Day 135

Sleeping location: Near the top of Erta Ale volcano, Ethiopia
Distance (km today/total): 0 / 10494
Estimated climb (m today/total): 0 / 70200
Lava lakes in the world: 8

Day in three words: Gate to hell 

Breakfast at the guesthouse was very tasty and we shovelled down muesli, bread, jam, honey eggs and coffee like we hadn’t eaten such things for months, which we hadn’t. We were picked up about quite early for the tour of the Danakil Depression we were going on with Beth and Sean, but due to a load of faff we didn’t actually leave town until late morning. The four of us were in a 4x4 with our driver, who had a name sort of like Teday but we mainly called him Terry as he seemed more like a Terry. We drove up out of Mekele then down a gradual, then less gradual, descent down a road that would have been incredible on a bike. The landscape was a very beautiful one of vigorously rolling hills down into rifts and cliffs. We came out on a flat plain at 1500m and stopped for lunch in a guesthouse in a town called Abala. Here we realised that the tour had six cars and about twenty farenji on it. It was weird to be among white faces again. It was also weird to be travelling by car again, it separates you from people and means you can’t really interact like you can on a bike. 

As we reached Abala we’d crossed into Afar province, having been in Tigray for the entirety of our time in Ethiopia up to that point. Immediately it felt different, the people were darker and often had braided hair and more traditional tribal outfits. They also don’t use the Amharic alphabet. We were in Afar for the whole of the tour, and the name felt apt; it’s out on the edge of Ethiopia and feels like another world. After lunch we descended through craggy ridges falling away to the east, down another amazing road for cycling. We should have arranged to meet the tour at the bottom. It got hotter and dryer as we descended, and felt very empty, rural and poor. There were lots of apparently wild camels, and we saw two baboons by the side of the road. At the bottom we came out on to a huge plain ringed by mountains, which switched between desert, semi desert and grassland seemingly at random before we entered a volcanic landscape of black rock and lava fields. It got more and more lifeless as we went on. When we stopped for a toilet break I managed to dislodge a pile of volcanic rock with flip flops on, cutting my foot in several places. It was a) the first day of the trip when I hadn’t had access to my first aid kit, and b) exactly what you want before two days of hiking and swimming in salt lakes.

After following a good tarmac road since Mekele we turned off onto dirt, although they were building a road through the nothingness with the help of the Chinese, who sure do love building roads. It was interesting to see the different stages of completion and how you build a road from scratch. Somehow people were living here, 50m below sea level and with no apparent water sources. The local kids seemed to know the places where the cars stopped and came over to beg food and water from the farenji. It was very hot, hitting 40 degrees at one point, although apparently in the hotter months 50 is common. We spent long sections of the dirt road playing Beth and Sean’s goat game, where you describe the plot of a film but replace all the characters with goats, and everyone else has to guess the film, but say the film name with “goat” replacing one of the words. Hours of fun.

We arrived at the “base camp” of Erta Ale volcano* about 6pm and enjoyed a nice desert sunset for the first time in a while. Dinner was basic carbs on carbs on carbs, with the virtue that there was loads available. After dark (and after the temperature dropped to merely the low thirties) we walked up the volcano over fields of crunchy lava. At the top it was very dark but you got the sense of the hugeness of the crater, and far below were patches of orange light and loud hissing noises. The air smelt strongly of sulphur. We could constantly see lava flying out of the orange sections. It was amazing to experience, the earth was tearing itself apart and its insides were coming out. I had never seen anything like it before, and likely won’t again as there are only 8 lava lakes like this on earth. To celebrate I had a wee into the crater. After 45 minutes we walked back down a bit to an area where a load of foam mattresses had been laid out for us, and sleep in one of the strangest locations I’ll ever experience.