My three-wheel Bajaj taxi, powered by what sounded like a lawn- mower engine, had somehow managed to bounce along the undulating dirt track through the scrub and weave around the plodding camels without toppling into the river flowing beside us.
But it had had to halt at a checkpoint where two young Afar warriors peered in, each with an AK-47 nonchalantly hanging from a shoulder and an enormous knife-bearing scabbard at the waist. They told my guide, squashed beside me, that the Awash River had flooded the road further on.
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