The beauty of Djibouti

On a side street in Djibouti City’s busiest nightlife neighbourhood, three middle-aged and slightly overweight women in brightly printed dresses clean the streets at 10pm on a Friday. One wears her Djiboutiville Propre neon yellow vest outside her clothes. Another has managed to half cover the garish colour with her purple dress and the third seems to have forsaken the reflective material, typically reserved for construction workers and early morning joggers, altogether.

It seems an odd time for municipality workers to be cleaning up trash, but Djibouti is the hottest point in Africa. Venturing out in the midday sun to pick up some scraps of paper would be unpleasant at best. The entire city closes from 2pm to 5pm every day while people take their midday respites from the sun.

These women are not alone in the square. Next door is a fluorescently lit souvenir shop pumping out hip hop tunes typical of top 40 radio stations selling everything from faux button-ups to salad servers with animals carved into the handles. Soldiers — Japanese ones in jeans with cameras, slightly doughy German seamen and carefully pressed members of the French Foreign Legion — criss-cross the Place du 27 Juin, named for the day Djiboutians were granted independence from France.

The nightclubs where the legionnaires, dressed in tiny shorts and bobby socks, dance with Somalian women trying to eke out a living by capitalising on the high number of single men in the city, would not exist if not for the country’s lucky location.

Like Dubai, Djibouti’s primary natural resource is its location. Situated at a narrow point between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, it is a natural port town, perfectly positioned to capitalise on trade between Egypt, India, China and Arabia. Unhappily for its neighbours, Djibouti’s economy also benefits from the spoils of a closed Ethiopian-Eritrean border. All people and goods moving between the two disputing countries must travel via the awkwardly positioned former French protectorate. The increasingly violent Somalia pirates operating in the Gulf have cemented Djibouti’s role. European Union boats sent in the hopes of staving off pirate attacks need a place for their soldiers to rest.

What most people transitioning through Djiboutiville miss, though, is the visually assaulting scenery just a 45 minute drive outside of the city. Travelling towards Ethiopia, tall hills not quite qualifying as mountains scatter across the brown and rocky landscape until they give way to Lake Ghoubet, a body of water which opens into the Gulf of Tadjoura before giving way to the Gulf of Aden.

The azure waters of Lake Ghoubet are periodically pierced with dome-shaped volcanoes, formed when magma surges up through the ever-widening crack between the Asian and African tectonic plates.

This is the birthplace of a new ocean, the guide says, which will one day be larger than the Atlantic. That day is hundreds of millions of years away, so if you need some tangible evidence, drive down to sea level. Black slabs of rock jut up at odd angles where the earth’s pressure has pushed them out. A crack running through the rock emits a heat that could boil a kettle. The crack continues from the water, nearly to the mountains. The asphalt road bears a nearly straight scar in the spot where it lays over the space between the plates.

Driving just north of Ghoubet, the brown and rocky landscape gives way to the pristine white Lake Assal. If not for the dramatic increase in temperature, the shores could be mistaken for snow covered. Lake Assal is saltier than the Dead Sea. The lowest point in Africa, it is also the hottest, and the grey mud at the salt’s edge will scald unshorn feet.

The journey back to the city runs past small villages where old and bright blue UN water barrels have been repurposed and line the road. Baboons and camels run over the terrain, periodically dotted with traditional dome shaped huts.

Back in town, there are several boat company operators that will take tourists and off-duty soldiers out to the islands to snorkel, exploring the undersea life around the coral reef and a shipwreck.

Since much of the city’s population is transitory, looking for a few 
days of solid ground before venturing back into open water, it can feel slow after just a few days. Those who stay in Djiboutiville, though, are robbing themselves.

emily@khaleejtimes.com