Six days in Ethiopia’s Danakil depression
The drive from the Abyssinian highlands down to the Danakil depression is like a descent into another world, a world of scarce resources and bare survival, but equally a world of heightened emotions. Also known as the Afar triangle in North-East Ethiopia, the Danakil is a unique place on Earth famous for the Dallol sulphur plains and the Erta Ale volcano, one of the very few active volcanoes closely approachable. It is also one of the lowest points at an altitude of around -155 below sea level, as well as the hottest with temperatures peaking at 60° Celsius. Home to the Afar tribe, a people with its own rules and customs removed from the tribulations of the rest of the world, the Danakil has exercised fascination for travellers, geologists and anthropologists alike.
Because of the harsh conditions and feared terrorist attacks due to ongoing tension between Ethiopia and bordering Eritrea, a trip to the Danakil needs to be planned carefully. Going there requires to travel in a 4x4 convoy (in case a car breaks down) with experienced guides and drivers and enough food and water to last for the six-day trip, bringing mattresses and sleeping gear, contracting local armed militia escorts and in some places, around Erta Ale in particular, paying army soldiers to give protection (four tourists had been killed the year before in January 2012). It is so remote that even the GPRS phone system doesn’t reach.
I was living in Addis Ababa at the time and took the opportunity of a visit from my old college friends Isabelle and Helene to organise a trip together with Gina, another friend from Addis. We were advised to be at least four people to maximize the use of a convoy and bring the cost of the trip down. The first leg of our journey took us from Mekele in Tigray (where we flew to) to Berhale, a non-descript town but a compulsory stop to get all the permits to enter Afar territory, going down the steep and curvy gravel road that even 4x4 vehicles had difficulties navigating (it has since been covered with asphalt).
Afar land
Berhale was the first town in Afar land and the end of the road, physically and psychologically. This is where new rules begin. The Afar people are renowned in Ethiopia for being an ethnic group of their own with different customs from the rest of the country. They are feared for their tradition of killing as many enemies as possible to be considered a man and for keeping their testicles as trophy. Traditionally, they are semi-nomadic pastoralists, their land is their house and for them entering their land requires permission and remuneration. They move from camp to camp in search of better grazing areas, leaving behind only the skeleton of a shelter. Unlike the orthodox highlanders, they are mainly Muslim even if they practice Islam in their own fashion. Women for instance do wear a headscarf and a long skirt, however, they leave their waste exposed similarly to Hindu women.
Beside being an administrative stop, Berhale is the first trading halt for the camel caravans carrying salt from Danakil to the main market in Mekele. During our one-hour stop there to pay entry fees and recruit a local militia man, we could watch at leisure the salt plates being offloaded one by one from the camels’ back and traded at a heavy discount for the caravans to generate a small amount of cash to afford the return to Mekele. We killed time in a ramshackle bar where we could get a coke, the safest drink to have in such a remote place, before moving on to our overnight camping site.
Isabelle’s face dropped when she realised that the so-called “Melabeday camping” on the program was no more than an Afar bed of wood and string planted outside in the middle of a rudimentary hamlet. Past the initial surprise, these string benches turned out to be the best solution, as they stayed cleaner than the old mattresses potentially infected with bugs offered as an alternative. Every night, we would lay our yoga mats on them and sleep outside watching the stars. A cook was on the trip too, whose job was to prepare food for the whole team using a portable propane hob. She was very good at concocting different meals out of the few ingredients she had at her disposal, and tried to vary the meals as much as possible. It was basic at its most basic but quite exotic. Infrastructure in this region is non existent, there is no place to stay, no hotel, no lodge, nor any organised camping site. For toilet or bathroom we had to use nature, a difficult exercise sometimes considering that there was no bush or place to hide within a radius of 200 metres. The Afar people are used to it, that’s what they have to do all the time, and in passing, Afari men do not stand up but squat to pee. They remain completely oblivious to the fact and ignore anybody in the same position.
Camel caravans
At dawn after our first night camping outside, I was woken up by some tinkling noise. I opened my eyes just in time to see in the distance a camel caravan passing by our makeshift camp. It was a biblical vision. In the half-dark, I could discern the shadow of camels walking at a slow pace against a backdrop of gentle hills slightly lit up by the moon crescent. A picture straight out of my childhood when in the exotic stories read to me, camel caravans were the vision of a far away land in bygone times.
For the Afari people, camel caravans are a harsh daily reality, as we saw the next day walking through a gorge following the same path as the caravans. In the course of it, one of Hélène’s shoes broke and we had to find a way to tie it back using her laces. Unfortunately for her, she had to bear the inconvenience for the rest of the trip as no one had thought of bringing spare shoes and buying a new pair wasn’t even a remote possibility. The shepherds leading the caravans are not too preoccupied with such luxury, they usually walk barefoot or with flip-flops and do not walk a mere 20 kilometres as we did, but much more, going from Mekele to the salt plains year after year, setting camps along the way and living mainly on porridge and milk since their arid land yields nothing else. Their livelihood has not changed in two thousand years, they transport salt back and forth until they are too warn out to continue.
However, their ancient way of living will not last forever as we came to realise at our next stop, the Hamadila camp near Dallol, which is quickly turning into a sedentary village due to the development of a potash mine. The potash deposits (used to produce fertilizer) are not new, they have attracted commercial interest ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when Italian mining companies started exploiting the area, which they did until the mid-1930s. After a long dormant period, interest for potash was renewed and the Ethiopian government recently granted new mining licences to international companies, who are redeveloping the former mine and building modern infrastructure around it. An asphalt road is being built which will enable trucks to drive directly to the mine and take potash for export through the port of Djibouti.
As a result, the Hamadila settlement is becoming a village with shops and restaurants, which, we were told, is a novelty in nomadic Afar land. Such development will forever change their way of life as herders will become more sedentary and the camel caravans will be replaced by trucks. The shops are run mainly by “outsider” Tigreans from the highlands who are more familiar with this type of trade and do not mix with local Afaris. From what we gathered when trying to buy a beer, Hamadila is divided into two parts: the Afari Muslim side where no alcohol can be sold, and the Christian Orthodox side occupied mainly by the Army and mine workers where beer can be discreetly consumed. As we stayed in the Muslim side, we had to venture across the main road to the army bar for our beer. It was a basic tent put up directly on the ground with a small generator powering a fridge and a TV. As we entered and realised that we were the only women around, we saw a group of local workers sitting in a far corner and totally absorbed in a Bollywood-style romantic comedy. They enjoyed it so much that they hardly noticed the other people around them. It must have been their mental escape in such a lonely and desolate place.
The stunning colours of Dallol
For visitors, Hamadila is the base from which to see the famous sulphur plains of the Dallol crater, one of the main attractions in the Danakil depression and a unique sight, unforgettable for its texture and rainbow of colours. We felt we had landed on another planet. All our senses were taken: the sight, the feeling, the smell, and even the salty taste as we breathed in vapors of evaporated salt water. Walking inside the crater felt almost like walking on fresh crispy snow with the sound of salt crackling under our feet (I wonder how much it gets damaged by visitors). The smell of sulphur, supposedly good for respiratory ailments, was overpowering and reminded me of the spas in central Italy where spring water is also the result of volcanic activity. However in Dallol, it was like the Earth had been stripped of its fertile surface.
The crater was formed by a volcanic explosion during which the basaltic magma merged with existing salt deposits, themselves the result of recurrent flooding from the Red Sea due to cracks in the East African Rift Zone. The last explosion which occured in 1926 and is technically known as a phreatic eruption, formed a 30 metres wide crater where current activity is in the form of hot brine springs. The salts washed out of the underlying layers, are transported to the surface by geothermally heated water and rapidly crystallise as the water evaporates. What is left is sulphur and potassium salts coloured by various ions, which create stunning shades of yellow, ochre, amber, turquoise green and copper red not seen anywhere else.
Salt plains
As the heat quickly rose, we had to make our way to the salt extraction plains, another unexpected sight. It was already midday and getting too hot. I had imagined a somewhat mechanised way of extracting salt, it was the opposite again. On an open area of about two hectares, workers in a squatting position, were turning up the Earth’s crust using rudimentary iron tools to cut out salt plates. It was hard labor in strenuous conditions in a picture unchanged in more than two millennia. The camels were simply resting, waiting to be loaded with some 50 or 60 newly-cut salt plates, amounting to a total of about 150 kilos. From the information I gathered (although I don’t know how reliable it was), a plate of 3 kilo was sold for about three Birr (12 euro cents) at the extraction site and about ten times that price at the market in Mekele.
We spent the rest of the afternoon lazing about in our shelter in Hamadila, chatting and drinking coffee, the heat preventing us from doing anything else. We were paid a visit by one of the local chiefs, a rather slender and vane character who looked much younger than his actual age (he said he was 50) and who was wearing the typical sarong of the region. He boasted about his three wives scattered around northern Afar and almost proposed to Gina, impressed by her red hair and fair Irish complexion. As he explained, a farenji (foreigner) fourth wife would be a definite asset. We later heard that he had come around to collect money for staying in the camp. The next morning, he was there for breakfast too. Our guides explained that in the Afar culture, private property does not exist and people share whatever they have with the rest of the community. An Afar man would not understand that food is not for everybody around. We didn’t see a single woman. They seemed to stay hidden, apart from fetching water, the one chore traditionally reserved to them.
On top of the volcano
The following day, we drove another seven hours through desert sand tracks to reach the Erta Ale volcano, the most isolated place on the border with Eritrea. Once again, we had to stop on the way to pay our due to the local chief and hire yet another militia man before reaching the base of the volcano. There we had to wait for dusk to start the three-hour walk up to the crater, finding protection from the suffocating heat in a basic shelter. The night walk was an adventure in itself. We could barely see anything with the feeble torch light we had brought for the trip (I would know now to bring more professional equipment) and blindly followed our local guide. The ground was hard like stone and covered with pebbles in some parts, which made us trip from time to time. We didn’t know we were actually walking on hardened lava, we only realised it the next day when we walked back down on the same path. The camel carrying our belonging and food for the night didn’t particularly like it, as it was quite reluctant to follow us and had to be pulled strongly to move ahead. Isabelle, not being the sporty type and fairly annoyed at not seeing where she was going, quickly lost patience and kept on asking where was “the f….g volcano?!”
As we got nearer to the peak, we suddenly saw a luminescent red light glowing through a cloud of smoke: it was the Erta Ale volcano firing in the distance. That was enough to trigger an emotion in us: we were going to see a live volcano! We took another turn and the light disappeared, but a few minutes later, we noticed the camp with its roofless stone shelters and army soldiers guarding it against likely terrorist attacks. We were going to continue on the track, past the camp, when instead, our guide took us down a steep and rocky path which completely confused me. It was only when flashing my torch around that I realised we were inside an extinct crater that had to be crossed to reach the live volcano. The experience was surreal, I had lost all sense of bearings and felt I was living a scene out of an adventure movie. A few minutes later, we were on the edge of the live crater, the highlight of any trip to the Danakil and a strong moment I didn’t think I would ever experience. The lava was in continuous movement like a thick boiling soup and would suddenly crack into a fire line or unexpectedly erupt into a firework that would last for a few minutes. In front of such an amazing sight, many pictures came to mind. The picture of hell as imagined by ancient writers and storytellers with the mouth of the volcano swallowing anyone venturing too close, or maybe a witch’s fire into which victims would disappear forever unnoticed. It was so fascinating that we sat there for hours watching it.
However as strange as it can sound next a volcano, it got very cold. The wind was so piercing and freezing that we decided to go back to the camp to get more clothes but to our surprise, the camel wasn’t there. It had stopped half way up and refused to move a step further. We were left to shiver for at least another hour, until another camel was sent down to collect our bags and we could finally tucked ourselves inside our sleeping bag for the rest of the night. At dawn the next morning, I realised that we had slept very close to the edge of the first crater crossed the night before to reach the live volcano; a false move walking during the night could have been fatal. We returned to the live crater to see it during daylight. It was a different sight: after the spectacular fireworks of the previous evening, we could now see the lava at work, slowly bubbling and waving, like a hot paste being blown into glass. The surrounding landscape, which we couldn’t see at night, now seemed like a desolate place, dominated by a shade of carbonated grey that nothing could animate but for the sparkle of the volcano.
As we walked back, we came across another eerie site: one of the dormant craters. In the middle of it, a tall lava chimney had formed from which smokey gases were still emanating. Erta Ale has a number of craters but only one is currently active. As we got back to the camp in full daylight, signs of life re-emerged: unfortunately, it was in the form of plastic bottles carelessly dumped on the ground by the recent visitors, treating the place as a huge rubbish bin. With this sight in mind, we took our walk back down to the base of Erta Ale where we had started the evening before.
Dead Sea in the Danakil
Our last stop on the trip was the Afdera salt lake, about three hours south of Erta Ale. After days of sand and dust, I was looking forward to a nice swim in the lake, which I was told was like the Dead Sea, so salty that we would float. The programme was enticing: a swim in the lake or nearby hot spring and dinner al fresco. The reality was otherwise: lake Afdera was covered by so much foam that we didn’t dare to swim. The hot spring was a tiny pond feeding into the lake that was too close to the road to be a relaxing place to bathe (in fact the water was far too hot considering the outside temperature of about 35°). Around the lake, were more salt plains but mechanised this time. As a matter of fact, this nascent salt industry was developing so fast that the urban infrastructure couldn’t catch up and the resulting town, a temporary home for salt workers, looked like a badly-maintained work camp with piles of rubbish lining the main street. Not a particularly nice place to conclude our trip! We ended up staying by the lakeside, trying to have dinner while getting rid of the many flies annoying us and sleeping straight on the ground with the intention of escaping as early as possible to drive back to Mekele.
