Africa No.2 - Marine life / Djibouti

Women, market, heat and humidity. Spice smell. Muslim city. Yes they are all nice in here. 

(hangout, city center)

But Djibouti is all about surveying the good-looking soldiers worldwide.

That’s the pre-information I got from one of my friends. She lived for two years in Ethiopia, a landlocked country, starving for the sight of macho bodies and fresh healthy blood. Poor girl.

Being such a small country facing to the ocean, as the base country to fight with the modern pirates around Somalia, Djibouti gathers military bases, not just navy base, arms and soldiers from lots of country. And money as well. There are the military bases of the France, US, Spain, Italy, Germany, and surprisingly, the base of the Japan Self-Defense Force, which is the only base outside Japan.

Djibouti also makes a big amount of money by doing the intermediate trade for long years to feed the big population of Ethiopia and others. Location counts a lot. No wonder Djibouti has been survived with the 3% food self-sufficiency out of cultivable land of 0.5% of the whole country.

(revenue, outbound aircraft)

When you go to the sole five-star hotel in Djibouti, you can see many soldiers hanging out around the lobbies, restaurants, bars, and most importantly, around the pool side. It was for sure the sight to be seen. Their robust hairy chest, biceps muscle of their arms, shapely waists and firm butts, all bronzed in the sun. Just to imagine these figures are fighting with the pirates makes me salivate. Such a fun place, Djibouti.

The other thing to be enjoyed was food, especially marine food, which I had been away from for a few months of staying in Ethiopia. There was a Sushi restaurant in the middle of the Djibouti city with fresh fish and proper miso soup. These all came from adjacent sea through Gulf of Aden.

(snooze, Monday market)

Gulf of Aden was not just a simple gulf but the beautiful sea which leaves tiny salt lakes behind. Lake Assal, was the name of this haunting death lake with 34.8% salt density, which is higher than Dead Sea. To notice, this lake had lowest altitude in Africa as well.

A visit there right before sunset was as scary as a visit to a haunted house, in the sense you encounter some deaths of former ocean. The grand splendid ocean with many adventurous pirates in the old days turned into the petite boring salt crystals, which you can hardly recognize that it used to be ocean. They were simply left out.

Salt crystals which stitch the edge of salt lake was totally and translucent pallor. Just as a face of ghost. It made me hard to stand in the lakeside for a long time, not just because of the itch caused by the long-term exposure to the high dense salt, but because of the fear to realize that something was missing there. The lake itself knew that they have been died already, and still struggling to face their past. This came as a mirror to me myself, which was the most horrible thing.

(salt lake, death of the sea)

Well, Gulf Aden deprived Lake Assal of their lives, but it gives life to something else; many marine lives are being fed in the protection of this Gulf. A whale shark is one of them. Being the largest known extant fish species, they were the most peaceful sea life I’ve ever seen. They don’t care if we human beings swim insistently around them. For them, we are just as the same as little red crabs, crawling around the sea surface and nipping the nipples of American soldiers with hard core tattoos.

Seemed to me like they were even smiling to see us minor creatures keeping shuffling around them. They looked like the creatures so called grandpas, for their thick skins and warm hearts.

(whale shark, the largest)

To conclude all of my experience in Djibouti for 5 days; Djibouti is all about ocean, from which all of us came out.

(la mer, the origin)