HEAT WAVE
• Do you like the summer heat and why? • What temperature do you feel yourself most comfortable at? • What is the hottest temperature you have experienced? • Do you prefer rainy summers or sunny summers? • What are typical temperatures for this time of the year in Ukraine? • Do you like suntan and have you sunbathed this year already? • What activities can you name that are perfect for the hot sunny weather? • Where do you prefer to spend vacation days – on the beach or in the mountains or forest? • Have you noticed the recent summers become hotter than before? • What do you know about the greenhouse gas effect and an ozone layer? • Do you think that in the future the humanity will find ways to fight global warming? What preventive measures do you know that are being taken now?
A Journey To The Hottest Place On Earth: Dallol Ethiopia • No one travels alone to the hottest place on earth. You need a driver and a Jeep stocked with water bottles and four days of non-perishable food. And because that Jeep will sink in the fine sand of the desert, you also need another Jeep (and another driver) to tug it out. • There are no places to lodge or dine in this desert, so you will need space for bags with food, a cook, plus a few armed guards - because the hottest place on earth is also somewhat lawless. • And finally, because such trip costs many thousands of dollars, you will need some fellow travelers to split the bill – the sort of people who like to fry themselves on their own vacation. • My father is the easiest recruit. Dad, who sleeps best when roasting in the afternoon sun, is a lover of extreme heat. He is also an extreme traveler, who likes all the countries where no one honeymoons. From my father, I have inherited both tendencies: I’m known for getting pig-pink sunburns, and also for stalking the edges of maps.
• The Danakil desert lies on the edges of three maps – the maps of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. All three countries claim a piece of this desert, named the cruelest place on earth by National Geographic. I don’t have to mention any of this to my father – not the endless salt flats, lakes the color of Listerine, or camels by the thousands. When Dad starts calling this desert “the Frying Pan, ” I know he is in. • On a message board, I find two more people to enlist – a concert pianist and a computer engineer. Both are keen on reaching the Danakil in early December – the mildest time of year in the cruelest place on earth. • We do not find Omer until the four of us come to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. He is leaning against the stone ledge outside our hotel, smoking, when my dad strikes up conversation. This pony-tailed Israeli man, with a dusty backpack and a unicorn tattoo, looks nothing like my grey-blonde, khaki-dressed dad. And yet, when they get to talking about traveling, I feel like I’m watching long-lost brothers reunite. Sumatra, Annapurna, the Andes: the same extreme places have lured both men.
• The jeeps plunge down tan mountains for hours, mountains that feel primordial, perhaps because I know Lucy, the 3. 2 -million-year-old hominid, was unearthed near here, or perhaps because civilization completely drops off. Every couple of miles, we see a flock of donkeys and camels strapped with thick tablets of salt, and the lone shepherd walking behind his herd, wearing a Kalashnikov. • The real heat won't strike until we reach the sizzling edge of the frying pan, an uninhabited region, roughly 130 meters (426 feet) below sea level, called Dallol holds the record for average annual temperature: 94 (+35 C) degrees. It's only advisable to visit Dallol in the early morning, before the sun has reached a critical height. • Sand gives way to salt, and soon we're in a landscape of white crystals, glinting in the fresh morning light. The ground is miraculously flat. Suddenly, in the pure white expanse, a huge brown mound appears, rising like a cliff from the sea. It's the only vertical mass in sight, and apparently, our destination. The jeeps brake and park. Nobody tells us this is a collapsed volcano. We're ordered to find a full liter of bottled water, and to bring it with us up the lumpy brown mountain. • My comrades crouch down beside pale green toadstools – mineral formations whose tabletops are smooth as marble. It feels oddly like we've just walked in on something – a meeting? a moment? Whatever these green outgrowths are, they stop us cold, right at the doorway of Dallol.
• The hottest place on earth is an assault of color: slime yellow and deep rust, pea green and Barney purple. Some of the formations look like coral reefs, others like egg shells, air-blown from the hot breath of the earth below. It's a psychedelic plain of sulfur deposits, iron oxide crust, acid lakes, and tiny geysers that gurgle up steaming water. Everyone wanders off alone, crunching over the brittle earth, heads down, heads shaking. • I know the ground is hot – you can even hear the soft throbbing of water boiling underground – and yet I can't help treating it like ice. Everywhere we step, things break and splinter. It sounds like a china shop, full of looters. • I feel hot, but not to a degree that alarms me. Only when I lift a hand to my chest and feel, beneath the soaked fabric of my t-shirt, collarbones like hot radiator pipes, do I understand what my body's dealing with. Heat in Dallol doesn't just beat down from the sun. It hisses up through conical vents, bubbles up in sulfur pools, and radiates from the thin ground with force. I get the feeling that this medley of heat is off the human register – mine at least. I'm not even thirsty.
