in the other, the hand of my sevenyear-old son, Ray, the youngest member of our intrepid troop that had set out to visit one of Africa’s most active volcanoes. Behind us stretched a faint row of flashlights and headlamps from the other members of the team. The camels carried our bags. The local guards carried old bolt-action rifles across their shoulders. The dried lava around us still radiated the punishing heat of the day.
This final trek up to the Erta Ale volcano had to be made after the blazing sun had set.
After a three-hour hike, we crested the ridge. Before us was the glowing caldera, filled with dancing fountains of lava.
Ethiopia is increasingly making its mark on the global tourist map. But even for the most veteran traveller to Ethiopia, the Danakil is in a category of its own.
This punishingly hot lowland, set between the mountains of the Tigray Region and the Eritrean Red Sea Coast, is home to immense salt flats that once were a major source of wealth for the medieval Abyssinian Empire, as well as colourful sulphur pools and the Erta Ale — or “smoking mountain” — the most accessible of the region’s volcanoes.
One of the first Europeans to make his way through the Danakil in the 1930s was the young British adventurer Wilfred Thesiger, who left behind the Danakil Diaries about his trips through a land that had meant the death of so many explorers before him, thanks to the exceptionally fierce and nomadic Afar people. He wrote about how, for the Afar, you weren’t truly a man until you had killed someone. “A man can marry before he has killed, but no other woman will sleep with him,” he wrote, adding: “They invariably castrate their victims, even if still alive.”
Thankfully, the rigours of the journey are much less now. New roads have been cut through the mountains from the neighbouring Tigray Region, so a journey of days is now a matter of hours.
We set off from Mek’ele, the capital of the region and a bustling, comparatively new town located a short flight from Addis Ababa. Our convoy consisted of two Toyota Land Cruisers for our seven-member group (me, my wife and son, and the other two children who had a parent each) and the guide, as well as a third vehicle carrying food, equipment and the cook.
The twisting road into the mountains above Mek’ele is a beautiful drive with sharp-faced peaks, wild vegetation and cool temperatures, but soon we were descending into the lowlands of the Afar Region and the heat set in.
The first stop was the town of Berhale, little more than a collection of makeshift huts made of flapping canvas and corrugated iron near the highway. Truckers, explorers and others must stop here and pick up the permits to head into the rest of the region. A string of restaurants popped up and our guide led us into one, where our group gathered around a communal platter of the grilled Ethiopian meat-and-chilies dish known as tibs, accompanied by shiro, a chickpea sauce that is a national staple. We washed it down with cold beers in the sweltering noon heat.
In the distance, there was a collection of tents from a refugee camp of Eritreans that had fled across the not-very-distant border.
By late afternoon, we were slammed by the first of many unforgettable sights of the Danakil — the camel caravans of the salt trade, a timeless image that probably hasn’t changed in centuries.
Moving along at a steady pace, hundreds of camels marched across the brown, flat landscape in single file, with a herder walking along every dozen animals or so. Each camel carried tablets of salt that have been carved out of the ground for the last two millenniums.
This “white gold” is the principal resource of the Danakil. There are about 700 registered salt miners from the Muslim Afar people and the Christian Tigrayans. They called out to us in Arabic, exchanged greetings and asked for cigarettes and water.
The salt is white and looks like snow, making the lines of camels walking across it seem especially surreal — a bit like a Nativity scene in a Midwest town after a snowfall, but really hot.
The next morning, it was on to Dallol, which has the unenviable reputation of being one of the hottest inhabited places on Earth, with an average temperature of 100 F (38 C). It is one of the lowest points on the continent, more than 91 metres below sea level.
The ground became a grim, cracked brown with streaks of colour until we reached a low rise that held bubbling sulphur springs. Cresting the hill, our eyes were assaulted by colours that should not exist in nature.
Bright yellow, red and orange mineral deposits surrounded bubbling pools as steam poured from vents in the ground.
It was just 8 a.m., but the heat was intense: a hot, humid, cloying sensation that had us sweating profusely in a matter of minutes. Faces soon turned red and clothes became suffocating. I felt for the guards, in their heavy green camouflage uniforms, but they seemed to be fine as they merrily took more selfies and helped my son clamber over the rough ground.
We drove south along the edge of the highlands to Erta Ale. Close to the mountains, it once again was a different Ethiopia on view, with green fields of barley and the local teff grain, as well as herds of cattle with immense, curving, prehistoric-looking horns walking beneath the acacia trees on the side of the road.
That night, we slept out under the stars again and dined on grilled lamb. There was an uncomfortable moment when a scorpion scurried out from the corner.
“Just kill it,” shouted one of my fellow parents, and it occurred to me that with at least three children around, it might be time to put aside my Buddhist sensibilities. I stomped on it with my Birkenstock-clad foot.
By late afternoon, we were slammed by the first of many unforgettable sights of the Danakil — the camel caravans of the salt trade, a timeless image that probably hasn’t changed in centuries.
The explorer Thesiger talked about the scorpions during his Danakil travels. He described putting on his pants with one inside after a dip in a lake and getting “severely stung.” He reserved his main ire, however, for the hairy tarantulas that bedevilled his campsites.
“They scuttle around the camp as soon as the sun sets,” he wrote.
Luckily, the tarantulas seemed to have gone the way of the big game that Thesiger so delighted in hunting during his travels.
The trip the next day to the volcano was a study in the declining quality of roads. We went from a broad, paved highway to a wide, gravel track before driving over the tortuous, bumpy lava fields at just a few miles per hour.
Finally, we reached a collection of round, stone huts with thatched roofs that became a kind of base camp for trips by foot up the volcano. Here, camel drivers, soldiers and local militia members often hang out until expeditions like ours come for the final three-hour, six-mile trek to the caldera.
With our cars left behind, it suddenly felt like we were in the true Thesiger territory from his 1930s diaries.
We hired three camels for the trip, one for our gear and the other two for anyone who grew tired during the hike. We also had a few militia members to accompany us.
While the Danakil today is nothing like it was in the time of Thesiger, when strangers were often killed on the spot and rival tribes were engaged in incessant raids against each other, it does have a bit of a lawless reputation, making armed accompaniment now an official requirement.
In 2012, a group of tourists was attacked at the volcano by armed tribesmen. Five died and two were kidnapped. In 2007, another group that included British Embassy staffers was also briefly taken hostage. Since then, there has been a security post installed at the volcano, and embassies have gradually lifted travel restrictions.
It was a rare cloudy day, so we were able to start the trek in the late afternoon instead of dusk, which is the traditional tactic to escape the sun.
We walked across a stark, beautiful landscape of dark-grey lava flows that contrasted sharply with tufts of straw-coloured grass.
The final hour of the trek was in pitch black lit by our flashlights and the distant glow of the volcano.
At the summit, our guide led us down into the plain around the crater and we scrambled over lava flows that were just a day or two old. Once, you could camp right next to the crater. In the past year, though, Erta Ale has become quite active. We only made it within about 70 yards of the bubbling cauldron before the heat kept us back.
We watched in awe as the lava leaped and fell back into the glowing bowl, making a hissing noise.
A last glimpse of the volcano showed it to be as active as ever, with red patches of lava, cooling in the plain, visible to us even as the sky brightened.