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.
