A small country with three roads worth driving, taken in a loop: whale sharks in a drowned rift off Arta, the salt crust of Lac Assal at 155 metres below sea level, a volcano that built itself in a week in 1978, a dying juniper forest 1,500 metres up in the Goda mountains, the old French station at Obock, then south across the Grand Bara to the limestone chimneys of Lac Abbé on the Ethiopian border.
Djibouti City
Arrive, and give the first day to the city and to learning what you may not point a camera at. The European quarter around Place Menelik is arcaded colonial building with Yemeni and Indian shopfronts underneath it, the Hamoudi Mosque dates from 1906, and Marché Central is where the qat arrives from Ethiopia by road every afternoon and the whole town reorganises itself around it. The one thing dominating the skyline — the port, the container cranes, the naval quays — is the thing it is illegal to photograph, along with the airport, the bridges and anything in uniform. Read the note below before you take a phone out. Nagad station, on the southern edge of town, is the Djibouti terminus of the electrified line to Addis Ababa and is worth twenty minutes for the scale of it.
Arta Plage and the Bay of Ghoubbet
Forty kilometres west on the RN9 and the Gulf of Tadjoura opens on your right. Arta Plage is the launch point for the whale sharks, which gather in the Ghoubbet and the western gulf in the cool months — the season runs roughly November to February and is worth planning the whole trip around. Operators work from small boats with a briefing first: no touching, no fins, no flash, small groups in the water at a time. These are juveniles, mostly four to six metres, and they are feeding rather than performing. Afternoon at Khor Ambado or the beach at Arta if the boat comes back early.
Ardoukoba, Lac Assal, and over to Tadjoura
The best driving day in the country. The RN9 climbs, then drops in hairpins to the Ghoubbet el-Kharab, the inner basin joined to the gulf by a strait a few hundred metres across — this is the Afar triple junction, where the Arabian, Nubian and Somali plates are pulling apart, and the ground shows it. Ardoukoba is the young cone on the left: on 7 November 1978, after a swarm of earthquakes, fissures opened in the rift floor between Lac Assal and the Ghoubbet, spread lava over the plain and built a small scoria cone inside a week. The two sides of the rift moved apart by something like two metres while it happened, which is as close as anyone has come to watching an ocean open. It has been silent since. Then Lac Assal itself, 155 metres below sea level, ringed by a salt crust white enough to hurt and about ten times as saline as the sea. Afar salt has been cut here for centuries and now leaves by lorry for Ethiopia. Walk out onto the crust in shoes you do not mind losing, and do not drink anything you did not carry in. North afterwards over the shoulder of the Goda range to Tadjoura, the oldest town on the gulf and white enough that the French called it the town of seven mosques.
Up into the Goda mountains — Forêt du Day
Thirty kilometres and most of two hours, because the track climbs from sea level to about 1,500 metres on switchbacks cut into the range behind Tadjoura. Forêt du Day is Djibouti's only national park and the last fragment of a juniper woodland that covered a great deal more of this coast before the region dried out. What you walk through is largely dead: every survey since the late 1970s has recorded the mature juniper dying back across the plateau — drought, heat and browsing together — and what stands now is thin woodland full of grey deadwood. Boxwood is taking the gaps. Somewhere in it survives the Djibouti francolin, endemic to this forest and the Mabla range to the north and listed Critically Endangered; a late-1970s count put several thousand birds here and every count since has been a fraction of it, with the surviving population now reckoned in the hundreds. You are unlikely to see one. Come for what a collapsing ecosystem looks like from inside, and for the fact that it is twenty degrees cooler up here. Village guides at Bankoualé or Randa on the way up.
Along the coast to Obock
Sixty-one kilometres on the RN14, sealed, running along the northern shore of the gulf with the Goda range behind it. Obock is where France arrived first — the coaling station bought in 1862 and occupied from 1884, before Djibouti was founded across the water in 1888 and the administration moved there in 1892, leaving this one to stop growing. The result is a small port of coral-block ruins, a working fishing beach and a French cemetery. The Ras Bir lighthouse is north of town on a spit of white sand, and the mangroves at Godoria beyond it are a wintering ground for waders. Ask the driver before leaving the track anywhere in this hinterland: mines laid during the fighting of the early 1990s have never been fully cleared, and the ground people drive on is the ground known to be clear. This is also the coast people leave from: Obock is the Djiboutian end of the crossing to Yemen, and the boats go at night.
Back around the gulf
There is no short way home. Retrace the RN14 to Tadjoura, then the RN9 the long way round the head of the gulf — past the Assal turning again and down the hairpins — into Djibouti City. About 220 kilometres and five hours, and the second run past the Ghoubbet is better than the first because you know what you are looking at. The alternative is the passenger ferry from Obock or Tadjoura to L'Escale in Djibouti City, roughly three hours, which does not sail in both directions every day and stops when the wind gets up; if you have a hired vehicle and driver, the vehicle has to take the road regardless, so most trips simply drive.
Moucha and Maskali
A day on the water and a deliberate gap in the driving. Boats leave from La Siesta or the fishing port for Moucha, half an hour out, and for the smaller Maskali beyond it — coral in shallow water, mangrove on the sheltered side, and turtles if you are lucky. Take everything with you, including shade and drinking water; there is a beach concession on Moucha and not much else. Back in the afternoon, which leaves the evening for the fish restaurants along the Boulevard de la République and for repacking for two nights of camp beds.
South across the Grand Bara to Dikhil
The RN1 out of the capital is the Ethiopian trade corridor and you share it with a continuous line of container lorries — a hundred kilometres to the Ali Sabieh turning takes the better part of two hours because of them. Ali Sabieh sits under red sandstone ridges and grew up around the old metre-gauge Franco-Ethiopian railway, which reached here at the turn of the twentieth century on its way to Dire Dawa in 1902 and Addis Ababa in 1917, and carried on in worsening condition until the new standard-gauge line replaced it. North-west of it the Grand Bara opens: a dead-flat clay pan tens of kilometres across, hard enough to drive on and used by the French garrison for exercises, which is a reason to keep the camera down. Dikhil is the last town, the last fuel and the last reliable phone signal before the lake.
As Eyla and down to Lac Abbé
Off the RN1 at Dikhil onto the RN6, which runs thirty-odd kilometres through As Eyla — a wadi with date gardens in it and stepped stone water cuts — to Kouta Bouyya, where the surface gives up entirely. The last stretch to the lake is sand, gravel and old lava, unsigned, and it is the reason you have a driver who has done it before. Lac Abbé is what is left of a much larger lake on the Ethiopian border, most of its inflow now taken upstream by the Awash irrigation schemes, and the retreating water has exposed a field of limestone chimneys up to fifty metres high, built by hot springs and still steaming at the base. Flamingos work the shallows. The far shore is Ethiopia; there is no crossing here and no reason to test one, and the campements and the chimney field are all on the Djiboutian side. Sleep at one of the Afar campements — huts, mats, a shared bucket, dinner cooked over wood — and go out again for the light at both ends of the day, which is when the chimneys stop looking like a film set and start looking like plumbing.
Back to the capital
Out at first light for the steam before the heat arrives, then the track back to Dikhil and the RN1 north — about five hours in total, and the lorry traffic thickens again from Ali Sabieh onwards. That lands you in Djibouti City in the afternoon, which is the right margin for an evening flight out; most long-haul departures leave late. If yours goes in the morning instead, sleep in the capital and treat the last stretch of the RN1 as a day you have already done rather than one to compress.
Good to know
Heat governs everything. Go between November and February; March and April are already hard, and from roughly May to September the coast runs at 40–45°C with the khamsin blowing off the interior, when Lac Abbé and the Goda tracks are simply not a reasonable place to be in a vehicle. Almost everyone needs a visa arranged before boarding — the e-visa at evisa.gouv.dj is the standard route, tourism grants 30 days, official processing is quoted at three to five working days and the advice is to apply at least ten working days out. A yellow fever certificate is demanded if you are arriving from, or have transited for more than twelve hours through, a country with a risk of transmission; a direct flight from Europe does not trigger it, a connection through Addis Ababa or Nairobi does. Malaria here is not only a rural question, which is the part most people get wrong. Anopheles stephensi — an Asian, urban, container-breeding mosquito — was first recorded on the continent in Djibouti City in 2012, at a point when the country was reporting a few dozen malaria cases a year and thought itself close to elimination; by 2020 it was reporting tens of thousands. Official guidance now treats the whole country as year-round risk and prescribes prophylaxis, capital included. Photography is the other thing that will get you into trouble faster than anything on the road. It is illegal to photograph military installations and personnel, ports, the airport, bridges and government buildings, and the penalties run from a fine and confiscated equipment to detention or expulsion. In a country of 23,200 square kilometres hosting American, French, Chinese, Japanese and Italian forces, that covers a great deal more of the skyline than you would expect, including most of what is visible from the waterfront in the capital. Ask before photographing people, particularly women, and do not photograph mosques. Money is unusually simple: the Djiboutian franc has been pegged at 177.721 to the US dollar since 1973 and is held there by a currency board, there are no exchange controls, and dollars are accepted almost everywhere — euros far less readily. Cards work in the better hotels in Djibouti City and essentially nowhere else, so draw cash before you leave the capital, because there is no ATM you should rely on in Tadjoura, Obock, Dikhil or anywhere beyond. A 4×4 with a driver-guide is the standard arrangement and, for the Lac Abbé and Forêt du Day legs, effectively the only sensible one: the tracks are unsigned, there is no recovery service, and mobile coverage ends well before the lake does. Self-drive is legal and a few people do it, but budget for two spare tyres, a compressor and far more water than seems necessary. The RN1, RN9 and RN14 are sealed and reasonable; everything else is not, and the RN1 in particular is a heavy-lorry corridor where night driving is a bad idea. Two areas to stay clear of: the far north towards Ras Doumeira, where the border with Eritrea has been disputed and effectively closed since the clashes of June 2008, and unmarked ground off the tracks in the Obock and Tadjoura hinterland, where mines laid during the insurgency of the early 1990s have never been fully cleared. Stay on the track. Ramadan shifts opening hours and restaurant service across the whole country, and the qat market from mid-afternoon onwards shuts a surprising amount of business down every day of the year. French and Arabic are official; Somali and Afar are what you will hear, and English gets you a good deal less far than French.
Shorter or longer?
Add four or five days. The electrified standard-gauge line runs from Nagad station on the edge of Djibouti City to Addis Ababa — 752 kilometres, the first cross-border electrified railway in Africa, in commercial service since January 2018 — and the passenger run takes roughly twelve hours when it keeps time. Departures are a few days a week and the schedule moves, so book at the station rather than online, and be aware that this leg needs an Ethiopian visa arranged separately before you travel.
Djibouti City, Arta Plage and the Ghoubbet for the whale sharks, Lac Assal and Ardoukoba, then back through the capital and south to Dikhil and Lac Abbé. Keeps the two sights the country is known for and the best of the driving; cuts Tadjoura, Forêt du Day, Obock, the islands and the long haul back around the gulf.