If you were alive in the 1980s, when Belinda Carlisle gleefully proclaimed that “heaven is a place on Earth” (or if you watched the best hour of modern television on Netflix at any time in the past year) it might not come as a huge surprise to learn that hell, too, is a place on Earth. Specifically, it’s located in Dallol, Ethiopia, where the average daily temperature is 94 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the hottest place in the world.
How Hot is Dallol, Ethiopia?
Dallol, Ethiopia is the hottest place on Earth based on year-round averages, which is to say that if you average the temperature of every place on Earth for one year, Dallol’s average will be the highest. There are places in the world that are hotter at given moments but Dallol is the hottest on average.
Another thing that makes Dallol so hot, its high humidity (around 60 percent) and the noxious fumes that rise out of its Hades-looking sulfur pools notwithstanding, is the fact that it doesn’t cool off at night. While many of the world’s hot spots are located in deserts, where temperature extremes between day and night are just as dramatic as the extreme temperatures experienced during either, Dallol has an average low temperature of 87 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than many places on Earth ever get.
Is It Possible to Visit Dallol, Ethiopia?
Yes, of course, though as suggested in the previous section, doing this independently is tedious, to say the least. Indeed, if you happened to be in northern Ethiopia, you could hire a camel and a guide to take you to Dallol.
There are a couple of problems with this in reality, however. First and foremost, since infrastructure is generally poor in Ethiopia, getting to a place where you could hire a guide who would take you to Dallol – and finding said “place” in the middle of the nothingness that characterizes much of Ethiopia – would be difficult or even impossible, to say nothing of the questionable safety of doing such a thing.
Secondly, any camel that goes in and out of Dallol these days is hauling one thing, and it’s not tourists. Camels are still incredibly important to the salt mining industry in Afar, the region where you find Dallol, although it reminds to be seen how long this will be the case.
