African hellhole shows
British explorer the extreme side of the continent
Monday, March 8, 2004
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| Sun News
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Going to extremes is a life-altering experience for Nick
Middleton. Middleton spends half his time at Oxford University
teaching geography and the other half venturing to remote,
extreme locations—the hottest, coldest, wettest and
driest places on the planet.
In this interview with the National Geographic Channel, Middleton
recalls his trip to Dallol, in northern Ethiopia's Danakil
Depression—where the temperature tops 93° Fahrenheit
(34° Celsius) every day of the year. And in the summer,
not a single day dips below 104° Fahrenheit (40° Celsius).
Why seek out places with extreme, inhospitable climate?
Most British people have an obsession with weather. I once
had a conversation with a guy in a bar in Mozambique and he
asked about weather in England. I told him that we got rain,
snow, and hail. He then said to me, "If I went to England
I would die in one day." It got me thinking what it must
be like to live in a place with really extreme weather.
Libya actually holds the record for highest spot temperature—134°
Fahrenheit [57° Celsius]—but we couldn't get permission
to go there. Dallol, in Ethiopia, intrigued me because it
is one of the least accessible destinations on the planet.
In many areas there are no sealed roads and camel caravans
are the only way to travel. It also holds the record for the
highest average annual temperature—basically it is bloody
hot all the time.
Dallol is at the northernmost extension of the [Great] Rift
Valley. It is below sea level and acts like a cauldron, trapping
all the heat.
Who lives in this region?
The only inhabitants of this area are the Afar. These nomadic
tribespeople actively discourage visitors. Both accounts I
had read from 1930s concerning the Afar disagreed on only
[one] point; that was what became of the testicles after the
visitor was castrated.
When I asked the Afar about this they denied they ever did
such things—they said it was done in Somalia. I wasn't
really convinced either way, but the Afar are definitely fierce.
Every man carries a two-foot-long [60-centimetre-long] combination
knife-sword and a Kalashnikov. I was unarmed, so this was
quite intimidating. There could be ecological reasons for
their suspicious and aggressive attitude toward foreigners.
After all, resources are very scarce.
How did you prepare for the trip physically?
I went to an oasis called Siwa on the Egypt-Libyan border.
There, I was buried in sand to sweat out all my city impurities.
Then I endured a massage that felt more like I was being physically
attacked.
Did they give you any valuable survival tips for desert living?
They told me not to sleep or camp near a water hole—which
was counterintuitive—because there are snakes and all
types of creepy crawlies lurking around that could kill you.
There are also these snails—and this is a serious suggestion
if you are in a dire state—that live near dried up water
holes. They look dead, or fossilised, but if you carefully
break open the shell and suck them, they keep the saliva going
and keep your mouth wet. But they taste really foul. I prefer
just sucking on a rock—it does the same thing without
the "flavour."
How have the Afar adapted to the desert? Where do
they find water?
The Danakil Depression is really a hellhole of creation.
It's this arid expanse with active volcanoes, lots of geothermal
activity and places where boiling hot water emerges from the
rocks. But the Afar women have an extraordinary method for
collecting water. They build these amazing four-foot [1.2-metre]
beehive canopies out of stones over the fissures. These rocks
cause the steam to condense and the water trickles into a
clay channel and receptacle, where it collects and cools.
The women then transfer the water into their goatskin bags.
What do the people eat?
Goat's milk and milk products. Goats can live on the sparsest
vegetation and provide a little meat and cheese. Camel caravans
also bring grain that is used to make bread. But there are
no vegetables.
Do people suffer from a lack of nutrients? What about
dehydration?
I think they must get a lot of essential minerals from salts.
On the other hand, they do get problems from not drinking
enough water. Burning bladder, which I got, is very disconcerting
and painful. You feel as if you need to urinate, but you can't—and
you feel like this all the time until you start to drink enough
water again. The Afar also suffer from kidney stones, a consequence
of not drinking enough water.
Why do people remain in the Danakil if it is so harsh?
People usually think that home is the best place to be. They
are used to the conditions and they have adapted. There are
many Afar people in the desert. Theirs is certainly not a
waning culture.
Describe Dallol. What does it look like today?
Dallol had been a village where a U.S. company tried to mine
potash until abandoning the site in the 1960s. Now, it's a
ghost town. There is a crumbling village and twisted tracks
that mark the beginnings of a railway. There are shells of
buildings—which were all made from blocks of salt—and
bits and pieces of machinery lying around.
Dallol is also located in a region called Dallol—basically
a huge salt pan with a crust on the surface. The salt pan
is flat with a cover of brownish white salt, but occasionally
you come across these eight- to ten-feet-tall [2.4- to 3-metre-tall]
yellow-orange sulfurous salt towers. There used to be a small
village of salt miners who would hack salt from the surface.
These workers have been doing this for hundreds of years.
It's only recently that salt stopped being a currency.
What did the Afar think of you?
I bumped into some Afar cowboys during one part of the trip.
They had these huge Afro hairdos like the Jackson Five and
all had daggers and Kalashnikovs. After we had this long ritualistic
greeting—how's your mother, your father … your
cattle?—I confessed that I didn't have any cattle. They
were completely confused. They couldn't understand how I could
be a man and not own any cattle. The conversation got very
tense and they started fingering their guns.
Then I pointed to and complimented their hairdos and the
whole conversation shifted to hair. They said that their hair
was more effective than my hat in keeping off the heat. After
I discovered that they spent more than two hours everyday
to get their hair looking like that, my fears of castration
subsided. |
