The tourist travelling to Ethiopia is unlikely to be wholly unaware of the country's recent history or blind to its poverty and the signposts to many years of international aid; the white UN landcruisers; the market place pots and pans manufactured from USAID food tins; the NGO offices in every town. She may, on the other hand, initially bowled over by ancient marvels, quite easily avoid a close view of real hardship and see modernity, growth and increasing wealth exemplified in the great ribbons of new, Chinese built, highway; the bridge construction and the multi-storeyed housing blocks consuming slum areas in old Addis Ababa. A picture supported on the surface at least by a level of equanimity and optimism amongst people who remember when things were a lot worse.

Anyone wishing to understand contemporary Ethiopia better, over and above the staggering beauty of the countryside, its people, wildlife and unique monuments, picking up the country's recent history from the pictures of the 1980s famine still so imprinted on the minds of those old enough to remember, should read Peter Gill’s new book, ‘Famine and Foreigners, Ethiopia since Live Aid' (Oxford University Press).

Gill was the first TV journalist to reach the worst areas of hunger in the 1984 famine and one of those, besides Jonathan Dimbleby, whose television reports changed the whole story of aid and made us all aware of the politically charged imbalances between rich northern givers and poor southern receivers.

His new book is based on in depth research during 2008 and 2009, revisiting the famine affected areas of the eighties; interviewing people ranging from the Prime Minister, opposition leaders, diplomats, international advisers and commentators, to poor farmers, local health workers and, especially, women.

Ethiopia has embarked, more recently than us according to its Julian calendar, on the journey of the 3rd Millenium. For the traveller or the armchair observer wishing to bring the long history of the country up to date beyond its ancient stones, imperial past and the Band Aid legacy, this book provides the essential view; portraying Ethiopia's complicated politics, the lives of its poorest people, the ongoing issues and complications of international aid and the ever present spectre of famine lurking in the wings.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/

The Hamlin Fistula Hospital

Obstetric fistula is an affliction of poverty and ignorance, the destruction of a woman’s life, the loss of her health and dignity; her hopes for her future role as a mother and as a participating member of the society in which she lives. It is an injury exacerbated by superstition; belief in an influential spirit world tightly interwoven with lives ruled by seasons and by natural fortune or calamity. It is an accident of topography and time; of the vast space and distances of the African and Asian continents and the great void between life in a rural village and in the city. The poor woman may be a citizen of the same country as the rich owner of hotels and shopping malls but she is excluded from medicines and hospitals by her lack of knowledge, untold miles, destitution and fear.

Fistula is a medical condition, most prevalent in the poorest communities in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, especially Afghanistan. Child or teenage marriage, childbearing before the pelvis is fully developed; malnutrition, small stature and poor health, as well as high parity in older women, are all contributing factors to obstructed labour and obstetric fistula. It ruins the lives of women expected to bear children, usually many children, under the most primitive circumstances. It may be the first of those anticipated children who, stillborn, also condemns a small ill-fed and child-like mother to the outcast status of fistula patients. As she mourns the child who has died, she also discovers that she, and she imagines herself uniquely cursed, has been damaged appallingly by her long and fruitless labour. She is leaking urine, faeces, or both, uncontrollably. She stinks and is to be hidden from view by her family. She brings shame on herself and on them by her loss of the basic physical control learnt as a child. Somehow, this woman has, by conscious or unconscious omission or commission, offended the mysterious shadowy world of the spirits, who need constant propitiation in their ordering of human life according to an unknown design. Religion, whether animist, Christian or Moslem, makes little difference to such deeply ingrained folk beliefs,

In the world where women like most of us live; a world of monitored pregnancies, foetal and maternal monitors and birth plans; it is hard to imagine the gulf that separates us from that other woman, a young girl who understands neither her pregnancy nor the birth process. She can only rely on information from other women in the same position as herself. For us, a labour that lasts five, six days even, is inconceivable – how does a woman survive that except in the hope and expectation of the baby who will be born. That baby will be dead after 48 hours and can only then be expelled when the skull has become soft, fluid enough to squeeze through the bony narrow pelvic passage. Many mothers will die, the others will often wish they had, rather than survive the tearing of bladder or rectum when their dead baby’s head finally crowns and it is pulled from them by untrained hands. Fistula patients are survivors – the ones who escape the UN tables of death in childbirth. In Ethiopia a third of obstructed labours result in maternal death. In a 2005 study, it was estimated that 40,000 women in that country were living with obstetric fistula. In the UK the last case of fistula was at least 100 years ago; in the USA the unique fistula hospital in New York closed in 1895.

The Hamlin Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital is the only unique fistula hospital in the World today. Founded by two young doctors from Australia, the Drs Catherine and Reginald Hamlin in 1959, it has become a centre of care, excellence, outreach, training and new initiative. Now widowed, Dr Catherine Hamlin remains a guiding presence in the hospital, still operating at the age of 85 and teaching the delicate skills she and her husband developed. The doctors and nurses in the hospital and in its growing number of smaller outreach and treatment centres have a grand design and a determination not only to clear the backlog of fistula cases in Ethiopia but in the whole of Africa. They aim to reach other affected areas of the world through training programmes for doctors and nurses from other countries, as well as operating as often as possible themselves.

In the end prevention is the only real and best cure for obstetric fistula and the Hamlin Hospital is working on their dream, a training school for midwives for every rural community. This is still only part of their work. Their patients cannot in many cases ever return home. The repair work of doctors and nurses is not always enough. Even those who are easily cured will return to the hospital to have new babies and must be housed, often 2 to a bed, while they wait for assisted births – they are told to start towards the hospital as soon as they feel their baby move. Others who have nerve damage to their legs, either from the effects of obstructed labour or from years lying in a foetal position attempting to retain their bodily fluids, may need physiotherapy and rehabilitation before they can have an operation. Other still may be too injured ever to return home; they may need stomas, and the hospital must find the money for every stoma bag, several per week. They may be so ill that they require long-term and loving care until they finally die from the kidney or other organ failure that is a result of long-term damage. Many long-term patients are employed as nursing aides; others are trained in handcrafts or as productive members in micro-enterprises at a new rehabilitation/resettlement village, Desta Mender. The Hamlin Hospital refuses no one and constantly works to repair shattered lives as well as medical conditions.

Recently, with the interest of world commentators and the powerful advocacy of media personalities, in particular Oprah Winfrey, the veil of family shame and secrecy surrounding fistula has been lifted. Obstetric fistula has become a term to be understood and to shock women in safer parts of the world into action. We, after all, expect long lives and the facilities to give birth to our children in safety. Meanwhile the Addis Ababa Hospital must find the money to cover the whole circle of birth, life, care and death, including for patients who will be unable to return to a village where there is no hygiene and no water closer than an hour or two’s walk. They must feed and clothe and, they hope, train their chronic patients to be self- sufficient, as nursing aides, tailors, farmers, or cooks. They will remain the responsibility of the hospital for life, deprived of their expectations of family and friends and the familiarity of a native place.

The hospital, with help from around the world, embraces this responsibility as doctors and nurses juggle with medical duties and the endless administrative requirements of building and rebuilding a community as much as a medical facility. Those who die, usually of renal failure, are deeply mourned. Others are, with constant follow up and advice, able to return to husbands and families. They understand that they must seek help in future pregnancies in time to give birth by caesarian section. They have the chance to have live, lovingly greeted babies and are sent home and welcomed again with delight.

No one is ever turned away and women continue to arrive at the hospital – damaged and fearful, they have braved the opprobrium of fellow travelers, borrowed fares from family, church or who knows where, when they hear of the possibility of a cure for their terrible condition. These are young women whose lives are hard enough, their expected life span averages 41 years. They should not have to suffer the loss of life and dignity that women in richer countries know is their right. In the end it is money that counts most in the endless circle of ignorance, superstition, conditions of poverty and in the provision of education, medical expertise, medicines, care and essential services to combat and ultimately end a preventable condition such as obstetric fistula. Supporting the Addis Ababa Hospital and its work is one of the most effective ways to remove the stigma of fistula, the continued existence of which shames us all.
http://www.hamlinfistula.org

To the Volcano

‘Only twenty minutes to the top,’ says Tesfa, for the 5th time in the last hour or more and still agile himself, loaded with a growing weight of other people’s kit and cameras.

We scramble painfully over crumbling lava formations following an invisible path ever upwards in the darkness, our small torches lighting only the next unsteady step. 11 Kilometres sounded an easy evening stroll from the bottom but we feel like hobbits at our last gasp struggling across the burnt landscape of Mordor.
Suddenly we are there, the air colder and fresher at the summit, the sky lighter and a cutting wind blowing up dust between a handful of rocky shelters in a roughly improvised campsite. An unseen camel or two groans disagreeably in the lee of a makeshift wall where the dim crouched shapes of tribesmen, sleep upright, with blankets over heads and ancient rifles propped nearby.

Just a steep cliff to climb down, its base hidden in the deeper blackness but we shy away at the top, pit ponies without blindfolds, by this time the spark lost and anticipation for the goal ebbing away. We are exhausted. You can do it if you don't look down and we have been waiting for this moment, our goal the heart of the volcano, the only lava lake in the World. This is Erta Ale, the Mountain of Smoke, the perpetual flame at the centre of the killing heat of the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia
.
‘Can I hold your hand Tesfa?’

Another walk in the dark, crunching across the caldera, wobbling between shifting footholds and sudden holes in the surface, ever weaker torches failing faster even than sore feet and middle-aged knees. Then we are much, much too close to a ragged edge and can only stand swaying, not believing our eyes, dumbfounded but for the ‘O my Gods’ over and over again. Below us a glowing portal to the underworld; a seething, heaving, living lake of fire; a constant tidal swell breaking against the glowing cliffs of the pit as great gouts of bright molten rock bubble up and burst from the burning surface, hurled into the air like sea spray hitting rocks.
We are mesmerised. We may stand here, as smoke clouds billow away from us in the wind, until tomorrow, or the day after, or until the crack of doom. Rivers of fire run randomly across the seething pit in burnished burning ribbons and then die down; quieten down; sigh; build strength for another assault on the walls in an endless attempt to break out of the mountain and pour the contents of hell down its blackened slopes once more.

Saints and Stories

Initial irritation over female exclusion from many of the famous rock hewn churches and monasteries of Northern Tigray was at first sight of their inaccessible perches on the heights of vast rocky outcrops, transformed to sighs of relief. Guide book descriptions of ascents by rope; words and phrases like vertiginous; ‘not really dangerous if you take it slowly’; and, my favourite, ‘it’s amazing the grip a toe can get’; offered additional discouragement. As it is there are enough churches and monasteries all over Northern Ethiopia to keep travellers of both sexes happy for months; plenty require at least a serious scramble to reach them.



Visits to those populating the islands of Lake Tana mean a boat ride that may include a sight of hippopotamuses and enough bird life, including fleets of pelicans, to convert the least ornithologically minded. Fishermen row past in the uncomfortable looking semi-submerged papyrus boats that have been used here for millennia. Contemporary life in Ethiopia often seems barely a step ahead of the life and legends so gloriously painted on the walls of Orthodox churches and so alive to those who worship there.

Lake Tana is the largest in Ethiopia with monasteries and churches on at least 20 of its 37 islands. One of the most famous, open to all, is Ura Kidane Meret, actually on the Zege peninsula but more easily reached from the busy modern town of Bahir Dar by boat. Walking up the rocky path to the 16th and 17th century monastery, we meet al l the monks heading for a funeral on another island. Funerals in Ethiopia involve as many people as possible including the merest acquaintances and certainly all available ecclesiastics. The church, centre of the monastery buildings is a round building with stone and mud walls and a corrugated iron roof replacing the original thatch. The sweep of the bamboo ceiling as it curves round the circular ambulatory is like a great Noah’s Ark but the true treasure of the church is its interior, revealed when a flowered curtain is drawn aside.

It would take hours to see every detail and years to understand every story of the Orthodox canon, inspiration for the decoration of hundreds of the estimated 50,000 Ethiopian Orthodox churches and the greatest delight to the tourist. The truth is that they can be read like cartoons and are as lively as moving pictures; moving indeed in their faith and sincerity however gloriously far-fetched the stories behind them. It is easier, after a few days wondering how on earth first millennium builders achieved the monolithic rock churches of Lalibela, to suspend disbelief and accept tales of architecturally inspirational trips to heaven by their founder and an angelic night shift. After that the saints’ lives follow easily enough. After all, if you had stood praying on one leg for somewhere between 7 and 22 years, depending on who you believe, the spare limb might very well fall off. If as well you had only eaten one seed a year delivered by a bird you might think you deserved God rewarding such devotion with no less than three pairs of wings and, in some paintings, another for the detached leg.



A great favourite of the painters is Gebre Manfus Kiddus. Preaching one day to the animals in the desert, he found a bird dying of thirst. Lifting it, he allowed it to drink a tear from his eye and is usually depicted with a revived black bird flying round his head as he stands surrounded by lions and tigers. There are varying views of his hairy apparel; some say it is his beard, others furs; the beard is obviously the most likely. Ura Kidane Meret is no exception in its equally splendid depictions of the baddies of the bible and more alternative religious stories. They are, with the exception of the devil who has two, always painted with one eye only; thus Judas Iscariot is quickly spotted at the Last Supper. Somewhat unsuccessful attempts are made to make the wicked look so as they put martyrs gruesomely to death and dismember well-known saints by unexpected means in a most cheerful fashion.

Back on the lake, jets of the Ethiopian airforce overhead are doing their best with the sound barrier; a dramatic pointer to a faster, less spiritually imaginative world. In Bahir Dar at the basic but charming Ghion hotel, where weaver birds with bandit eye masks steal the breakfast off your plate, modernity has been defeated by a 24 hour power strike. Good luck as it turns out for the tourist. Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile and the famous Blue Nile falls, the Tis Isat or Water that Smokes, are nearby, now a mere trickle of their former self due to an upstream hydro-electric plant that supplies most of Northern Ethiopia. The total lack of any water in the hotel caused by no electricity ceased to matter as we walked towards the thunder of the falls in full tumbling spate. Due to the power shut down, the gates have had to be opened, a privilege nowadays only granted to occasional visiting heads of state.

An Ethiopian Anniversary

In the epilogue to his 1987 autobiography, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, CBE, DSO, wrote: ‘I realise that my exciting and happy childhood in Abyssinia, far removed from direct contact with the Western world, implanted in me a life-long craving for adventure among untamed tribes in unknown lands.’ He was born on 3rd June 1910 in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, then still known as Abyssinia. A distinctly tenuous claim to kinship with the man often seen as the last of the great explorers, my great aunt was married to his youngest brother, and this year’s centenary of his birth, were the inspirations or excuses for a tribute journey earlier this year in the footsteps of his first great expedition among the Afar tribes of the Danakil Desert in eastern Ethiopia.

His parents’ first child, ‘Billy’ was born in one of a cluster of airy tukuls, the local thatched huts that were the first buildings of the British Legation in Addis Ababa when his Father arrived there as British Minister. Ultimately a survivor of empire, Wilfred was, in many ways by nature and by nurture a Victorian, weaned on the stories of adventure, patriotism and derring do upon which the imperial fable also thrived. His Uncle, Lord Chelmsford, was Viceroy from 1916-21 and nine year old Billy had a taste of Viceregal India and the greater excitement of a tiger hunt in Jaipur to add to his store of memory on his family’s return to England via India when he was nine.

The tukuls have been preserved, bedded down in the mature hilltop gardens of today’s British Embassy, as permanent seemingly as the solid stone bungalow that was built thereafter as the first proper Residency and became Wilfred’s childhood home. The old whitewashed buildings now squat among a hotchpotch of later reflections of 20th century diplomatic architecture and are used as an IT learning suite for embassy staff, their dichotomous history highlighted by the glass case in a passage near the coffee machine preserving his hunting rifles. Above them on the walls hang paired pictures from the latest Embassy publication comparing and contrasting professional lives in Ethiopia and Britain.



Wilfred’s Father died soon after his family’s move home. It was as his son that Wilfred was invited back to Addis Ababa in 1930 to the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie. He spent the following month hunting game beside the River Awash on the edges of the Danakil Desert, a trip that inspired his exploration of the length of the river when he left Oxford in 1933. As he later described in ‘The Danakil Diaries’, Wilfred’s goal was to find the unknown end of the river in the crocodile ridden salt lakes of the mysterious Sultanate of Aussa, in what is now the Afar region of eastern Ethiopia. His expedition was the first to survive tribal appetites for killing and castration that made any male, however young, potential prey to trophy hunters from the constantly warring Danakil. These unfortunate prizes were the prerequisite of a man’s status and respect during an unsurprisingly abbreviated lifetime.

For Wilfred, his successful expedition, made in opposition to nervous local and colonial authorities, was the start of a career spent travelling and working in distant and inhospitable country among the brave and barbaric tribespeople who were his chosen companions. Little pleased throughout his long life with the machines and conveniences of modern invention, the way of life and travel of these indefatigable walkers and camel drivers suited a man whose unmistakable powerful physiognomy and determination masked a paradoxically emotional character jarred by the heedless speed of change in the 20th century.



The FCO still advises against travel in the Afar region, no keener on the place or its inhabitants than the contemporary authorities in Thesiger’s day. But, amid rumours of oil under the endless salt of the Danakil Depression, Chinese built roads are encroaching fast on the hidden desert. Ignoring an imagined snort of contempt from elsewhere at so cushioned a mode of transport, the mildly intrepid 4x4 traveller can concertina a potted version of his expedition into a couple of weeks. Ethiopian tourism posters accurately promote the unique natural and cultural wealth of the country but for the time being the haphazard Ethiopian travel infrastructure is less conducive to flightfuls of comfort loving vacationers and the more to those in search of modest adventure. Place names along the River Awash have changed over the years, even long term locals no longer remember those in use in the thirties but it remains easy enough to pick up the Thesiger trail and to add a pick and mix of other places of interest along the way.

Dipping in and out of the sites and scenes of the Danakil Diary from the main Addis-Djibouti highway the pace of change is exemplified by growing drifts of plastic waste and the wreckage of lorries at the sandy roadside. Bilen, where Wilfred camped and hunted for several days near the hot springs, is now close to the main road and offers thatched tourist lodges overlooking the impressive waterfalls. Pylons run side by side with the asphalt as straight as a die across the sand plains and the dusty acacia scrub that provides illegal raw material for charcoal, sold by the basketful along the road. The one street towns are lined with parked lorries, their drivers patronising roadside cafes and picking over heaps of second hand clothing. Supplied mainly by foreign charitable donations, it now provides an uncertain livelihood for hopeful profiteers.

Afar tribesmen with afro hairstyles stride among rusty football tables, their long traditional knives stuffed into the yellow canvas belts binding their sarongs, battered antique rifles slung over their shoulders. They herd flocks of sheep, goats and bony horned cattle between the lorries and watch suspiciously for any camera pointed in their direction while a constant accompaniment of Ethiopian pop interspersed with Beyonce and Tina Turner blares from speakers in the small shops selling music cds beside dvds of US action films and Bollywood hits.



Semera, the new capital of the Afar region is a bizarre Kafkaesque collection of contemporary concrete monstrosities apparently almost deserted in the middle of dusty wasteland. The lorries on the road snaking through its centre and an occasional dog or child are the only signs of life beyond the rubbish blowing about amongst the ugly blocks. It may be hard to capture what has been lost to the asphalt but the hungry march of modern infrastructure has barely reached more isolated areas of the desert. Away from the main road much of Afar life would be recognisable to a traveller from 1933. Images photo-shopped to a dateless monochrome show the same groups of hide covered igloo shaped huts, the dry stone walls and tower tombs that Thesiger photographed punctuating the desert landscape. Shifting nomad settlements are still dependent on their flocks of cattle, goats and the camels used to transport great tiles of cut salt from the desert to the markets of Northern Ethiopia.

The varied wildlife recorded in detailed daily hunting stories in the Diary is these days less profuse. Wilfred shot for the pot, for trophies and to provide British museums with the skins of rare and unknown birds and animals. Later in life he gave up game shooting altogether although he continued to kill for food when necessary. We were thrilled to come home with contemporary trophies, the distant snapshots of animals like the Abyssinian wolf. Rare species that now need all the help they can get if they are to survive, not the effects of solitary and careful hunters but those of increased population and human encroachment on their natural habitats, something Wilfred would have deplored.



Still, shy Soemerings gazelle watch the road from the camouflaging shadows on rocky promontories while oryx and ostriches shimmer in and out of focus in the watery mirages of the sands. Warthogs mind their own uncharming business and Hamadryas baboons pause to stare equitably at the inhabitants of slowing cars before resuming their grooming rituals. The local recyclers; shy jackals, just spotted among grey tufa rocks; marabou storks like Dickensian clerks and strutting yellow headed Egyptian vultures, tidy up road kill and all the human detritus they can digest. In the national park areas along the Awash, ibex and oryx, recorded by Thesiger as often too tame to shoot, remain equally careless of passing human traffic.

Beyond Semera we departed from Wilfred’s route albeit not, we felt, the spirit of his expedition. We headed north, still on the road but deeper into the Danakil, towards the great salt lake and hot springs of Afdera. The town here has the temporary feel of a construction camp. Workers from all over the country gather here to work in the salt pans during the dry season and to provide the manpower that will push the road further into the desert. We slept here in one of the basic dormitory hotels that provide the only travel accommodation off, and sometimes on, the main tourist trails in Ethiopia. With roughly partitioned cubicles, board or rope beds and some sort of water and lavatory arrangement, best avoided where possible, this is essentially camping without the bother of a tent. We moved our beds outside to sleep in sleeping bags under the stars with the extraordinary desert wind that rises after dark screaming round us and hurling dust into every crevice and camera lens like some malevolent banshee. An early morning wash in the hot springs only going some way towards redistributing the dirt as, for the sake of our local guides rather than innate modesty, we attempted fully clothed baths in almost boiling water.

Plunging deeper into the desert, we drove through tumbled heaps and folds of black tufa towards the volcano of Erta Ale, the mountain of smoke that contains the only lava lake in the world. With constant stops to haul one or other car out of the soft sandy track in this desolate and dead landscape, we began to understand why two cars are an essential expense for safe travel here. The tribespeople too, however keen to earn tourist dollars, have not cast aside their formerly murderous intentions towards strangers to the extent of outright friendliness or helpfulness, quite apart from problems of common language with other Ethiopians as much as foreigners. Their rifles, however, if not quite the antique French models seen by Wilfred, are relatively speaking as old, with barrels often so squashed that they appear likely to damage their user more lethally than his prey. Life in so freakishly extreme a region is, even without tribal killings, poor, short and hard. Wilfred’s experiences doctoring local injuries and sicknesses were mirrored in pleas to us in every village for our medicines. We salved poisoned hands and fingers, unknown and unexplainable sicknesses, hardly treatable with savlon and paracetamol and hoped for miracle cures.



The lava lake of Erta Ale and its Danakil companion, the Dallol Depression, the lowest place in Africa, are geological wonders of the world. They exist in an almost unimaginable landscape that lends credibility to cinematic rendition of Tolkien’s Mordor and renaissance visions of hell. The walk tog the lava lake, active since the 1960s, feels like a Thesiger style challenge, crunching uphill over broken lava fields for some 11km from the village huts of El Dom, an impermanent looking settlement at the base of the mountain. We started in the late afternoon, arriving at the summit well after dark, weary and footsore enough from the climb almost to give up on the final torchlit cliff descent to reach the lava lake. The reward, however, for that final effort to see it in the dark, is unique beyond superlatives as one stands on the edge of the crater literally awestruck. Below, in a living, moving, sighing, sea of lava, sudden spumes of fiery molten rock break the heaving surface and light the crater of a real life mountain of doom.

After a night spent camping among the rocks on very stony ground surrounded by the sounds of snorting, farting pack camels, we were woken finally by the daybreak prayers of their devout moslem drivers. We retraced our steps down the mountain a little stiffly to an unexpected and restorative breakfast of night-cooled beer with syrupy pancakes prepared by the expedition cook, aka ‘the king’. Heading on towards Dalol the landscape becomes less hostile under a ridge of gently puffing volcanoes. New eruptions are expected after a period of quiet and the kettle seems to be simmering. Blackness gives way to sand, cattle and goats on occasional patches of green scrub where the fat bladders of dead sea fruit grow in oily little islands of moisture giving way to great oceans of stones like endless south coast beaches. Patterned salt flats take over, heading to the horizon, their emptiness broken by occasional camel trains carrying salt or returning with loads of fodder and fuel.

If Erta Ale seems like the end of everything, the growing salty excrescences of Dalol feel more like a beginning however belied by the malodorous stench of sulphur. Early morning visits are essential as the rising vapours becoming insupportable when the sun reaches its zenith and the salty slopes make uncomfortable walking in the heat. The multicoloured salt crust is studded with mushroom like formations or bulbous stalagmites and chimneys in saffrons, greens and purples. Steam from the constantly boiling underlying water hisses from fissures and steams in pools where the crust is thin and where walkers stepping unwarily have been scalded breaking through. After, we drive across whiter than white flat fields of salt so hard that cars and trucks leave no trace on their surface.



Returning by a somewhat roundabout route to Wilfred’s Aussa tracks, our long drive was mildly anaesthetised by chewing qat, the local narcotic leaf so beloved by Ethiopians and their Yemeni neighbours across the Red Sea. Thesiger visited Harar, the epicentre of the qat culture, in the footsteps of Richard Burton, but unlike his fellow explorer, does not mention the drug and the traditions that surround its consumption. Not a drinker either he may have disdained the drug or perhaps tried it to no effect. It seemed to us to be little more than a greener alternative to chewing gum although it encourages a wakefulness and loss of appetite that clearly suits local lorry drivers involved in its fast carriage to lucrative markets in Addis Ababa. Horrific accident levels may be accounted by the early effects of the drug being later replaced by consuming sleepiness.

Wilfred’s quest ended in Aussa. In his day the Sultanate was one of nomadic villages and rich marshland round the salt lakes at the end of the Awash in an area where the town of Assaita now sprawls. The romance and menace of his first moonlit meeting in a jungle clearing with the powerful Sultan, who literally held Wilfred’s life in his hands, is hard to conjure these days. Dust storms continually hide the road into the town and the green river fed land beyond is busy with the small homesteads of settled farmers and their herds. The border with Djibouti crosses Lake Abbe, the last of the Aussa lakes and Assaita, the pre-Semera administrative capital of the Afar region, has the frontier feel of those places in any country that are at the end of the road. The town is a centre for Afar traders and has its own curious charm with mazes of small streets leading to market places and the delightfully dumpy green and white striped minarets of the mosques, signals to the overwhelming faith of the local communities.



The nearest lakes to the town can be reached by a track starting some 10km outside the town and once theoretically motorable. These days the bridges over the river and its small tributaries have gone and one must walk and wade to reach the crocodile infested lake shore. In the dry season the river is a shallow enough obstacle and the crocodiles not tempted inland but it remains a long enough march between mimosa trees alive with kingfishers, hornbills and red-breasted swallows, warthogs and baboons crisscrossing the path. Good looking Afar men, sadly camera shy, walk swiftly by and step lightly across the occasional narrow log crossings over streams. Equally disliked by local goats and foreign tourists, it is possible instead, for a fee, to be carried across the water by a strong local. This procedure involves total loss of dignity, getting very wet and becoming an object of considerable entertainment and ridicule for the perambulatory audience.

In the end, a trifle damp still, one reaches the first lake, greeted by several hundred crocodiles that approach swiftly from the nearest sand bank. Wilfred hated crocodiles and, standing nervously jumping at every wavelet lapping the shore; it is easy to understand why. For him, achieving his goal was something of an anti climax coloured by continuing responsibility for his men and animals, and, aged only 23, the question of what to do next. Our expedition being a tamer, more middle-aged affair and unprepared for more extensive negotiation of the lakes, we took our tourist photographs to prove we had been there, turned back to the comforts of the four wheel drive and a speedy onward journey towards other gentle adventures in Harar and the Bale Mountains.