Descent into the Rift
My first weekend outside of Addis Ababa was excellent, but it mostly just left me wanting more. Naturally, I wasted little time booking another trip out of the city for the next weekend. While I'd gone higher up the previous weekend into the Ethiopian Highlands, this time I was going down: into the northern part of the African Rift Valley . The Rift Valley stretches from the active volcanoes of the Afar Triple Junction in Ethiopia and Eritrea south through Kenya, Tanzania, and most of the rest of East Africa, ending in Mozambique. It began around 25 million years ago with the massive flood basalts that created the Ethiopian Highlands, and around 10 million years from now the eastern part of Africa will split away from the mainland, forming a new ocean and a new continent (aren't plate tectonics amazing?). For now though, it's a huge valley stretching more than 6,500 kilometers through Africa, responsible for such impressive geological features as...