Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Nonato Nonnie Ramirez also asks, “What is the most dangerous travel adventure experience you had? Risky travel due to weather or extreme sport or natural disasters or crime?”

The most extreme thing was probably a hike I made to the Erta Ale volcano in Ethiopia. The people organizing it told us nothing about what it entailed. In fact, we didn’t even know we were going to be hiking.

Erta Ale is basically an open lava pit, one of the few like it in the world. It is also located in the Danakil Depression, one of the hottest places on Earth. As we were driving there, the temperature reached 50C or 122F, probably the hottest I’ve ever experienced.

Before we got started, they gave us beers, which it turned out was a horrible thing to do because alcohol gets you dehydrated. We still had no idea what was in store. It turned out we began the hike after sunset because of the temperatures. We walked for hours in the extremely hot night desert…and we had no water, and our guides were walking so far ahead of us they had no idea we were getting dehydrated.

Were it not for the fact that a guy with a camel was following behind us with water, I’m not sure what would have happened in the pitch dark of the Ethiopian desert.

When we finally got to the volcano, there were noxious fumes. Other groups that were there had gas masks because they knew what they were getting themselves into. We did not. We had to put ourselves upwind to avoid the fumes we had no idea we would be encountering.

In the middle of the night, we began walking to get back before sunrise.

What made the entire episode so bad was that I had no idea we would be doing it. We weren’t prepared.

I’d actually do it again, but only because I know what I’d be getting myself into now.