Strange days on rare Earth

Luke Jerod Kummer

• Last Updated: November 11. 2009 11:18PM UAE / November 11. 2009 7:18PM GMT

The road ceases to exist and now Hussein, a greying, whittled man who retired recently from Djibouti’s military, is piloting the hulking Landcruiser we’re in over sand and rock. The windscreen, and thus the outside world, vibrates as we rumble along.

We are on our way to see one of Djibouti’s dramatic, little-visited wonders – Lac Abbe, a place so remote and otherworldly it was used as the setting of the 1968 film Planet of the Apes. The whole country is a hotbed of volcanic and seismic activity and here steam churning underground has spewed up 50m-high pillars of limestone sediment that geologists call “chimneys”. My main curiosity is to see if this spot will live up to the words commonly used to describe it: “Martian”, “moonscape”, “alien”.

Ahead a series of blips emerge on the horizon. Sam, the bright-faced Djiboutian translator riding in back, says it’s an Afar village. Finally, I will come face to face with a people who have fascinated me since I met a supposed victim of their hospitality in Addis Ababa a year ago – the Afar were famous among early 20th- century explorers for castrating unwanted visitors.

As we close in the blips become dome-shaped huts sheathed in woven palm fronds. By the houses a few of the Afar stare at us stoically. I don’t imagine many vehicles come through here, not in this weather anyway. It’s mid-October and, in one of the hottest places on Earth, it’s about 40 degrees Celsius and dry as burnt toast.

Hussein slows the car as a crowd of a dozen men blocks our way, waving us to a halt. They clamour around the vehicle, yelling and banging on the glass. Though he is of Somali descent, Hussein learnt the Afar language while stationed here during Djibouti’s civil war in the 1990s. I notice one of the men’s incisors are filed to points. When another tries to engage me, I smile, remain silent and nod, as though I were not imagining the possibility of a future career as a male soprano.

The men squabble with Hussein, who translates to Sam, who whispers to me that in order to visit their land they want money. After plenty of confusion, followed by negotiation, one of them hops into the 4x4 as an additional guide and we drive off to where even these hardened nomads dare not dwell. The man tells us that it takes all day to walk from his village to Lac Abbe. Hussein thinks it will be only about an hour’s drive. I see no water or sign of life. There are some boulders ahead and Hussein revs the engine and then climbs them like in a Landcruiser ad.

As we level off over the rocks I see a caravan of hundreds of camels loping along, making the overland journey from Ethiopia to Dihil and then on to lorries to the port of Djibouti City, from where they will sail to Saudi Arabia. Hussein points beyond them and says in a rare English phrase, “Now I show you New York.” He zooms forward and a skyline of towering upright red rocks comes into view like Manhattan across the Hudson. But in this case that body of water is an expanse of sand and the structures are the product of geothermal pressure instead of capitalism. Yes, the scene could even be called Martian. We drive on and all I want to do is take photos but Hussein insists on reaching camp before dusk.

Camp is a series of Afar-style huts along a ridge. Sam and Hussein unpack, and I stride off to capture the landscape as the sun dives behind the chimneys. Sam decides he had better come with me, saying it’s dangerous. I walk towards the towers but no matter how many steps I take, crunching into the crusty surface, they never seem to get closer and I realise just how big and far away they are. A couple of boys with cloths draped over their shoulders are herding goats. An old man appears who seems none too pleased by my presence. We walk on until I spot a white object on the ground that turns out to be a jawbone. Sam points to something else, a figure tracking through the growing shadows. It’s a hyena. Sam presses me to return.

Back at the camp, we enter a barasti shelter as the cool darkness settles in. There is a family who stays here and tends what is the only lodging for visitors to the area. They say that we can sleep on cots outdoors for free if I browse their handicrafts in the morning. Sam unwraps a roast chicken that we brought with us and tears the meat from the bones, douses it with ketchup and folds it into baguettes – French colonisers left at least one positive legacy wherever they went. Gusts of wind hiss through the woven walls. We change into sarongs and plop onto mats, eating and smoking beside bundles of khat leaves. The wind mixes with Ethiopian accordion music on a battery-powered radio. We sleep beneath the stars and I wake every so often to swat away a bug, noticing each time how far the moon has travelled.

I am roused for the last time as the red dawn rises from the mountains behind us. I again begin pacing towards the surreal skyline. In half an hour, before I have made it all the way there, the Landcruiser pulls up beside me. It’s already hot and my mouth is dry but there’s nothing to drink. Hussein parks at a distance from the chimneys. He says the ground is too soft. A few metres away from the car I see what he means – with each step the floor sinks in like a loose drum skin. It can swallow a man whole, Hussein tells me through Sam.

Upon closer inspection, the chimneys look less like solid rock and more like immense termite creations. A rivulet of boiling water gurgles around us; a sulphuric fog hovering above green moss and grass. Now I understand how this eerie place is actually the lifeblood of the herders and their animals. In the distance I can see Lac Abbe, one of the saltiest bodies in the world, stained pink by a flock of flamingos.

Yes, it looks like an another planet, but I realise too that all of my concepts of otherworldliness are based on places on Earth that people describe as such. Lac Abbe may even be the most alien-looking I’ve seen. But perhaps the truth is that in all of the cosmos, it is the varied and wonderful orb that we inhabit that is truly strange.

lkummer@thenational.ae