It was curious because I had never really seriously believed that I’d find records to prove a place was drier than Arica, despite what people had been telling me since I had arrived on the Atacama coast. But now that I had, and come so close to proving Aldo, the Arica meteorologist, right, I felt a tremendous sense of disappointment, a sense of being robbed.
I put my calculator to one side and flicked through the pages of the plastic-covered book of records again. Perhaps this was the ‘one small problem’ that Don Cecilio, the soothsayer in San Pedro, had seen in the coca leaves. I stopped. A page I hadn’t seen before lay open in front of me. It was another annual summary sheet for Quillagua, covering the years 1963-1972. All of the years had the familiar black dot in the month boxes, indicating no rain.
I flicked back to the start. Quillagua was only supposed to have started its readings in 1969. I compared the new sheet I’d just found with the previous one. Both were headed Quillagua. The only difference was in the latitude and longitude marked at the top. It seemed that meteorological readings had been taken in the village prior to 1969. Someone had started in 1963, but at a different site. It is not unusual for meteorological stations to be moved, and it seemed from the slightly different latitudes and longitudes, each different by just one minute, that the instruments had been moved from one side of the village to the other.
I did my sums again. This time I had 33 years of data, from 1964, the first full year of the pre-1969 readings, to 2000. The rainfall total was still the same: 1.6 mm (0.06 inches). The average this time came out even lower: 0.05 mm (0.002 inches) a year.
I could hardly contain myself. There was still the problem of the missing years, but now I had 33 years to average from and Quillagua was still an order of magnitude lower than Arica. The missing years remained a fly in the ointment, but I was 70 per cent sure that I had found a new driest place on Earth.
Quillagua was about 90 kilometres north of María Elena, straight up Ruta Nacional 5. The Atacama was unrelentingly barren for every kilometre in the desert sun. About 15 minutes from Quillagua I passed some geoglyphs of human forms on a hillside, and then, as the road took a slight rise, I caught my first glimpse of the town that I hoped to make the new record-holder. It was a sliver of green tucked into a deep valley slit into the wilderness.
It was a sleepy little village with a leafy main square, one side of which was bordered by old car tyres, half buried and painted bright colours. The meteorological station was in the grounds of the small school, closed today because it was Sunday. The padlock on the gate to the instrument compound was open and I walked in to take a look at what I reckoned was probably the least active rain gauge on the planet. It was of the same cylindrical white metal design as that at Arica airport. After I’d peeked inside and seen just a slight deposit of red dust, I bent over and kissed it.
After my return to the UK, I contacted the World Meteorological Organization and the Guinness Book of Records. Both were interested in my claim to have found a new driest place on Earth. The Guinness Book of Records wanted confirmation from the World Meteorological Organization before they would think about including Quillagua in their next edition, and the WMO said they could only look into the matter if the Chilean authorities could confirm my inkling that Quillagua was a drier place than Arica. I contacted the Chilean meteorological authority and put my findings to them. Then I waited.
A few weeks later, a fax came through from the Direccion Meteorologica de Chile. In addition to a brief covering letter, there was a page marked Certificado. The certificate said that after looking at the respective records, the Chilean meteorological authority confirmed that Quillagua was a drier place than Arica and that the meteorological station at Quillagua was the driest in Chile.
It was official. I’d found a new driest place on Earth.
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.
The Danakil’s few inhabitants, the Afar, have developed a lifestyle based on animal husbandry and nomadism to cope with this harsh environment and have also become renowned for their ferocious protection of the few resources the region has to offer. It seemed to me that if there is a hell, the Danakil is situated on its roof. The place sounded like a burning inferno inhabited by demons.
In truth, it was the demonic Afar, rather than the hellhole they lived in, that most exercised my mind as I left the office clutching my permit and emerged on to one of Addis Ababa’s nondescript highways. A hot desert I could cope with, having visited several in my academic line of work, quite apart from enduring the commandos’ survival course in the Atacama. But by all accounts, the Afar did not welcome outsiders into their fiery wilderness. In fact, to say that the Afar don’t encourage visitors gives a somewhat misleading impression of their legendary lack of hospitality. It is more accurate to say that they actively discourage them. And their favoured method of active discouragement is castration.
The two most comprehensive accounts of the Afar that I had laid my hands on agreed on this. Both were written by British explorers and published during the 1930s. In 1933, Wilfred Thesiger travelled the length of the Awash River to its bitter end in Lake Assal, reputed to be the saltiest body of water in the world and the lowest point in Africa. Five years before him, Ludovico Nesbitt, a mining engineer and a member of an Eng
lish family long settled in Italy, had traversed the entire Danakil Desert from the Awash to Asmara, in present-day Eritrea. Both men presented accounts of their journeys to the Royal Geographical Society in London which were subsequently published in the Society’s journal. The fact that both men had returned to tell their tales was a significant achievement in itself. All previous expeditions into the Danakil by white men had been, without exception, massacred by the unsociable Afar.
And it wasn’t just white men who had previously failed to penetrate the Danakil. Although notionally a part of Ethiopia, the Afar had never been effectively subdued by the Highland Ethiopians. As I was to discover, the Afar are still very much a law unto themselves, and I rather suspect that it was this fact that had been uppermost in the bureaucrat’s mind when he had tried to dissuade me from my quest. As my blue Lada taxi chugged its way through the mid-morning exhaust fumes, and my driver drew my attention to a notable local landmark, Addis Ababa’s first set of traffic lights, I could still see the look of genuine concern on the face of the man behind the chipped desk.
The Afar castrated their victims by means of a very long knife known as a jile. The blade was about 50 centimetres long, with one bend in it, rather like the shape of a boomerang, and sharp on both sides. If the operation could be conducted while the victim was still alive, so much the better, but for obvious reasons most of the injured parties had to be killed first. The Afars’ motive for castration and murder was variously justified on harshly objective grounds – as a logical reaction to their region’s aridity: a newcomer would necessarily have to drink some of the scarce water available, jeopardizing the survival of all native inhabitants – and also for cultural reasons.
Thesiger pointed out that until he has killed someone, an Afar man is called a woman and is not allowed to marry. But it doesn’t stop there. An Afar’s great ambition is to collect more trophies than his neighbour, since a man’s prowess is rated according to the number of his kills. A system of decorations has evolved to indicate the castration count. Not until he has killed can a man wear a coloured loincloth, or a comb or feather in his hair. After two executions, a chap can split his ears, but the most common method of denoting kills is to attach a brass-bound leather thong to the knife or rifle, one for each trophy taken. Ten kills gives a man the right to wear a coveted iron bracelet. Indication of a man’s competence in this matter even follows him to the grave. A line of stones stood upright before his memorial gives notice of his achievements to posterity.
In the matter of castration, Thesiger and Nesbitt held opposing views on just one issue. Nesbitt claimed that it was also customary for an Afar to display the testicles of a victim either in his hut or around his neck, while Thesiger stated that he never saw any such thing. The trophy would be displayed around the village, Thesiger maintained, but it was then thrown away. It seemed like a very minor point of disagreement to me.
Addis Ababa means ‘New Flower’, but at first sight Ethiopia’s capital doesn’t live up to its name. Neither character, nor charm, are words that come to mind when proceeding along the city’s wide boulevards, some straddled by monumental communist arches proclaiming the struggle of the people, superfluous reminders of the country’s Soviet-inspired Marxist-Leninist regime that had been overthrown ten years previously.
Ethiopia’s communist government was just the most recent twist in the history of a state that has been on the world scene for more than 2,000 years. The country’s name is derived from the Greek, meaning ‘land of the burnt-faced people’, and the ancient Greeks held Ethiopia in high regard. In the Odyssey, Homer states that Poseidon attended an Ethiopian festival where he accepted a mass sacrifice of cattle and sheep in his honour. The kingdom of Ethiopia traditionally dates back to the tenth century BC, when it was founded by Menelik I, Solomon’s first son (supposedly by the Queen of Sheba). The first recorded kingdom, however, grew up around the city of Axum in the first century AD. Either way, Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest countries, and it is unique among African nations in never having been colonized by Europeans. In fact, while European powers were scrambling for power in Africa in the late nineteenth century, Ethiopia was still busy building her own empire, and continued to annex areas on her southern borders well into the twentieth century. Italy had a go at setting up shop in Ethiopia in 1895, but retired with a bloody nose after the battle of Adowa, the following year. The Italians tried again in the late 1930s, when Mussolini fancied an African colony, and actually managed to occupy parts of the country for a brief five-year period before being kicked out during the Second World War.
So, for all intents and purposes, Ethiopia remains relatively untouched by European influence, a few Marxist monuments and clapped-out Soviet motor cars notwithstanding. These reminders of Eastern Europe have been augmented in more recent times with a few equivalents from the West, like T-shirts adorned with the faces of Liverpool footballer Michael Owen and Kate Winslet in her Titanic role. But in many respects, the country has followed its own path into the twenty-first century, retaining its ancient home-grown Christian church which dates back 1,600 years, its own alphabet, and its own calendar and system for measuring time. Although the city of Addis is distinctly unremarkable, these other aspects combined to give me a feeling of moving in some sort of parallel universe.
Actually, Ethiopia has not yet reached the twenty-first century. All my permits for travel into the Afar ‘Region Number Two’, as today’s government insists on calling it, were dated 1993, a year that began in what I know as September 2000 according to the Gregorian calendar now used in the West. The calendar used in Ethiopia is divided into 12 months of 30 days each, plus a ‘thirteenth month’ of five days (or six days during a leap year). Hence Ethiopia’s tourism slogan claiming: ‘Thirteen Months of Sunshine’. The Ethiopian calendar is now about seven years and eight months ‘behind’ the calendar I am accustomed to.
More troublesome to my everyday existence, however, was Ethiopian daily time. The days begin at sunrise, which is always considered to be one o’clock. On several occasions, I managed to miss appointments by assuming the times given were according to the Western system. Converting one to another was enough to give me a brain haemorrhage. On one occasion I turned up for an 8.30 meeting just after breakfast, only to be told that the appointment wasn’t until after lunch. Somehow, 8.30 was supposed to mean 2.30 in the afternoon.
It wasn’t just time that was disconcertingly different in Ethiopia. Space, too, was viewed rather differently. Getting from place to place in my Lada taxi was manageable just so long as I knew the name of the building I was aiming for. An actual address, in the British sense of the word, was less commonly used. For postal purposes, Ethiopians have PO boxes rather than door-to-door deliveries, a fact probably not unrelated to the almost complete lack of street names. At first, I put down the absence of name plaques on the thoroughfares to bureaucratic inefficiency, but after several enquiries as to how I should refer to particular roads, it became clear to me that most streets simply didn’t have names.
As a geographer, this alternative approach to spatial referencing should have been interesting to me, but when combined with continual thoughts of imminent emasculation, the lack of recognizable frames of reference for both time and space resulted in a surreal effect. Some time ago, I had a session in a sensory deprivation tank in Oxford. It was an enclosed bath of warm, salty water in which you lie floating in darkness for an hour or so in order to relax. The first five minutes after the lid was closed, shutting out all light, I found to be anything but relaxing. They were disturbing in the extreme, and the effects of my first day in Addis Ababa were not dissimilar. Here I was, in the capital city of an ancient African civilization, meandering along a street with no name, six hours adrift and seven years previously, pondering the impending demise of my most valuable of masculine assets.
Consequently, I’ve no idea what time it was when I wandered into a small shack covered by a blue tarpaulin in an unknown location somewhere
in the Ethiopian capital. Beer was being served and it was just what I needed. I sat down on a low wooden bench and ordered a Castel, one of the local brews. I soon got talking to some of the men sat around me, Addis professionals taking their ease after a hard day’s work. I was in the company of a young journalist, very smart in his suit and tie, an older man who happened to work for the British Council, and a rather dishevelled figure of indeterminate age in an open-necked white shirt.
‘I studied law at university in Moscow,’ he told me apropos of nothing. ‘Many Ethiopians used to study there during the time of the Derg, but not so many now.’ The Derg was the Amharic name for the former Marxist government, a regime that had been associated with widespread repression and curfews in its later years. I thought to myself that my new lawyer friend had probably been well out of it in Moscow, since radical students had borne the brunt of the Derg’s oppression. Had drinking dens like this one been open during those years I wondered aloud. The question was largely stonewalled. The journalist chose the moment to sup his beer. The British Council man took an interest in something going on at another table.
‘Those were different times,’ the lawyer told me. It seemed like an appropriate time to change the subject, so tentatively I raised the topic of the Danakil.
‘It is a desert area,’ the journalist told me.
‘Home of the Afar,’ the British Council man chipped in, his attention now refocused on our discussion, ‘Moslems who claim to be descendants of Noah’s son, Ham.’
‘They say it is the hottest place in the world,’ the Moscow lawyer announced, ‘for me this is a good enough reason for not going there.’ I told him that this was precisely the reason for my interest. I was intending to visit the Danakil, to make a trip to Dallol, the world’s hottest town.
‘Is it not hot enough for you here?’ The lawyer giggled. Addis had indeed been warm, despite being more than 2,400 metres above sea level. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I want to go to the place where it gets no hotter.’
Going to Extremes Page 14
