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Djibouti

The fishing boats that the fishermen go out on daily.

By the mid-19th century Tadjoura was thriving, "while all the other so-called Afar sultanates along the coast were described ... as small decaying villages of no political or commercial importance.

Tadjoura owed this success to possessing a major slave market; Pankhurst suggests that a rough estimate of 6,000 people a year left Ethiopia through Tadjoura and Zeila.[7]

The slave trade was abolished by decree on 26 October 1889

Every where you looked you could see so many unemployed.

Stark contract with camels in the foreground and docks in the rear of the photo.

Home sweet home

Car trouble with one of our vehicles

Steam still coming up out of the ground

Our local guide explaining how the ground is shifting and pulling in opposite directions.

A crudely gouged hollow 300 metres above ground awaited us as we scrambled up the rubble. It dates back to 1978 when L'Ardoukoba erupted and then promptly subsided within a week

The eruption harmed nobody but left an awesome scar on the landscape. The sable-coloured rubble creaked beneath our feet as we walked over the roofs of small tunnels created by the rampaging lava flow

It's hard to imagine life ever prospering here. The only sign of movement came from one small crack in the ground where a single wisp of steam lazily sailed upwards into the sky

When I placed my hand gently above the opening, a blast of heat immediately. This episode provided a physical reminder of just how close we were to one of nature's most active works in progress

I actually crawled into the lava tube and looked out through this hole. What a strange feeling crawling along in a extinct volcano lava tube.

Nowhere is the country's inability to cultivate its landscape more evident than in the area surrounding the extinct volcano L'Ardoukoba

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