13 Nov Djibouti: Lake Abbe

Has it ever happened to you that you are sitting at home and you feel that some special place, like a sweet siren song, is irresistibly calling you to leave everything behind and go there in search of your doom?

Well, I often do. The bad thing is that to silence those voices I decide to follow them. That's when I dust off my canyoning, river-crossing, volcano-climbing, desert-crossing watercraft... and prepare them for another ordeal.
Sometimes I think that one day they will refuse to take another step.

Riding on my nautical shoes I feel like Rimbaud, of whom Verlaine said that his shoes had wind soles. I have told you before about Rimbaud, the cursed poet who one day decided he wanted to be an adventurer, left everything and went to Africa. He landed near here, in the bay of Tadjoura, where he stayed to live in order to explore the region, following those voices that only he could hear. Another one who was in a bad way...

My voices were guiding me this time towards the Abbe lake, but I admit that I had been driving for hours on a very hard track, I had crossed the deserts of Gran and Little Bara, and I still could not understand what had brought me there, because there was nothing, nothing at all...

Until I saw this...

What I had before my eyes made it worth all that I had gone through to get there. It seemed that I had finally found the door to that great world of the things I dream of.

And the place is amazing. The spectacle paralyses you, fills you, moves you. You want to stop and contemplate it and at the same time you want to walk all over it. You are glad that the place is so remote, hard and unknown that it is only for you... but at the same time you want to share it (I have just reread the sentence and it could or could seem that I'm petrolete, I'll leave it but if I get another similar sentence I'll go to the emergency room to be seen).

The landscape was incredible, there was a desert, white, and a volcano, and a blue lake, and hundreds of smoking chimneys, and caravans of camels, and thousands of pink flamingos in the lake, and ostriches, hyenas, warthogs, gazelles ....

I spent hours wandering around the area and getting lost in the maze of chimneys. Then I remembered that the Planet of the Apes film had been shot here. I admit that as I was not sure if the film was based on real events, my fears of falling into the hands of the fearsome Urko increased with the darkness. The chimneys began to take on ghostly shapes so we looked for a place to spend the night.

I was not alone, I was accompanied by Jacob, an Afar guide who had come up in Dikhil to guide me through these labyrinths. The Afar are a sullen and harsh people like the land they inhabit. They were feared for their habit of using the gile, a ham knife similar to the Yemeni iambic, to cut off the testicles of their enemies and hang them around their necks as ornaments (which didn't leave me very calm, so I decided never to take him to task and, if necessary, to tease him a little).

By the fire we talked about life, chewed qat and drank gin and tonics, so it didn't take long for us to drift off into regional chants.
Jacob taught me an old legion etrangere song adapted to the desert:
Elle decend de Lac Abbe on dromadaire Au gaza gouzi gouzi aree aree Au gaza gouzi gouzou aree aree aree (this part is free transcription)

Those chants took me back to other times, with the Foreign Legion in Central African Republic...
And the intense heat, to those nights in the Palace of Udey Husseim, in Baghdad (one day I will tell you that I was there...), what a time...

The qat lulled me to sleep until the chanting finally died away in my head. After a while I could only hear the crackling of the fire and the laughter of the hyenas prowling around. I will always wonder if they were laughing at their own things or were laughing at how badly we were singing.

I slept with one eye open and the first thing I did at dawn was to check with relief that Jacob had no new neck ornaments.
After a petite dejeneur, (in the most literal sense of the word) we went to the lake to see the flamingos and to walk around the area one more time before starting our way back.

Exaggerating as I would like to say that Jesuscalleja, the risk was extreme because water fountains of 90 degrees were constantly emerging at our feet (which is quite hot, not as hot as the tea I get where I work, but close).

If he fell into one of those boiling water death traps, with the powder he was carrying and the oil from the sun cream, he could be turned into a chicken croquette in a matter of seconds.

And now I'm going to put an end to the story, because I'm getting too long. It was very hard for me to leave. Departures always affect me and I need company. I started by picking up an old woman with a baby, then two others, then a couple... in the end I had the car more loaded than a matatu. I went from village to village, Aselà, Kouta Bouyya, Dikhil... This won't change their lives, but at least they would sleep less tired that day.

I left with a huge regret, but as in Desertando we have an incredible route through the deserts of Ethiopia and Djibouti, I am not worried because I know that very soon I will be back, with you if you are up for it.
And those voices are back...

And finally, I'm going to show you a photo of a little girl so that you can see that I am a tremendously sensitive person...