The Horn of Africa

Between January 13 and February 6, 2026, we crossed six countries in the Horn of Africa — Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia, and South Sudan. They were countries №141 through №146 of our 150: twenty-five days, sixteen flights, armed escorts in three countries, one nation that officially doesn't exist, the lowest point on the African continent, and rock art older than the pyramids. It was the most difficult, most unusual stretch of travel we have ever put together — and some of the most rewarding.

Eritrea moves at its own pace: credit cards are nearly nonexistent, bank records are handwritten into paper ledgers, and the espresso machines the Italians left behind still run Asmara's Art Deco cafés. We drove the old highland road down 2,300 metres to Massawa, took a boat onto the Red Sea, and relaxed on a sandbar while local couples shot their wedding photos.

Ethiopia gave us Timket, the Epiphany festival that turns Addis Ababa into a single moving procession — then Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton; the stelae of Axum and the church that claims the Ark of the Covenant; Gondar's castles; and Lalibela, where we felt our way between 12th-century rock-hewn churches through pitch-dark tunnels and got pulled into a village wedding with homemade beer.

Djibouti is a country-sized strategic asset: our hotel alone was hosting soldiers from seven militaries. We slept in the desert beside the limestone chimneys of Lake Abbe — the landscape everyone says starred in Planet of the Apes (it didn't; it just looks that alien) — and stood on the salt crust of Lake Assal, 155 metres below sea level, the lowest point in Africa.

Somaliland runs on its own currency, its own army, and its own elections, recognized by almost nobody. It was also far more relaxed than we expected: we walked Hargeisa's markets at night, changed money by the brick, got escorted into the owner's box at a packed soccer match, and stood under the 5,000-year-old cave paintings of Las Geel with our government-issued soldier waiting outside.

Mogadishu was the opposite: armed security, a fortified hotel, and a city that has been fighting for thirty years — yet the fish market landed sharks on shoulders, the Lido beach filled with families, and the old Italian cathedral stood roofless and defiant. Somalia has the longest coastline on mainland Africa, and you can feel it: everything faces the sea.

South Sudan, the world's newest country, closed the run. Photography is heavily restricted in Juba, so the cameras stayed pocketed — until the Mundari cattle camp, where thousands of Ankole-Watusi horns catch the dung-fire smoke at dusk and the light turns bronze. We slept in a tent outside the camp and didn't sleep much at all.

One stamp is still missing. Port Sudan was booked for February 2026 — a Red Sea camp, Suakin's coral-block ruins — but wartime Sudan had other plans, and the leg is rebooked for 2027. The Horn isn't finished with us yet.