Driving

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Adventures in No Man's Land

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Adventures in No Man's Land

We knew that today’s journey was going to be a lengthy one; not only did we need to cross a potentially tricky international border, but we also knew that in order to get our visas fully validated we would need to get to Khartoum which was over 750km away from where we currently were, we weren’t even sure if it was going to be possible, but if nothing is ventured, then nothing is gained, so with bleary eyes we headed out into the dark streets to look for the first of many of today’s transport types...

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The Danakil Part Four: The Gateway to Hell

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The Danakil Part Four: The Gateway to Hell

If you were woken up and told that today, was the day you would be heading to the Gateway to Hell, what would your choice of breakfast be?  A Full English perhaps? Or maybe a giant stack of pancakes complete with all the toppings?  I tell you what it probably wouldn’t be: a packet of banana cream biscuits!  Yes, remarkably someone has actually created this monstrosity, and they are, as you can imagine, absolutely terrible!  This was the reality we faced as we waited outside a small police check point, deep in the Ethiopian desert, for our paperwork to be signed, before we could continue our journey; fortunately, we had been given some excellent coffee to offset the taste of the biscuits, and we both agreed that this was a journey well worth enduring any number of banana creams for.

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The Danakil Part Two: Salt of the Earth

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The Danakil Part Two: Salt of the Earth

The first thing we saw to break to beautiful monotony were the camels; there were hundreds of them all relaxing out in the sun, so well adapted for this oppressive environment that they barely batted a long-lashed eyelid at the baking sun, which, despite the early hour, was already pushing the mercury well into the 40s.  If camels are the ships of the desert, then donkeys are the sort of raft you’d expect from a particularly awkward team-building day, and the lack of shade was clearly getting to these poor beasts of burden, desperately trying to utilise the bulks of the camels for their own personal parasol...

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Would you like some lime with your vomit?

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Would you like some lime with your vomit?

After asking around, we discovered that there were no direct buses from Lalibela to Mek’ele.  In addition, the route was over 400km, on roads of varying quality.  We knew it was going to be a bit of an ask to make it to Mek’ele in a day; still, it would be an experience if nothing else, and when some people laughed at our enquiries, and told us that it would be almost impossible to make it in a day, we had no other option but to accept this as a challenge, and commit ourselves to spending several hours crammed into the back of various buses, with no other plan than relying on chronic optimism to get us where we wanted to go.

explore v. (ɛkˈsplɔː) 1. The action of travelling through an unfamiliar area in order to learn more about it