The Grand Bara

South of the Gulf, the highway drops onto the Grand Bara and the world simplifies to two elements: a dead-flat clay pan running tens of kilometres, pale and cracked into polygons, and the sky doing everything else. The dry lake floods briefly in rare rains and spends the rest of the year as Djibouti's straightest surface - the road crosses it without a single bend, mirages float Pelzeln's gazelles above silver false water at the edges, and on windy days land-yachts sail the clay, the national sport this landscape invented for itself. Basalt ranges frame the emptiness on both horizons.

Highlights

• The absolute flat - the cracked clay pan to both horizons.
• The mirages - gazelles and ranges floating on false silver water.
• Land-yachting - wind-sailing the pan when the gusts arrive.
• The dead-straight road - kilometres without a bend, a photograph in itself.

When to go

November to March for survivable temperatures - summer on the pan is furnace-grade; early morning gives the best mirage light and the chance of gazelles near the margins. After rare rains the pan briefly becomes a sheet of real water and impassable mud.

Good to know

It is a landscape moment on the way to somewhere - Ali Sabieh, Lake Abbe - rather than a destination with services, of which there are none: fuel, water and shade all travel with you. Driving off the graded crossings after any rain risks bogging to the axles. The emptiness is the entire point; those needing features should time it for the land-yachts.

Nearby

Ali Sabieh's red mountains, Lake Abbe's chimneys beyond and the route back to the Gulf.

Key facts