“Hey bro, you ever see that movie where Mark Wahlberg makes fun of retards?” our young tour guide asked us sincerely.

“Nah, I think I missed that one.”

The eerie limestone chimneys of Lake Abbe towered above us, smoky steam from the hot springs beenath rising up over the barren moonscape. Below our feet the earth’s crust was slowly pulling apart, creating a new ocean that will one day rival the Atlantic in size and turn the horn of Africa into an island. Magma seeping through these cracks between the tectonic plates was heating underground water, causing it to boil up to the surface and deposit the minerals that were building these chimneys ever higher, climbing up into the sky. Steam vented out of the chimney tops, reminding us of a process that never stops.

“He learned ballet to make fun of retards,” our guide assured me that this was an actual movie that exists on somebody’s coffee table somewhere.

Our guide had learned English from watching American TV and movies. Like, way, way too much American TV and movies. He was beyond thrilled to have two Americans to guide through the bizarre landscapes of his home country of Djibouti. He spoke exclusively in a quirky mix of catchphrases and misremembered movie quotes.

“Suuuuure,” he responded exaggeratedly when I suggested that maybe he could shut up for a minute while we watched the sunrise. “It’s like Robert DeNiro said in that movie. Suuuuure. Make my day.” Is he mixing up Taxi Driver and Dirty Harry? Mysteries of the cosmos.

He had asked me touchingly as we walked through the desert if I thought he would fit in, in the United States. I said sure (make my day), he’d probably seen more TV than anyone in the US, so he’d be fine. Only I warned him that nobody in the US had ever heard of Djibouti.

“Oh I know bro. It’s like my country’s a joke. What about your booty? Like I’m talking about my ass.”

Steam curled out of the occasional, odd pools of boiling hot spring water in the early morning light.

“Careful where you step. You might fall into one of those and then it’s all over. Sometimes cows fall in and get cooked... Hey, how come One Direction doesn’t put out any songs any more?”

I explained that his favorite One Direction song was actually a Blondie song from the 80s and promptly blew his mind. Oh god I’m old.

I laughed as I remembered dinner the night before in Djibouti City, when our other guide Moussa had asked my friend Mike what kind of music he liked.

“You like Ed Sheeran?”

“Sure, he’s fine,” Mike answered, strictlty being polite.

“How can you just think he’s fine?? He plays all the instruments! And he writes the music. And the words! That music is the product of one mind, man. Not three or four. It’s the real thing.”

Moussa proceeded to try and convince Mike to love Ed Sheeran for, I shit you not, 45 straight minutes. This was hilarious.

I especially enjoyed it because I myself wasn’t entirely sure who Ed Sheeran was.

Did he do that shitty “I’m in Love With Your Body” song? I kind of hope so, becuase that would make this whole thing even funnier. I think he was on Game of Thrones.

Thankfully Moussa was too busy trying despserately to deprogram Mike from his Ed Sheeran indifference to ask me if I loved the Ed, like all good and right people must love the Ed. I would have asked Moussa if he was the dude who had that show the Beatles were on, and Moussa's head would have exploded right there on the spot, showering us in uncomprehending head gore.

Back at Lake Abbe, our guide Rasheed began to quote Tupac lyics to me like he was peforming Shakespeare. Oh God, I suddenly realized, this is because I’m from L.A..

Mike, you’re so fucking lucky there’s no rap music from Ohio.

I frantically attempted to tune this all out while snapping photos of the gorgeous Martian sunrise.

Nearby there was a grassy knoll where, bizarrely, there must have been a spring that was barfing up water that was somewhere below a thousand degrees celsius. Egrets picked among the mashy grass, seeming unaware how odd they looked on this patch of grass in the middle of the dark side of the moon.

Out on the nearby lake, flamingos perched and occasionally streaked across the top of the water like exclamation points turned on their side, long and sleek and reflected pink in the calm water.

The previous day we’d visited Lake Assal, the other tourist mecca of Djibouti. This is the third lowest place on the Earth, after the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The endless salt flat crunches white under your feet as you march toward the water. Wow, this reminds me of Uyuni in Bolivia, I thought, as my eyes adjusted to the hot sun flaring off the expanse of white salt.

Our guide explained that anything left on the flats would soon become totally encrusted in salt, and local boys were selling goat skulls that glistened in the sun, appearing to be made entirely out of salt crystals.

The water was pure and clear, too salty to support any kind of life at all that might cloud its antiseptic clarity. The salt formed in wind-swept ripples that the shallow water rolled over peacefully.

We spent the night between the two lakes at a small camping area, sleeping under the stars inside mosquito tents, that were mesh on all sides and slightly smaller than my body. I woke up in the middle of the night reluctantly to pee and realized Mike was gone.

Oh my God! They took Mike! The day before we’d stopped in a small village and listened to to the driver furiously negotiating in an unknown language with the locals. I amused myself imagining that they were selling us. “C’mon! Two perfectly good white guys! Maybe they can dance?”

Now they’d got Mike. Well, he’d had a good run, before he became a qat-harvesting slave or whatever’s happened to him now- Oh, wait, his cot’s gone too. They probably wouldn’t cart off the whole tent and cot with him inside in the middle of the night, would they? Probably not, though that would be hilarious. He must have moved inside one of the huts to escape the desert wind.

In the morning I woke up to the sound of about four thousand mosquitos trying desperately to get into my tiny mosquito-proof tent. BZZZZZZZZZZZZT. Ha ha, you poor motherf- then I suddenly realized I would, at some point, have to leave this tent. Maybe I could just stick my feet out the bottom and waddle away like some kind of mosquito-proof turtle? The mosquitos waited, loudly, biding their time.

On our way back from the lakes, we stopped in a few small villages. In one, we got to explore a local traditional hut:

In another, the mytery negotiation turned out to be our driver spending a solid 20 minutes trying to score qat from a glowing-eyed old man who was simultanesouly chewing qat and smoking a cigarette.

Our guide explained that often tourists request a driver who doesn’t chew qat, which is nearly impossible since 9 out of 10 people chew the plant drug, which is sort of like hippie meth. Then they really get into trouble since they end up with a qat-chewing driver who isn’t allowed to chew qat that day, and the first side-effect of qat withdrawal is falling right the fuck asleep.

In the middle of the desert, our cranked-up driver was thankfully alert enough to spot some rare ostriches, which we chased hilariously across the desert in search of some very, very bouncy ostrich photos. The ostriches fled in a fussy gait that made all of us laugh out loud.

On the way to the lakes we had stopped at hot springs and dipped our feet in the water, where hundreds of tiny fish promptly attacked our ticklish piggies and both painlessly and agonizingly nibbled off the dead skin.

We stopped for lunch in a roadside restaurant with strange witch's hat lamp covers.

Another stop saw us overlooking a gorgeous canyon.

It was fascinating to see how such a seemingly unvaried landscape could provide such contrasts, the utter emptiness giving way to an oasis crowded with donkeys, camel herders and strange algae swamps.

Other parts of the desert were flat as can be, giving rise to Djibouti's nickname, The Land of Mirages.

Back in Djibouti City, Moussa had struggled to show us the highlights of a town that remains stubbornly resistant to having highlights. Check it out, a port!

This is why tiny Djibouti exists, allowing ships to deliver goods to populous and coastless Ethiopia further inland. Check out some churches that are closed!

OK this guy is clearly trying to make lemonade out of dog shit, and we applaud the effort.

Much more interesting was the “downtown” of Djibouti City, which was lively and festooned with cool French-inspired architecture.

One particular favorite was the BFC restaurant, which we decided stood for “Big Fucking Chicken.”

We walked around the busy streets, sipping on delicious Watermelon juice.

I’d been warned from multiple sources before I came that Djibouti was home to the least-hospitable people in the world. Thankfully I didn’t have that experience at all. The people liked to yell, but that just seemed to be their style. The country seemed to be a mix of the nomadic Afar people, Somalis and Ethiopians, in an uneasy balance.

My favorite thing in Djibouti City however was the beach where these kids were trying to sail to Somalia in a refrigerator.

I'm still amazed it floated, in site of their spirited efforts to sink the thing and all die.

When we returned to the city after the camping, we stopped by our hotel from the night before to see if I’d left my headphones there. The woman running the hotel quickly fetched them for me.

“I was going to call your guide, but I don’t trust him. He’s Ethiopian,” she admonished.

“He is?”

She nodded gravely. Oh no.