Salt caravans and the white sea
In the heart of Danakil lies Lake Asale salt – a dazzling white plain stretching to the horizon, hiding a thick salt crust beneath a thin layer of water. At sunrise, the pools turn into mirrors reflecting the glow, and salt crystals crunch underfoot – a natural foot massage that no resort can offer.
Read more After the loss, Marčiulionis highlighted the process and praised the opponent: «This is rare»
Salt here is not just a sight, but a livelihood. For centuries, camel caravans have crossed Danakil, carrying cut salt slabs to the Ethiopian highlands: salt blocks called amoles served as money in Ethiopia for ages – used to pay wages and buy goods. Caravans still travel today, but trucks have joined them, and salt miners go to the white plain even in night shifts. The Afar people, who live in this desert, are considered some of the most resilient people in the world – it’s hard to disagree when their daily life is a place others visit briefly and only well-prepared.
Colors you don’t expect on earth
Beyond the salt plain lies Dallol – a place hard to describe without slipping into fantasy. Hot springs bring minerals to the surface, forming structures resembling sculptures by an invisible artist: white, yellow, orange, green. Pools bubble with acid, fragile sulfur crystals form around, fumaroles steam, and the colors are so vivid as if someone turned nature’s saturation knob to the max. Walking here is cautious and only with local guides – beneath the fragile crust lie hot acid pools. The word “dallol” in the Afar language means decay, disintegration – hardly a more accurate name for a place where the earth melts before your eyes. Scientists are also interested in Dallol as a boundary of life: its most acidic springs are studied to find answers about the conditions under which life is possible at all – and what it might be like on other planets.
Another Danakil highlight is Erta Ale, one of the few volcanoes in the world with an open lava lake in its crater for decades. The Afar call it the smoking mountain, and climbing it is done at night, over pumice and lava fragments, with flashlights and armed escorts – security remains a serious matter in the border region with Eritrea. The volcano lives by its own rhythm: one night it shows lava, the next only clouds of smoke and ash falling into the crater. Nature here does not keep schedules.
At the edge of Danakil awaits the most unexpected refreshment – Lake Afdera salt lake. Its water is so salty it lifts the body like the Dead Sea, and dozens of hot springs gush on the shore: after bathing in the salty “jelly,” salt can be washed off in a hot fresh water stream. Around the lake are salt drying fields, another livelihood branch of this land.
Churches you have to climb a rock to reach
Tigray is the cradle of Ethiopian civilization, and its mountains look as if created to hide sanctuaries: sandstone fingers reaching the sky, cliffs resembling spear tips, plateaus with steep slopes. In the Gheralta massif, dozens of churches are carved into the rocks, and the most famous is Abuna Yemata Guh, considered the hardest sanctuary to reach in the world. The path to it is a climb up a steep seven-meter rock wall, where local helpers show where to place your hands and feet, then narrow ledges above a chasm and a tight crevice instead of a door. Nearby, in the Mariam Korkor complex, a narrow crevice between two rocks leads to the mountain top with natural basalt stairs, and in the sandstone, centuries of pilgrims’ footsteps have worn deep grooves – a path trodden thirty times. Inside awaits a reward: a 6th-century church with exceptionally well-preserved wall paintings – the dry mountain air has preserved the frescoes better than any restorer could.
Read more By strengthening airspace protection, the military has deployed the NASAMS system near Vilnius
Christianity took root here earlier than in almost all of Europe: the Kingdom of Aksum declared it the state religion in the 4th century – according to legend, a Syrian sage converted the king’s twins to the faith, and from that time in Tigray remain churches carved from solid rock, considered among the oldest in the world. Later rock sanctuaries were created by other holy sages who came from Syria. In later centuries, churches were built in increasingly hard-to-reach places – both to protect from enemies and because the path to God should not be easy. Some were damaged during the recent Tigray war, but the tradition lives on: early in the morning, a ninety-year-old priest climbs barefoot along the narrowest ledge to the church.
A kingdom that saw Rome
Tigray is also home to the oldest surviving structure in Ethiopia – the Temple of Yeha, built in the 8th century BC, before the founding of Rome. Its stones are so precisely fitted that you cannot insert a knife blade between them, and it was built by the mysterious D’mt civilization, which traded ivory and incense and used the Sabaean script – from it developed the Ge’ez language, still used to write Ethiopian Orthodox books, and the current Amharic alphabet. Later, the Aksum Empire arose here, which in the 3rd century was named by the Persian sage Manis among the four great powers of the world – alongside Rome, Persia, and China. Aksum’s greatness is still testified by monolithic stelae – obelisks carved from a single granite block, the largest reaching 33 meters and being perhaps the largest monolith ever attempted by humanity. One 24-meter obelisk was taken to Rome by the Italians in 1937 by Mussolini’s order – Ethiopia regained it only in 2005, and it was one of the most difficult art repatriations in history: the obelisk had to be cut into three parts and flown by the largest transport plane in the world. And in the Aksum cathedral, Ethiopians believe the true Ark of the Covenant is still kept – no one can see it except a single monk appointed as its guardian.
Nearby is Adwa, a place whose name everyone should know: in 1896, the Ethiopian army crushed the Italians here, ensuring Ethiopia remained the only African country to defend its independence from European empires. And very close is Negash, where in the 7th century the first followers of the prophet Muhammad found refuge from persecution. They were welcomed by a Christian king, and this gesture of hospitality is still remembered in Islamic history.
Danakil and Tigray are probably the most contrasting pair you can combine in one trip: below, acid and lava boil, above, just a few hours away, priests chant on rock peaks. But this is exactly what this land is – a land still forming, and a civilization counting its third millennium.
Read more 13 illegal migrants turned back at the border with Belarus
