Crossing Ethiopia’s punishingly hot lowland on an epic tour gives and his family an adventure they’ll never forget.
Paul Schemm
We stumbled along in the darkness, the path a lighter grey amid the deep charcoal of the dried lava fields surrounding us. Up ahead was our goal, the dull, angry, red glow our of own personal Mount Doom just over the ridge. We were in the Danakil Depression, in Ethiopia, which has been called one of the hottest places on Earth.
In one hand I held a flashlight; in the other, the hand of my 7-year-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.
We were in what has been called one of the hottest places on Earth, so 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. Once just the province of dedicated Peace Corps workers and intrepid backpackers, newly built roads and new hotels are opening it up to the broader tourist market.
But even for the most veteran traveller to Ethiopia – who has already visited the baboon-infested northern highlands, the nearly inaccessible mountain monasteries of the Tigray Region or the rock-cut churches of Lalibela – 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 sulfur pools and the Erta Ale – or ‘‘smoking mountain’’ – the most accessible of the region’s volcanoes.
And we decided to take the kids along. There was my son, as well as a 9-year-old and 11-year-old who, well protected by sunblock and broad hats, had a great time. Despite the region’s forbidding reputation, a wellorganised tour in four-wheel-drive vehicles made for an unforgettable trip of four days.
The journey begins
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.
Yet despite the dangers, he spent weeks exploring the area, hunting wild game and charting the course of the Awash River. ‘‘They were a cheerful, happy people despite the incessant killing,’’ he noted.
Thankfully, the rigours of the journey are much less now. Even a few years ago, the lack of roads through the Danakil meant long, spine-rattling trips over dirt tracks in a four-wheeldrive vehicle. 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 meatand-chillies 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 were tents from a refugee camp of Eritreans who had fled across the not-very-distant border. It was a grim, hot, stony landscape. Clambering back into the air-conditioned cars was a relief.
Discovering Danakil
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 millennia.
This ‘‘white gold’’ is the principal resource of the Danakil. Once, it was used as currency by the Abyssinian Empire. There also is archaeological evidence that the ancient empire of Axum, a contemporary of the Roman Empire, traded in these salt slabs.
The slabs are chipped out of the ground, cut into uniformly sized tablets and loaded on to the camels every day.
At one time, the caravans would head all the way into Mek’ele, a trip of weeks, but now they generally just go to Berhale, our midday road stop, in a two-day, 74-kilometre trek. There, the salt is offloaded onto trucks and taken to the rest of the country.
Some 30,000 years ago, the Red Sea covered this low-lying region before eventually receding and leaving behind the thick salt deposits. Just before dusk, we arrived at the flats, 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. which look like a skating rink that stretches on to the horizon. A thin layer of water on the surface turns it into a mirror and reflects the images of the distant mountains.
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 US Midwest town after a snowfall, but really hot.
We took off our shoes to keep them from being damaged by the salt before venturing out across the slick, ridged surface.
The squad of Ethiopian soldiers that accompanied us to the flats – we were, after all, just a few dozen kilometres from the Eritrean border, which was