Djiboutian Journey — Part 2
Autumn break travels



Autumn break at the International School of Djibouti has commenced, and I was fortunate to be able to kick it off with a weekend trip with several colleagues. The trip had a two-fold purpose: to visit a French Ph.D. student who is a friend of a couple of my colleagues, and who is doing ethnographic research in villages throughout Djibouti, and to get out of the city and visit several of Djibouti’s small towns and natural wonders. The trip began with a lovely ferry ride from one of Djibouti’s main ports across the Gulf of Tadjourah to the small city of Tadjourah, a city full of pretty whitewashed buildings with pale blue trim, which give the place a tranquil look and feel. After lunch on the seaside patio of a hotel restaurant at one of the few lodging places in town, we made our way northeast along the coast to the small port city of Obock, where the first French colony in Djibouti was located. It was fascinating to drive up and down some of Obock’s hilly, bumpy dirt streets and get some glimpses of life in this small but growing city — both corporations and NGOs have some existing, and are bringing in more people and erecting buildings, drawn by the port and the nearby Markazi refugee camp.
En route to, and again while backtracking following our visit to Obock, we passed the Markazi refugee camp, one of three refugee camps in Djibouti. Markazi hosts refugees from Yemen, while the other two camps host primarily refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea (all neighbor countries of Djibouti). While driving past the sprawling complex of tents spread across this hot, windy, desert site, and during many moments since, I have been imagining what the experiences of the people there are like as, following their departure from Yemen — where a very violent was has raged for the past five years — they make a temporary home in this place and try to plan and prepare for uncertain futures.
Our next stop was at a place about as different as one could imagine from Markazi: Sables Blancs (White Sands), a small, beautiful beach where we spent a couple of hours enjoying the warm, calm waters and white sand beach. Upon our arrival we ran into a couple of students from our school and their parents, but we did not make them do any lessons at the beach ;) Punctuating the tranquility there was the sudden appearance of a pack of around 30 baboons scrambling along the side of the cliff that rings the bay encircling Sables Blancs. They made their way down to the beach and, as they appeared to be about to run out to the area where beach chairs full of visitors are clustered, we heard what sounded like gunshots but turned out to be red and green fireworks, a much more humane (and tourist-friendly :) ) way of getting the baboons to run back up the cliff! The fireworks proved to be effective, at least for the remainder of our time there — while we saw a line of baboon face peering over the edge of the cliff down at the beach, the baboons did not make a return descent down the cliff.


Once the sun began to set we returned to Tadjourah, where we ended up staying at the hotel where we’d eaten lunch earlier in the day, and walked into town under the bright stars — it is always a treat to get out of larger cities and their light pollution to places where the stars appear to shine more clearly and brightly — to find some street food for dinner. Waking up early the next morning, one colleague, Mariam, and I were rewarded with getting to witness the most brilliant and massive red sunrise I’ve seen in years. Following breakfast on the seaside patio we hit the road for Ardoukoba Volcano, Lac Assal, and Lake Ghoubet.

Ardoukoba is a volcano that last erupted in 1978, and where visitors can now hike through lava tubes to see and feel steam coming out of vents, and high up along old lava flows, from which you can see Lac Assal in the distance. We continued to Lac Assal, a salt lake that is also the lowest elevation point on the entire African continent. The lake is fed by a salty hot spring, and is surrounded by a huge solid slab of salt that has been left as water has evaporated from the lake over the years. Tom, REI-Djibouti’s Country Director and our extraordinary tour guide, explained that the brown dirt that now borders some of the salt slab is what’s left behind when the salt is extracted, which has been happening for the past ~30 years. Soon after arriving at Lac Assal we encountered a couple who recently moved to Djibouti from India for work, and who a couple of us had recently been in touch with to schedule a school visit since they are planning to send their children to our school. These types of unplanned encounters are turning out to be quite common in this country which, although it has a population of around one million people, often feels like a village due to its small geographical footprint and how that facilitates unexpected encounters with friends and acquaintances (and for expats, this happens especially within the expat community). Several of us made our way carefully — the floor of the salt lake is very sharp, so you need to wear sandals or shoes and try not to touch it with the rest of your body to avoid getting cut by the small, jagged salt crystals — across the shallow salt ledge out to the deeper part of the lake, where you are extremely buoyant and can effortlessly float near the surface of the water on your back or stomach, a very strange (in a wonderful way :) ) sensation.




Our final stop of the trip was at a scenic overlook at the top of a cliff bordering one edge of Lake Ghoubet, a small, very deep cove with deep blue waters that is separated from the Gulf of Tadjourah by a very strong current. I was again thankful to be with an experienced guide who thought to bring a couple of large bottles of fresh water that we used to rinse off the salt coating our bodies prior to the ~2-hour car ride back to Djibouti City. We packed a lot into the 36 hours of this trip, and it was an excellent opportunity to get to know some of my coworkers better and see some of the most interesting places among the many found in this tiny country that contains numerous natural and cultural highlights.
