Danakil Depression (ኢትዮጵያ Part Six)

The day arrived that we would be sherpa'd from our pastoral Tigrean highlands home of the past week to Arrakis/Danakil. In whatever down time we had during our Gheralta interval, I would make it a point to dig further into Dune, feeling the deep connection that Herbert's world shared with my then local surrounds. While there was a kinship between the book and Tigray, it wasn't until we descended into Danakil that the connection was firmly made between that world of Herbert's and the insane terrain all around me. But, before I get too ahead of myself, lets focus on the the machine pictured above and below, which was tasked with getting us to Danakil and then on to Mekele after. It picked us up in the morning, ready for a full day drive into the depths of Danakil. Below is a close up of the Tigrean People's Liberation Front flag flying proudly at the front of our road warrior.

Part of the way down to Danakil, we stopped in the village of Negash on market day to take in the sights/sites of that oldest Islamic settlement in Africa. It was a striking scene in a few different ways, the most prominent being that there were two groups of believers (Christians, Muslims) present there that from an American perspective we have been conditioned to believe are at mortal odds with one another and will indeed kill each other the first chance they get. As we strolled the market, we noticed both groups being completely peaceful and friendly with one another and when I mentioned this to the drivers of our Danakil adventure, they didn't seem to get why it was a big deal. 

One of, if not the oldest mosque in Africa, getting restored via a joint Turkey/Ethiopia effort

Meets and greets among father Abraham's many sons

Shelter from the sun shower

So very tall on his way to market/mosque

Spice bags

Chili mounds

And salt piles (fresh from the salt flats we were about to spend a few days in)

From this shoe spread

Jan scored a few pairs of jellies

and proceeded to bro down excitedly with his yellow green assortment

Los Angeles Ethiopian connections made (look closely at their shirts)

The health benefits of the prickly pear, I think

Stopped for a coffee ceremony on the edge of Danakil

Melissa and the great G-d java

in complete, devoted communion

Jan in non-digital pixels (as originally shot by Melissa, at least), Janning himself into some deals on the other side of the world, no doubt

Our anti-coffe contingent, disturbed by the rampant coffee consumption/java worship all around him

Scenery upon our descent/temp climb

116 or so (Fahrenheit), and not nearly as hot as it got (It topped out around 52 or 53 degrees centigrade, which I think is around 130 Farenheit)

At last, we arrived/bottomed out at what I proclaimed to be the lowest place on earth, to be summarily corrected/chastised by our Israeli traveling cohorts that, in fact, the dead sea is indeed the lowest. Pictured below is part of the village of Dallol, while not the lowest place on earth, it is consistently the hottest and would be our home base /sweat lodge for the next few days.

Our humble abode, with said Israelis to the left of Steve and Melissa. We were all grimacing in disbelief at the heat blanket atop us, trying our best to stay out of the sun for the time being

Stickwork, through the lense of Melissa

And then me, film versus digital.

Gauzy view of the white hot sun from a home made cot

Said cot, and said vantage point, relaxing in black jeans in 130 degrees

Dirt home, shade where we could find it

For some reason, everyone started drinking hot coffee again (barf)

And then, we boarded our trusty Danakil machine to travel further afield into the great salt expanses of the region, in search of a large salt lake somehow not evaporated yet.

Because Danakil is very close to the sometimes contentious border with Eritrea (in fact, a few years before we visited, some European tourists were killed by Eritrean soldiers in the very area we were travelling in), we had to have armed guards with us the entire time we were travelling around in the Depression. Pictured below you will find some of our guards atop one of our caravan, all ready for our evening trip out to the storied salt lake. 

Donkey patrol

Afar tribesman and their wares,  more donk to behold

Soon enough, camel caravans came into view

Beautiful creatures, silently, proudly marching along through that intesely austere landscape

Again, film wins.

One of my favorite shots of the entire trip and it wasn't among the thousands I took. Less is more. Thanks Melissa and your thrift store cameras

We stopped midway to the lake to take in this utterly alien landscape

Arrakis was a everything I had hoped for, and more. Flat salt wastes as far as the eye could see, eradicating all distance, the horizon line seeming like we could reach out and touch it 

No water and the forms of its absence

Melissa, on the visual hunt with her film

Caught me marveling at it all

After navigating a maze of roads through the vast salt flats, we somehow arrived at the salt lake and walked out into it

Trager family portrait process, part one

Two

and three.

Close up on my body, less full of liquid and the disappeared horizon behind it

Careful steps further into double sun

One of our guards and a salty expanse. What a hunk

Considering the improbable nature of our then experience, strapped with an AK-47

Melissa, looking back to the shore

And then, with white gold

The surrealism of all of this came to head as the sun set

And the two suns sank/rose into one another

Photo trickery

Dusk-ride back to camp, the camel train never stops

I probably should have ridden up top

Food, sweat and Ethiopian TV before we walked across the street to the local military outpost to drink St. George with the Ethiopian army men stationed there. We continued to watch Ethio TV and talk with the locals into the wee small hours of the morning. Way too dark in that military St. George military zone to digitally capture the moments for your viewing pleasure, so you'll just have to trust me on the utterly bizarre time we had, drinking with military men by the light of a TV screen.

The night that we spent in Dallol was fraught with extreme heat (probably around 100 at midnight when I fully woke up, covered in sweat, just in my boxers) and random dust storms that would blow dirt right into my sleeping mouth. I arose just before dawn, and below was the scene after nite sweats

Some distance away from our camp, where I wasted some of my water due to not having a stillsuit

Back at the camp, creeped on our sleeping crew

Everybody up, in the (relative) coolness of the morning, before the sun scourge

Jan followed some Afar tribesmen to a kill zone and the following pictures describe that animal rendering process through the lens of his camera.

First blood

Bucketed

Full separation, into meat forms

After we all awoke and the goat was rendered, we disembarked from sweat camp for further wanderings around the wonders of that geothermically vibrant area and the forms and colors the innards of the earth can create when brought to the surface.

A more muted prelude to the eventual rainbow storm, but still fascinating forms to trod over

Teaming up on Steve's tripod through dust colors, in the fullness of punish-sun

The beginning of the color explosion (Melissa film version, if you couldn't tell the difference by now)

A plague

The earth, somehow (I will let the following dozen/baker's dozen or so picture speak for themselves of the fullness of the otherworldly splendor that resides in the Danakil Depression. Like a Yellowstone on Mescaline, with no protected walkways or guides or handrails. We just tromped over everything, hoping we would not sink into scalding hot pools of green earth acid. A seriously indescribable experience out there in the heat, so without further ado I present this crop of pictures...)

No regard for these natural wonders, especially when there was a photo op. While it sounds super BA to say that we had to have a military escort the entire time we were out there, the truth of that battalion of escorts was, they were a total goof troop the entire time.

Exhibit B

Trager family portrait above the earthy rainbow, squinting into the brutal sunlight

Variation on a theme (and Steve's shadow)

Hung back with this guy on the walk back

Melissa looked for a spot to pee, while I tried to distract the above mentioned guard

Melissa eventually found a spot and when the three of us stragglers walked to meet up with the rest of our group, the above mentioned guard took hold of my hand and we walked most of the way hand in hand to add to the surreal vibes of our time out there among all those colors of the earth.

We were then taken to a salt palace

A monument valley of salt

How long has it been there, slowing melting into the architectural shapes we got to enjoy?

Our final stop of our full day in Danakil was at the camp/work site of some of the hardest working people I have ever seen in my life: salt miners. Before we get to them, though, we will pause to take in another picture of these beautiful, proud creatures (their humps fully worn down by the weight of salt they bring out of that desert floor up into the highlands and beyond)

Now, to the miners themselves. They wack away at the earth, cutting rough rectangles with their rudimentary tools right into the ground at their feet.

Those rectangles of salt of the earth are then pried up via similarly rudimentary tools

And then hand-shaped into bricks to be bundled and eventually piled onto the waiting camels

Like this. Seeing how many of these bricks they pack onto the backs of the camels made a lot of sense of the absence of the humps we spotted upon our arrival out there

Shaping, bundling

Bundling, shaping (just look at the red shirted gentleman's bundling steeze!)

I think it was with him that I got into a "conversation" that consisted of saying "YES!" very loudly to each other dozens of times. Hilarious, but I also felt weird being in their work zone, shooting photos and treating their subsistence lifestyle (barely subsistence, actually. They spend a few weeks out there cutting and shaping salt bricks and then a few more weeks trekking it back to market, where they are able to sell it all for just enough to feed themselves, their animals and then make the trek out there again) like a tourist attraction. It seemed they were used to the attention from Faranjis, or they didn't much care about the attention (or both).

Melissa marveling at it all, camel adjacent

Another salt pile atop a waiting camel, the demands of legal tender

Steve squats and shoots some footage of these hard working gentlemen, a lot of which fell right in line with the generations before them that also plied the salt trade. We were told, by our guides as we found our way to the salt miner camp, that there is a myth propagated by the miners that the whole of Danakil used to be covered by gold, but then someone did something to really piss god off, who then turned the entire area into salt and the reason why these men use the simple tools they do to extract the salt is actually an act of faith.

Whatever the case may be, they continued to cut rectangles into the earth at an insane pace

Yes, that is a small kettle of coffee, boiling away for the entire work crew. It was the only liquid of theirs that I saw. Perhaps they have stillsuits? We left Danakil with perhaps more questions than answers about the lives somehow sustained there (among the people as well as the earthforms/colors), but thankful that we made the last minute decision to go there and to forever connect the imaginative worlds of Frank Herbert to my own lived experience. We headed back into the highlands for the last part of our trip to Ethiopia, which will be detailed in the next, final installment from our time spent in that special part of the horn of Africa.