3:00pm, Semara, Afar Region, Sept. 29th:

Ohhhh… this is a grim moment indeed: I often wonder how Meriwether Lewis handled the many times like this: days have passed since the last journal entry, and you must face the consequence, the dreaded catch-up entry. I suppose he just went on ahead as if he’d been journaling the whole time, but perhaps that was because he’d been manically depressed and didn’t feel like he really wanted to record the events in the blank spaces. However, that is (thankfully) not my situation. My journaling was on hold for the principal reason that there were four days without electricity and I had to save all the juice in my laptop for the EXTREMELY important task of data transfer off the GPS receivers. Plus it was infernally hot, I was sick, uncomfortable, filthy, exhausted, and besieged by biting insects. But now, the team is in Semara, truly, as Shimeles calls it, The Devil’s Anus. Yet while it bakes outside (at least 115 degrees by now), we are comfortably lodged in decrepit mobile homes at the Bureau of Mines’ Geothermal Research Station here in the ‘offical’ capital of Afar (the unofficial capital being Asayita). My outlook has changed dramatically in the last several hours of life: for one, I now believe that I may actually survive to see Addis again, and with most of my sanity still intact. The mobile homes… no, I shouldn’t call them that, they are rather shipping boxes like you see on trains and semi-trucks, only outfitted in such as way as each houses four to six tiny compartments with a bed (and mosquito netting!), a desk, an electrical outlet, a chair, and above and beyond all else, a functional AIR CONDITIONER… all amenities which I hadn’t the slightest hope of acquiring while in the Afar, but which I think have proved critical to the success of this expedition.
So, I last wrote to you, the anonymous reading public, from Awash, the joyless little shithole on the edge of the desert, where we paid three times too much for the worst accommodations I had until that time stayed in, and in unwitting revenge, I accidentally stole the room key, which in this part of the world is probably a very big deal. That was the 24th. We failed to get an overnight station in at Awash, as was specified by our itinerary, because of the lack of bedrock and the massive and paranoid military presence in that area. I felt horrible: it was part of the ongoing saga of reality versus The Dreaded Itinerary, and I felt like I was losing. We were already a full three days behind schedule, and our first opportunity to collect data had come and gone, with nothing to show for it. I felt hopeless about our future prospects, self-conscious about the potential failure my expedition was quickly becoming, and to top it off, I still was suffering from a case of SOBS (sudden onset bowel syndrome) I’d picked up from a salad in Addis. I was pretty sure Shimeles didn’t like me, the Ethiopians had no interest in interacting with a gringo who didn’t speak the lingo, and fuck if it wasn’t HOT. I felt low, depressed, alone, worthless, homesick, physically ill, and I wanted my mommy. Actually, probably just about how good old Meriwether was feeling while he waded through hip-deep crusty snow in the Rockies, eating tough horseflesh and about a thousand miles from home.
The next several days were to be a real … I don’t know what to call it… a purging of all those weak elements in myself which felt defeated, and a toughening of spirit, the development of a crusty resolve which got me through four days of trial-by-fire between Awash and my air conditioner.
I have no idea how to tell this story except piecemeal. It didn’t start well. The damn Itinerary: 22 points, we were supposed to observe. Leaving Missoula, I had planned to do just that, to come home a hero and humbly accept Simon’s offer of all the beer I could drink in return for my stellar service. I could only hope that, three days and a survey point behind, we would install at least three units today (I’ll fade in and out of present tense while discussing the past, sorry if it confuses) and arrive in the luxurious metropolis of Mille for a self-congratulatory dip in a swimming pool. Instead, we spent the entire morning driving dirt tracks around Gewane, wandering about the vast flat plain in search of the Awash River where we hoped to find rocky outcrops. Instead, we drove right into an African Village straight out of the early National Geographics: Dust and thorn bushes, twenty round-topped grass rondavels, some stick-and-mud huts, and black, dark black people, staring at our car with unabashed amazement. It’s hard to describe this scene, but pick up a National Geographic, circa 1940, and turn to the section which profiles this or that village deep in the heart of Africa and you’ll see what I’m talking about. No change: Women with breasts exposed, in colorful sarongs and ornaments; dirty children, naked, chasing goats down the track; men washing in the brown water of the Awash River; no modern implement of any kind or sign of western intrusion. Our reception was friendly, but walking down the lane between the huts I got the distinct impression that for many of the villagers, I was truly and honestly the first white person they had ever seen. (A strange feeling!)
We later met two young teachers from Gewane town, who accompanied us back to the highway, and helped us locate a hidden but excellent rock outcrop where, sweating under the blazing equatorial-African sun and the pressure of doing it for the first time for real, no more practice runs, we set up the GPS unit and Shimeles bartered with the two fellows who finally agreed to watch the unit for two days (not three!) for the very steep price of 200 Birr. Now, I know that’s only about 22 US dollars, but keep in mind that in all Shimeles’ previous experience (outside the Afar), he never paid more than 10 Birr per day, and that was received with great gratitude. Anyway, I was very thankful just to have finally gotten a unit up, and eager to go repeat the process several more times that day to try to get back on schedule. Still, I felt a little worthless, having deferred to Shimeles on just about everything, and realizing that he would be the one and only communicator for the duration of the trip (in Missoula I had imagined that, somehow, I too would be bartering, coaxing, and squeezing us in and out of tight situations with my verbal wiles)… which did not exactly help my feeling of low self-worth, but still, with one unit up, I felt that perhaps my trip was starting to be justified, after a week of loafing on a hotel bed in Addis. Shimeles sensed as much, and said so. I was glad he knew it had been worrying me.
The rest of the day was stressful: Between Gewane and Mille, we were to put in 3 new monuments at specified locations (with an allowable placement radius of 10 kilometers for each): Kali Ali, Tareina, and MONW (middle of nowhere); and around Mille, two more: ‘B’ and ‘C’. However, we drove all day, turning off the highway at every possible sighting of an outcrop and four-wheeling around the volcanic savannah, burned retinas scouring the rolling (or pancake-flat) landscape for any sign of solid bedrock. No luck. We ate lunch in a tiny town called Endofu (injera, goat meat, and shiro, essentially cooked pureed beans, like refried beans with way too much water), and continued the fruitless search. We picked up a poker-faced soldier in blue camo fatigues who wanted a ride to Mille, and Shimeles and Tewodros (hereafter, Teddy) talked to him in Amharic while I continued to search desperately for any sign of solid rock as we whizzed along the highway. Several times I forced a stop to get out and run about dry washes and boulder-strewn hillocks searching for the holy-grail outcrop, but it never materialized. Moreover, at one stop, while wandering along a wash with bedrock fever, Teddy and I left Shimeles behind in the thorns. When we finally met him back at the car, he looked a bit pale and agitated. He’d walked into a sleeping Afar in the bushes, who’d woken up, pulled his AK-47 out of a tree, and maliciously beckoned Shimeles over. Shimeles, wisely, had instead called for Jacob, the soldier, to come quick, and both agreed it had probably saved Shimeles’ life. After that I made a mental note to give rides to soldiers as often as possible.
At Mille, I was dejected: we hadn’t gotten a single one of the three points we had to get, and there was little hope of getting them later. It was unbearably hot (and I mean that very literally) and Mille was an even worse shithole than Awash, although considerably more authentic. A drive both East and West along Highway 4, looking for places to install points ‘B’ and ‘C’ revealed an even more hopeless situation than the drive from Gewane. Dry, dusty plain, as flat as printer paper, spread for miles on either side of the road and were covered with a sort of pyroclastic gravel which was many meters deep. The few ridges and cinder cones were found to be covered in nothing but highly weathered and fragmented rock… nothing even a desperate man would set a monument in. There was one large mountain near Mille with a communications tower on top, which Shimeles had said would interfere with our satellite, but growing more desperate by the minute (I mean, I was downright panicked at this point, folks) I told Shimeles I wanted to drive up there anyway. We did, and after finding the station unguarded, drove back down away and then managed to locate some bits of exposed but solid rock… maybe big boulders, but maybe bedrock, and solid in any case. We hurriedly set up the unit, no one around to watch us this time, and I felt a little more confident in my knowledge of the equipment, so that I was able to correct a few of the things Shimeles and Teddy were doing wrong while setting the stuff up. We left it and drove back to Mille, but I was quietly getting a stomach ulcer from stressing about the unit not having a guard. I was imaging how Rebecca would act when I told her that a unit had been stolen, and having to admit that I’d allowed it to be left in a place where we couldn’t find someone to guard it, because I was so desperate to get points in. I was aware that having installed two points in a single day, we were actually doing quite well (Becks had told me I’d be lucky to get more than one) but somehow I couldn’t shake the panicked feeling of being woefully behind. Anyway, Shimeles made the wise move of stopping at the Military checkpoint to let them know what we’d done, and after showing the appropriate magic Letters of Introduction from the University of Addis Ababa Geophysical Observatory (that one always does the trick: people here seem paranoid of earthquakes, and also seem to think that if they let us do our thing, we can somehow stop them), we met the regional Minister of Finance, who asked that we show him the unit that night, and said he would bring a guard. Later, following a rusty pickup truck full of rowdy Afar boys with M-16s up the bumpy dirt road, I felt a little concerned that perhaps they were just going to execute us at the top and steal our money and equipment, and the whole thing seemed a bit fishy, but it turned out as it was supposed to, with a local sheikh, a crusty old bearded character, watching the unit for two days, and again haggled down to 200 Birr, which was quickly becoming standard. I felt a bit better.
That night, I stayed in the most dingy accommodations of my life. The room was built party of concrete, partly of sticks and mud, and so full of cracks I felt certain the whole thing would collapse at any moment. There was a dirty mattress the consistency of rising bread-dough, a broken chair, the largest spiders I’ve yet seen, a few friendly lizards, an open grate in each wall covered with tattered cloths, and a dangling bare light bulb with wires fully exposed, which faded on and off in random intervals, but off becoming increasingly more common. Ceiling paper, wires and pipes hung down rotting from exposed ceiling beams, and the attached bath was a little cement pit, black as night, in which there was a hole in the floor between slippery algae-covered footrests, below a dangling pipe with a rusted faucet, which served as the shower head. You shat in the hole, and then showered under the faucet, allowing the water to flush your waste, so that no water was wasted. Teddy explained that this was quite common, after I made a joke about showering in the toilet. I declined to shower, for the obvious reasons, plus the water only came at a maximum of a fast drip and was about as warm as the air (115 degrees), and had a foul smell to it. Regardless, I used a little to brush my teeth. Dinner was tibs (roasted goat) on injera. It was the hottest night I’ve ever spent, even compared to that train-ride in Italy. I have been repeatedly thankful for the silk sleeping liner that I brought: it’s protected me from fleas and bedbugs thus far, is about as light as can be hoped, and dutifully absorbed the three gallons of water I sweated out that night while tossing on the filthy, spongy mattress. I might even have slept a wink or two.
I should also mention the enormous birds which perched outside my room that night and the next morning, looking down into the muddy Awash River. They were enormous, bald-headed, hairy chinned beasts, with great pink wattles, and legs nearly as long as mine, with bodies shaped something like a triple-sized pelican’s. The things must weigh at least a hundred pounds and are both fascinating and horrific… They are stoic and ugly and rigid and strange, and for some reason I can easily imagine them roosting in graveyards, feasting on the flesh of the newly dead, and standing awake all night with their staring, dark, unblinking eyes. One of my favorite parts of Mille, in fact, was that the most distinct feature of the town is the large area of thinly mounded stones, where a great many hundred people seem to have been recently and hurriedly buried, though for what reason I have no idea. You can hear the hyenas howling from the graveyard at night, a rather grim prospect considering what their business is there.
Anyway, the birds here are fantastic: there are at least three or four species of strange and ferocious species of eagles I’ve seen, plus some strange bird that looks like a cross between a hawk and a vulture and are always feeding on the goat skeletons behind roadside restaurant shantys. There are beautifully colored emerald green birds that look a bit like small parrots, and blue-green flycatchers, and darting yellow-black-white things that are beautiful and other bald-headed long-beaked birds that look like something out of a Tarzan cartoon. The great thing is that every bird I see here is so completely different than any bird I’ve ever seen anywhere before in my life, that the only thing I can really say that they have in common with the birds I know is that they fly. There are strange birds which smack their wings together in great claps as they fly, and birds that make the strangest croaking noises, and a thousand other birds that we smash on the windshield with great frequency as we careen down the highway.
The wildlife is fascinating too: I’m becoming accustomed now to accepting the complete disconnect from the flora and fauna of North America or Europe or Eurasia… but it was truly a wonderful surprise to find that this is still, in so many ways, the wild wooly Africa that you read about in picture books as a kid. There are gazelles, and funny-faced hairy monkeys, and great shaggy-maned wild boars, and humpbacked, twisted-horned oxen, and camels, camels everywhere, the Afars love their camels like nothing else in the world. They are huge, healthy beasts, loaded down with the contents of a traveling nomad camp, or romping about, or crossing in front of you on the highway at the very worst moment. I’m told that if you hit a camel on the road in Afar, away from a military outpost, you might as well commit suicide, because the Afari owner of the camel will kill you anyways, and make it a lot more horrible. And I’m told this in dead seriousness. At first I was skeptical of the Afars and their fearsome reputation: they are everywhere out here where you would never expect a human being to be, in the middle of nowhere, in the most inhospitable location, and they appear quite content and smug doing whatever it is they are doing, which is usually nothing. The young men walk in groups alongside the road, with their matching white clothes (not djellebas, not sarongs… they look a bit like baggy, shaggy sailor suits), chewing on the ubiquitous acacia sticks, with huge, curly black and perfectly shaped Afros, soaked in camel grease to maintain the shape. They always carry either a long thin switch over their shoulders, or an AK or M-16, in precisely the same fashion. They seem cocky and rude and more fashion-conscious than Milanese models, which is surprising for a people who etch out a living in the desert. Or perhaps they don’t ‘etch’ it out… I was pretty sure at first that they all just use those guns as ego-boosting props, like the size of your gun must be proportional to the size of your penis and ‘hey, look at my big gun…’ In fact, I saw a tiny boy not older than twelve herding goats down the road and carrying some sort of sniper rifle, I think, that was literally as tall as he was. But since then, I’ve learned differently. The Afars are pretty badass. I mean, they live in the middle of the most God-forsaken hellhole on Earth, and they do quite well at it. They smuggle guns, drugs, electronics, whatever, across the desert and make damn good money at it. They make a living, I’m told, by marauding neighboring clans in the desert, be they Afars or otherwise. They sound, in fact, a lot like the Commanches: the young men are often going on raids of neighboring villages and nomad camps, guns blazing, and either they come back rich with loot, or they don’t come back. A hard and fast way of living… except for most of the time, when they lay snoozing in the shade of an acacia tree, which is just about always.
That can’t be said of the Afari women. They work all day, building the short, twinkie-shaped afar huts, herding the goats and camels and oxen, making camp, cooking, mending, holding down the fort, doing all the things that women traditionally do, which is pretty much everything except kill each other. They are almost without exception slender, with striking features, and stunningly beautiful. Not in the way that makes you say, “wow, she’s pretty” or “wow, she’s sexy,” but the way that makes you crank your neck as you pass, open mouthed and wide eyed, thinking “wow, she was beautiful.” They dress wonderfully: the Afar women usually don’t go around bare chested, although a few do (no idea what motivates the difference), but are dressed in several handsome and wonderfully pattered sarongs, variously wrapped and all looking very resplendent, with a considerable amount of finery and ornamentation around the neck, and often a silver tiara under an amazing variety of hairstyles which are as fun to look at as anything else. Sandals or nothing at all is the footwear of choice. The women I’ve met, and even those I just see in passing, seem generally friendly, witty, smart, and tough as nails. I get the distinct feeling that they’re perfectly able to pick up an AK and defend their camp from a marauding party while the men are away snoozing. They also seem extremely intelligent for nomadic womenfolk, and are eager to help with our GPS setup, and make good guards. In fact, in Karsagita, (point #3), I received my first offer to marry the beautiful daughter of the Afar man who was watching our unit on his ‘property’: I had to argue politely that I already had a good prospect back home, but this was no problem, the father argued, because the American woman could easily be made my second wife. It sounded quite good (sorry Halle) and when he brought her out to meet me, she was indeed a desert princess, tiara and all, but alas could not have been more than 13, and I had to break off the arrangement. Anyway, that’s about all I have to say about the Afars, for now, except that they are certainly making our situation here, as Shimeles likes to say quite often, ‘very precarious.’ I have to respect them for being so damn tough, but they are also a bunch of lawless bandits, and just several days ago they shot and killed several people along the highway south of here and stole their cargo. Sounds like this is pretty common, except one of the guys who was killed was apparently a rebel fighter back in ’91 with Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian President (hopefully not become dictator), who has responded by deploying a few thousand federal troops to the region, which is why there are blue camo fatigues peeping out from behind just about every damn rock and bush in this whole area. The military seems, for the most part, quite friendly as long as we are very courteous to them, and I have to say I am very thankful for their presence right now, as it makes me nervous to think of how appealing our brand new silver Land Cruiser with a white gringo passenger must look to every gun-toting Afar mercenary lurking in the bushes. The Eritreans, apparently, have been providing the Afars with an endless supply of firearms and sending them back into Ethiopia with the directive to cause general chaos and mayhem, which is what the Afars are best at anyway. Not that they like the Eritreans any better, but they get lots of nice guns. So I’m terrified (probably because Shimeles is also terrified) by driving at night, or on lonely roads. But it sounds like fate is on our side in many ways: Ramadan, the only holiday which the Afars seem to strictly observe, is right now, during our campaign, and all the fasting makes them in less of a mood for looting and killing… plus, they are trying to be just a little less sinful in the eyes of Allah, just until the holiday is over. God, let’s get done and get out of here!

Anyway, I love the Afars.

So, after that long, Hugo-esque diversion, let’s get back to the narrative: Things seem to be looking up with two points installed in one day, but four points have been missed; we’re still behind schedule; we don’t have any concrete data yet (guards could be running off with the equipment at this very moment); no one slept the night in Mille; I’ve now, despite the infernal heat, come down with some sort of head cold which makes me dizzy and achy and I’m convinced could be the onset of malaria (did I remember to take my pill yesterday!?); the road westward is so full of potholes and washed out bridges that we barely crawl along it; my stomach is still bad; we discovered that we don’t have one of the critical components for our fourth GPS unit and so can’t deploy it; and maybe worst, the long road westward from Mille to Dese, where we’re supposed to set up two stations, is surrounded by millions of boulders and rocky ridges that all look like solid bedrock from a distance, but on laborious closer inspection, turn out to be nothing but fractured piles of blocky rubble. It reminds me of a horribly sadistic game of ‘Where’s Waldo.’ Plus, an eight o’clock breakfast of tough fried chunks of goat meat is sitting poorly with me, and my stomach moans in agony at every jolting pothole in the road. I can tell I’m going to have to get accustomed to the local dish, as I’ll be enjoying it three times daily for the next twenty days.
Shimeles drives the road at a good clip, and once it turns to dirt, we really pick up steam. The highway is no better than a Montana logging road, but Shimeles is driving like it’s the Jersey Turnpike, and my butt cheeks spend so much time clenching that they feel exhausted by the time we arrive at the edge of the main fault scarp, with real bedrock, and drive into a little village called Karsagita. After a bit of searching around, and a lunch of injera, shiro, and tibs, we find a place to set up a station, and do so after somehow managing to botch the first 3 or 4 drill holes. There is a very nice Afar family camped just above the unit on the hill, and they watch us with eager interest the whole time, talking to Shimeles in bad Arabic, which he also speaks a little of. We arrange a guard, and head back for Mille. For some reason, Shimeles seems in a damn big hurry, and we take the road back at such incredible speed that the car seems to be literally airborne about 95 percent of the time. I’m horrified: this is a bad road, covered in washboard and loose, deep gravel, and there are blind corners and cattle and huge hidden potholes which Shimeles must swerve around to avoid at the last minute… I’m generally pretty calm sitting in a car with even the most dangerous drivers, but this time I’m really unnerved: from my experience driving on dirt roads, I know we are at a speed where there is really no control at all. My heart is thudding and my ass is squeezing and my fingernails dig into the handle as hard as my teeth are biting on my lower lip. I glace at the speedometer: 140kph… what is that, 85 miles per hour? On a gravel road? This is demented! I can’t take it and tell Shimeles that we should slow down. “Yeah, but this way we don’t feel the bumps,” he says.
Somehow, we survive to Mille, and hit the good road south toward Endofu, which we heard was cooler at night than Mille. I’m realizing with no small degree of horror that my ideas of packing the equipment up and down desert mountains and volcanic calderas, showing off my ranger’s physique, were the most ridiculous delusions. This Ethiopia campaign is going to be like a five week road trip, with very little getting out of the car. My muscles are turning to jello and I can tell I’ve already lost all of the fitness I gained over the summer: just walking up a 20 foot hillock leaves me gasping for breath on shaky legs.
Endofu: I feel the first signs of a severely worsening stomach condition, and am not encouraged by the surroundings. Everything looks sick, from the oozing sores on the donkeys and goats and the mangy cats limping about, to the collapsing sheet-metal frame of the Restauroont Znashi, where we make our stop. This is apparently a major stop on the truck-line too, and huge semis are continually grinding past us, belching black diesel fumes and the stink of burning clutch. We have nothing else to do today, because there’s no bedrock anywhere around us, and we’ve got all three units deployed. So, we suffer through the heat of the day over a plate of injera, shiro, and tibs, swatting off the swarms of flies and sweating profusely in the 105 degree shade. The boredom becomes severe, and this is probably the point at which my morale reached an all-time low. It’s hard to describe the agony with which time passes when you want so badly to be doing something, yet can do nothing… but it took a long time to go from lunch to dinner, the only two real events since arriving in Endofu. For dinner, a steaming platter of injera heaped with tibs and slathered with shiro, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was going to lose my mind. Shimeles was conversing jovially with the owners of the Znashi, and announced to us that “We’ll sleep here tonight! The owners are very generous. It will be much nicer, in the open air.” Well, the Znashi was certainly no hotel, and now we had gone from the dingiest rooms in Mille to no rooms at all. Bedframes made of acacia sticks and taught goatskin strips were brought outside and put next to the Toyota. Somewhere around this time, a huge truck pulled up and fifteen women in yellow ‘French Feelings’ shirts jumped out and starting handing out coffee flavored condoms, pens and can-openers. The party, apparently, had arrived. It’s amazing how a day of sitting, driving, and boredom can leave you utterly exhausted, and I wasn’t quite up for the dancing that started up inside the restaurant. Teddy and I lay down on our beds, to discover that the things were probably invented by greedy Ethiopian chiropractors: there was no position you could lay in where your spine did not feel like it was being torqued severely out of alignment. We were about 20 feet from the steady stream of tanker trucks that pulled into and out of the parking lot, engines throbbing, about every 6 seconds, their bright lights illuminating our sleeping area like a football field under the Friday Night Lights. I fell into a sweaty sickness-induced coma, and at some point woke up to find the trucks had stopped, as had the dancing and shouting and clapping and blaring music, and the lights were out. In their place were thousands of tiny, whining mosquitoes, and it took only a second to find out that my face and arms and feet were swollen and puffy from hundreds of stinging bites. I could hear Teddy rolling around under similar discomfort, and Shimeles was nowhere to be seen, perhaps was sleeping with one of the French Feelings girls. I tried to cover up with my silk liner and the thin sheet, which helped with the bites but not the incessant drone. I don’t remember falling back asleep, but I remember waking up again to the sound of ten thousand hyenas fighting with the wild dogs over goat scraps just behind the restaurant. The sound was deafening, and by the time it finally stopped, the truckers began to wake up and climb back in their trucks, and a full hour of rumbling engines, dust and diesel blasted us under our thin sheets until, at long last, quiet arrived and promptly the burning ball of sun launched itself up over the horizon and started to bake me like a potato.
Suddenly, a gurgling in my guts announced that I had other very urgent business to attend to. Shimeles was gone with the car keys, and the car was locked, but inside was the item I desired more than anything else in the world just then: the toilet paper. There are no toilets in Endofu, and certainly no paper. I asked Teddy, sounding desperate, if he had any toilet paper. It’s in the car, he said.
‘Ah, it’s fine, I’ve got some,’ I lied, and rushed at a broken-stepped gallop for the bushes, stepping over mounds of goat bones and garbage several feet deep. I barely had time to drop my pants: the real diarrhea had arrived. Finally purged, I found a creative use for the wad of 1 Birr notes I’d saved in my pocket for tips, and waddled back to the car. Breakfast was injera, shiro, and fried goat chunks. Just before we left, the family who owned the place invited us to share a special treat with them: some freshly made spiced goat cheese. My stomach was still tying itself in knots, but I couldn’t resist trying just a little. It was amazingly delicious. We stayed a bit longer and everyone laughed over my jokes about needing to wear a diaper in the car and as we drove off, I felt like perhaps I had just had the first pleasant experience since coming to Afar.

Success! We picked up the receivers at Gewane and Mille that day, and in the evening drove madly out to Kasargita on the long dirt track, fishtailing and jouncing over potholes so hard that we’d all bang our heads on the roof of the car. Our plan had been to make it to the village before dark, but we knew we were pushing it, and despite Shimeles’ suicidal rate of speed, we were still an hour away when the sun plummeted below the rift scarp west of us. It was fairly tense: it was a lonely road, well known for banditry, and generally it was observed that if you were smart and valued your hide, you didn’t drive it after dark. The Afars were famed for making bets on whether they could take out the driver of a moving car in the dark, and many truck drivers who braved these roads at night had sustained bullet wounds. So, there wasn’t much talking that last hour, just the sound of chewing on fingernails. We rolled safely into Kasargita and ordered and ate tibs and sat outside. The restaurant was the only place in the whole village which had a generator, and I was really wishing that it didn’t. Otherwise, the night was clear and the moon was big, and night birds were cooing in the little draws and the sound of many voices chanting in unison was coming from the mudbrick mosque up the road. After tibs, we sat around for a long time, and I didn’t understand why Shimeles wasn’t inquiring about our rooms for the night. Finally, I understood that it was because there weren’t any rooms, and we were to spend a second night outside. However, I was happy because it was cooler up here, only about 90 degrees and falling a bit, and this was a lonely road with no trucks rumbling through in the middle of the night. I went for a nice walk alone up and down the road, listening to the sounds of the desert, and felt, at long last, happy and at peace. I didn’t walk too far, though, for fear of being jumped by bandits, and was glad when Shimeles offered to walk with me in the other direction, through the village. It was one of the most wonderful scenes I’ve ever been witness to: I had stepped back in time to a pastoralist society which was happily existing without any of the conveniences and trivialities of the modern world. A hundred mud huts were warmly lit from inside by candle light, and while they looked hot and slummy during the day, now looked cosy and inviting, and somewhat luxurious with patterned rugs, wooden stools, and nice smells. Gentle, pleasant voices were talking everywhere, and the street and homes seemed alive with the vibrant throb of dark bodies which seemed to belong to the night, blend and mesh with it. During the day, this was a place of baking rock and burning air, but when evening arrived, the village came to life. People we passed seemed friendly, and Shimy noted that we had driven just to the outer edge of the Afar territory: these people were of a different upland tribe.
Back at the restaurant, things had calmed down, but I was dismayed to see that there were not even any beds for us as we’d had in Endofu, but instead the small goatskin-mesh benches we’d eaten dinner on had been pulled out by some trees in the dusty lot in front of the restaurant. The benches were furnished with a pillow, but nothing else, and could not have been more than four feet in length, and very narrow. In addition, the proprietor, probably thinking that us city folk would feel more at home near the only modern appliance in the village, had situated us not twenty feet from the roaring, clanking generator, which was thankfully shut off only about an hour later, before I sustained permanent hearing loss. Not wanting a repeat of the last night’s bug-frenzy, I tried to rig up my mosquito netting over the tiny bench, but really only succeeded in becoming hopelessly entangled in it. I didn’t sleep more than a few minutes that night, for despite the pleasant temperature quiet village, the full moon rose straight overhead and stayed there all night, shining in my eyes like a spotlight. Much worse, the bench had hard wooden armrests on which my head had to rest and over which my legs draped at mid-calf, bruising my skull and cutting off circulation to my feet. No matter how I twisted, it was magnificently uncomfortable, and I rose in the morning feeling filthy, exhausted, smelly and a bit discouraged. I climbed back into the same pair of clothes I’d been sweating and stinking in all week, and we moved on after a breakfast of tough goat flank and an emergency poop in the pasture behind the restaurant. My bowels had gone from producing wet diarrhea to liquefied pea soup, roughly the same consistency and color as the shiro we’d been eating three times a day, only considerably worse-smelling. It made it extremely difficult to function during the day because I felt that if I unclenched my anus for a single second, I’d shit my pants, and this general discomfort was only added to the fact that I now had a full-on head cold with aches and pains and completely clogged sinuses and a runny nose. I was growing so tired of the food that I felt like I might rather starve on alternate days just to give myself a break, but Shimeles’ apatite only seemed to be growing, and refusing to partake in the ceremony of sharing the injera is nearly a mortal sin in Ethiopia. If your friends are fat, you’ll become fat too by proximity. The only thing keeping me lean just now was the way my bowels were undergoing a complete scouring purge three times a day.
I felt a bit better after we picked up the receiver from our third point, and much better after we survived the drive back, in which Shimeles covered sixty rough miles in about forty minutes. We proceeded on past Mille toward Semara, and as we came within thirty miles, the landscape began to rapidly change. Instead of the flat, flat plains and sandy turf, it was a land of lava flows, volcanoes and dykes, massive cinder cones, great slip faults exposing chunky basalt columns, fields of enormous pillow lavas and pyroclasts, and a lot of topographic relief. It also was growing increasingly hot, and the sun became more and more fierce, until it occurred to me that if not for the air conditioning in Shimeles’ car, I probably would have fainted. The dashboard on the console read 122 degrees as we dropped into a wide plain surrounded by faults and broken lava flows and the metal roofs of Logiya and Semara appeared ahead. Shimeles announced to Teddy and me:
“Everything before was just child’s play. This here is really The Devil’s Anus. This is Afar.”
We exited the car at a restaurant and the sun felt like it was right there, hanging maybe a hundred feet off the ground. It didn’t take more than three literal seconds to feel all my exposed skin beginning to burn. I was dripping sweat and my eyes burned from the heat and the dryness. We went inside, where fans (a luxury in this place!) were blasting everyone with superheated air. Teddy looked like he was about to melt in his chair, and I was so hot I couldn’t talk or move to wash my hands or even sit up straight to eat. Shimeles ordered me a pasta, because I’d been complaining of my bad stomach, and though it was very plain, I ate it with gusto, being the first farenji (white-guy) food I’d had since a croissant in Addis. The regional administration guesthouse, where Shimeles though we could stay, was closed, and the Geothermal Research station looked abandoned and locked. However, after a few well-placed phone calls to the appropriate departmental heads back at the University in Addis, we had the combination to the gate, and surprisingly, there were a few groundskeepers hanging around inside after all, who we ‘tipped’ handsomely, and wasn’t it our luck: all the geothermal researchers were away on holiday for the month, and all the rooms were open, including the four administrator’s rooms… the only ones in all of Semara with air conditioning! Imagine, after four days of sweat and stink and headache, walking in from the now unbelievable 122 degrees outside into a little paradise with a desk and a firm bed, where the air greeted you at a heavenly 60 degrees. We were home!