Home » Ethiopia » One Year Africa: Maybe the Hot Season

I will go to Mekele, try to join a salt caravan and with them I want to go to the Danakil Depression.

One Year Africa: Maybe the Hot Season

Maarten de Boeck
2006-05-01 17:15:05

Displayed times (last time: )

return after their day shift, the last stop before the salt harvest.

That evening I wrote in my diary:
"Today it was a great journey. But.... I didn't encounter any heat. It wasn't hot. It wasn't difficult. It wasn't hard. It wasn't how I thought it would have been. It was a nice journey on foot through a beautiful landscape. It is stupid but I feel some disappointment because of that. It didn't feel like walking through one of the most inhospitable places of this planet, but still... it was a great journey."

In retrospect, my disappointment seemed ridiculous, but it wasn't. I had expected to cope with 40- 50 °C, but it was just bearable. Actually I had come to feel the heat. That was the reason why the Danakil had attracted me. I had loved to see Nick Middleton coping with extreme temperatures on television. I had liked to experience it by myself, but on the day we hiked to Hamed Ela it remained cloudy. Although it was still quite warm, it was not as extreme as I had imagined. I had expected it to be a true ordeal, but it wasn't. Unlike Nick Middleton, I didn't have to defy extreme temperatures nor the famous gara (hot and dry wind which Nick Middleton described as an inferno). Unlike Nick Middleton I wasn't shattered when I arrived in Hamed Ela, nor did I collapse. I was just fine.

At dawn we set out to reach the final destination, the salt mines. We journeyed across the flat plains, far below sea level. Less than an hour and a half later, we reached the salt harvest, a place which is called Regut by the salt traders, a place were the salt is harvested, cut in rectangles and loaded onto the camels for the journey back. The site spread over a length of about 100m, with men sitting down cutting the rough pieces in neat rectangles with their axes, and camels standing or sitting around. I saw how the salt crust was broken with big axe and detached from the soil with long poles, how the rough ...