The next morning was a mad dash for Dallol and the site of the bandit attacks 3 days earlier.

Teeming with guns, some operational, some most likely not, we joined up with a mass of French people whose Capri pants and euro-feel was as comforting as it was out of place.

Dallol was miraculous as only a vast expanse of delicate, wafer thin structures, boiling pits of sulfuric acid, and impossibly vivid yellows and greens can be amidst a monotous sea of lava rock and dust.

We also had the opportunity to visit surface salt mines that had been mined nearly continuously for thousands of years. But besides thousands upon thousands of camels, armies of salt workers, and hundreds of thousands of blocks of salt ripped from the earth through a mixture of brute force and primitive metal tools there wasn’t much to see.

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