Going to Extremes by Nick Middleton

Author:Nick Middleton [Middleton, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447232278
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

H O T T E S T

D a l l o l

E t h i o p i a

O N E

‘What is the purpose of your trip to Region Number Two?’ the man asked from behind his chipped wooden desk. His voice sounded perplexed, laced with a hint of suspicion.

‘I want to visit Dallol, the hottest town on Earth,’ I told him.

‘I see,’ he replied slowly, his speed of delivery implying quite the opposite.

Flyblown letters and lists embossed with official-looking purple stamps, all in Amharic, were pinned to the notice board behind him. He ran his gaze over a pile of similar papers on the desk in front of him and then looked at me.

‘Wouldn’t you rather visit some of our other regions?’ he asked, adopting a more positive tone. ‘All are more interesting and comfortable than the Afar region.’ He proceeded to list some of Ethiopia’s conventional tourist sites, places where I could see ancient rock-hewn churches, spectacular landscapes and amazing wildlife, all from the security of modern hotels and safari lodges.

I told him that I might try to take in some of these sites after my trip, but that my heart was set on visiting Dallol. The man surveyed the papers in front of him a second time, then shrugged, scribbled his signature across the bottom of my permit, and handed it to me across his desk. I folded the paper, put it in my pocket and shook the man’s hand. As I turned to leave, he said, ‘Good luck, and be careful.’ I was halfway out of the door to his office when he added finally, I think more to himself than to me, ‘I hope they don’t kill you.’

It was thus with a feeling of some anxiety that I spent my first few days in Addis Ababa traipsing round various government departments collecting documents giving me official permission to venture into the land of the Afars. My nervousness was not eased by any of the bureaucrats I had dealings with, all of whom obviously considered my venture to be foolhardy in the extreme.

My journey to the world’s hottest inhabited place had been the most difficult to plan of all my trips to the world’s climatological extremes. The main obstacle had been a distinct lack of information about the record-holding town of Dallol and its surrounds. The Danakil Desert appeared to be one of the least explored and least understood deserts anywhere on the planet, and I got an immediate inkling as to why from what little material I did find on the place. Situated at the northern end of the East African Rift Valley at its junction with the Red Sea, it was an area of vast salt flats, bubbling hot springs and active volcanoes belching smoke and sulphurous fumes. A friend in Australia sent me a quotation from Ladislas Farago in 1936: ‘The desert of Danakil is a part of the world that the Creator must have fashioned when he was in a bad mood.’ My friend said she thought this charming little quote summed it up rather well.

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