The Danakil Diary

(Paperback)

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The earliest and most influential expeditions of the man now considered to be the greatest living explorer.
The Danakil Diary is the account of two journeys Thesiger made into the Danakil country in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, in 1930-34 at the age of 24 which, today, he still regards as the most dangerous he undertook.

It was an extraordinary journey and a remarkable achievement. Thesiger succeeded in penetrating country that had wiped out two Italian expeditions and an Egyptian army before him, discovered what happened to the Awash River (one of the areas last geographical mysteries to be solved) and managed to survive amongst the Danakil tribesmen, to whom a mans status depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated.

Besides giving early proof of Thesigers descriptive genius with his portrayal of the beautiful, savage landscapes, and their varied wildlife The Danakil Diary reveals youthful evidence of his fierce motivation and uncompromising will, which are familiar hallmarks of his sixty years of travel among primitive peoples in some of the harshest and remotest areas of the world.

Reviews

These diaries get us as close as we can now come to the camp fire around which Thesiger told his best stories
Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

Author Bio

Wilfred Thesiger was born in 1910 at the British Legation in Addis Ababa, and spent his early years in Abyssinia. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. In World War I, serving with the patriots under Orde Wingate in Abyssinia, he was awarded a DSO. He later served with the SOE (in Syria) and the SAS in the Western Desert. Thesigers journeys have won him the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal of the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society. His writing has won him the Heinemann Award; Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature; and Honorary DLitt from Leicester University and an Honorary DLitt from the University of Bath. In 1968 he was made CBE. He is Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Oxford. He was honoured with a KBE in 1995. For over twenty years, until 1994, he lived mostly among the pastoral Samburu at Maralal in Northern Kenya. He died at the age of ninety-three in August 2003.