An adventure at Lake Abhe or Lake Abbe or Lake Abhe Bad or whatever...

Well, my most recent adventure takes place in the same place most of my adventures for the last couple/next few months will occur…Djibouti. Being a small country, you would not expect for there to be much to do in Djibouti. However, as kids from small towns with Wal Marts everywhere have found, there’s ALWAYS something to do. By the way, there are many uses of ‘’ in this and they mostly refer to comments that were made by my fellow adventurers. Sorry for most of the 10 readers out there, but you’ll just have to trust me that there is more funny stuff behind ‘’ words.

So, the destination this time would be Lake Abhe or Lake Abbe or Lake Abhe Bad or something like that. This beautiful gem is home of three tectonic plates moving away from each other, a salt lake, a bunch of mineral deposits and some hot springs. It was also the ‘location’ where part of the original Planet of the Apes was filmed ;) So, off we head for a great adventure to see some of the finest landscape Djibouti has to offer.

Djibouti Flying J

We start our trek down out Djibouti City on the paved roads towards Dikhil (yes, laugh to yourself as you say it, I know I do). This two hour drive has some of the finest roadside attractions around. There even appeared to be a Djibouti Flying J that we passed. I wanted to see if they had a Denny’s, but we had to push on.

Once we made it to Dikhil (still funny isn’t it?), we were to take N-6 towards Diksa (haha) and Kouta Bouyya. What does N-6 look like? I’m not sure, but I’m sure it was similar to whatever road we were ended up turning onto. Apparently, if looking for a ‘dirt road’ in Djibouti, you probably need a guide because they all look alike and they are about 100 of them every 100 feet.

Pee break

So, we took what we thought was N-6, and headed towards what we thought was Diksa. After a pee break where the only person that had made this trip prior said, ‘I don’t know if this looks familiar’; we continued on. We ended up in a town about half a mile from the Ethiopian border that probably hadn’t seen people like us in a long time (if ever). Since the road ended the ended, which was probably a good thing; we turned around and backtracked until we found another option to head ‘in the right direction’. Not sure how we knew exactly which direction was the right one. We had gps, but I don’t think any of our maps had latitude and longitude on them.

How come you guys have to pee so much?

Nonetheless, we continued and our pair of tracks eventually merged with what was clearly a dirt road. This was in fact, ‘The-6’, not to be confused with ‘The-5’ or ‘The-9’. We made it to Diksa, where we were greeted in the usual fashion of the local towns that you have to experience in order to understand. We had one local jump onto the lead car and help or something? After we figured out how to get through the town we continued. The road at this point was multiple sets of tracks weaving like spaghetti in the same general direction and of course, another pee break.

 

Gypsum tornado.

As we got closer we could see the gypsum fields that were a sea of white spotted with towers of dust devils. We made it to the pass and stopped for a photo op. We could see the towering limestone chimneys in the distance. Our destination was in sight.

After another couple of miles driving on a ‘road’, we decided to head straight to the closest chimneys. Turns out, there wasn’t a road to them anyway. Here we got out and walked around and took some photos. We were still about 3 miles from the water and were headed that direction.

      
After a drive over some mounds of grass and across a flat, we parked at the next set of towers. It was amazing. They were huge, mounds of limestone deposits that towered above and were surrounded by grass fed by boiling hot springs at the base of the spires.  As with any vegetation in Djibouti, a heard of goats feasted at the delicious sulfur-grass (I just imagine it tastes like sulfur, don’t really know). We had our fill of this spot and decided to make our way closer to the water. After crossing between a few towers, we quickly realized the ground was not going to cooperate. It was time to head towards higher ground.

We arrived back at our last stop, only about a quarter mile away, and stopped to tell one of the others the grounds wasn’t stable, time to head out. At the moment the other car started home, the third car cracked the hardened surface we were driving on and found the mud below. Immediately following their lead, the second car cracked through and was stuck. In a last ditch effort to speed across this unknown land, we too found ourselves axle deep in mud. It was absolutely incredible.

This was the type of scenario that makes you think of movies like Castaway. We had found ourselves in a crusted over bowl of Jell-o. The surface layer was about an inch or two thick and underneath was an endless mud pit with the consistency of wet pottery clay. The vehicles were not losing traction, but simply sinking under their own weight. The solution was simple; we would just get some rocks and get them under the tires in order to get traction. This was Djibouti after all. How hard could it be to find some rocks?

That's right, two Toyota Landcruisers and a Toyota Prado couldn't even survive the hidden trap at Lake Abhe. Notice the lack of rocks. The mineral deposits in the background practically crumble in your hands.

Well, apparently luck was not in our favor since there were no rocks in sight. That’s right, we were stuck in the country that could rival the US’s GDP if you could build everything out of rocks, and there was not a rock in sight. We divided and concurred and backpacks were emptied of food and used for transporting rocks. Who ever thought we would be in Djibouti carrying rocks in backpacks? Since we needed more surface area for ‘jacking off’ the Toyota’s, we had to dig a hole to place the spare so we could ‘jack off’ the tires. What did we have to dig with? Our hands, a couple sticks, and a small camp shovel that is more like a garden shovel.

1,000,000,000 flies

I will have to say that I was quite pleased with the group we had out there. I do not think I saw one sign of someone flipping out which means we had just the right people on this kind of trip. I will also say that everyone did a great job pitching in to help with our predicament, even the ones that somehow escaped getting covered in bugs and mud. Speaking of bugs, I don’t think I mentioned the bugs that seemed to be a cross between ants, flies, mosquitos and termites. Not sure what they were, but they really liked the shade. They hated when you disturbed their sleeping places which happened

Maybe it's 1,000,100,000

 to be every hump of grass and the shady side of anything. Yes, and there were in fact over a billion of them based on the number that we ate every time the wind blew. It’s a good thing they weren’t mosquitos and didn’t bite because we would probably have 12 cases of malaria to report. Of course the billion bugs probably would have drained us of life before we made it out anyways, so there wouldn’t be anyone left to show signs of malaria.

Don't worry guys, I'm getting awesome photos!

After three hours of attempting to get a vehicle out of the mud, we realized that defeat was closing in. We also realized that help was a four hour drive away and we had almost four hours of sunlight left. So, we broke out the iridium-phone to call dad to come help us. The best part was almost every person that would be the best to go to for help was already there! We explained our situation and the plan was to have someone come find us. So, we had the only person that had been there give directions. This was priceless. You could see the defeat in his eyes before he started speaking into the phone. The directions, ‘You take N-1 to Dikhil’. Pause…sigh…’then’…eyes close and head sinks…’take…N-6 to Diksa…then go through town and head northeast on N-6…you’ll go through a mountain pass and we’re about 2 miles off the ‘road’’. He knew, as all of us did, that no one could possibly find us before sunset even though we had given GPS coordinates. We couldn’t find ‘The-6’ and we knew where we were going!

For the next few minutes, we soaked in our defeat. Another SUV appeared about two miles away. Immediately, the senior member of our team took off running, waving and yelling. After about a half mile run, the SUV clearly slowed down to check us out, then sped off to abandon the crazy people at Lake Abhe. About 30 minutes after telling dad that we were stuck, a couple of entrepreneurial Djiboutians came out of nowhere carrying a 10’ sand ladder. Our knight in shining armor was in fact a couple Djiboutians out to make $6,000djf. Maybe they will learn the art of negotiating with desperate people someday, but $6,000djf was nothing for a bunch of people stranded 8,000 miles from home, 125 miles from our CLUs, and 2 hours from the nearest pavement.

So, back to work we went. In our time of sadness we were able to assess the vehicles more closely. I found that if I took a pointy stick, I could find solid ground by placing a little weight on it and had mostly mapped the area. I could drop the stick a couple inches and feel the crusted-over mud giggle below my feet. Within 20 minutes with our new sand ladder we had got the Toyota Prado out of the mud. With my ground checking stick in hand, ‘Shepard Steve’, with the Prado following, ’led us to the promised land’. This was about the time that a herd of donkeys wondered by and we couldn’t figure out which ‘one group of us was a bunch of jackasses’. We moved to the second vehicle which took about 30 minutes to free. Finally, we went to my SUV, which we had spent the majority of the three hours working on prior to the phone call. It turned out that the car we thought was the best bet, was in fact the worst. It took almost an hour to get it out and it was just enough time to grab our crap, strap on our saving sand ladder, grab one out of focus group shot and head for pavement. Of course, we left the shovel which we had lost about 1,000 times in the mud.

We made it about halfway between Diksa and Dikhil (still funny) before it became really dark. The good news was that Dikhil had lights and we could see it in the distance. After an eternity, we could still see the lights in the distance. About 20 minutes later, we stopped for a pee break and powwow. We could still see the lights in the distance and some were questioning our heading. We trucked on and a few minutes later found pavement. It was another 2 terrifying-Djibouti-highway-hours later and we arrived safely. It was by far the best adventure I have had the chance to experience here and hope that I can have a fraction of the fun I had on that trip in my remaining time here. And the best part of it is; Planet of the Apes was NEVER filmed there!