After lunch, our guide suggests another great hike. He promises us a shorter but more adventurous hike. Only later he confesses that, with a group, the hike has sometimes taken him four hours and that people often quit and start crying. After several slippery, vertical rocks which didn’t offer any decent grip, three of our crew members drop out. The remaining crew, accompanied by 5 local guides, carries on. Those guides are great. Whenever I slip and skid a bit they say 'slowly slowly'. Super! Thanks a lot!

We’ve already climbed a steep 200 metres and even climb a vertical rock face of about 8 metres with questionable safety equipment. Soon afterwards, we arrive at a kind of eagle's nest plateau of about 4 square metres. We are really high up, with a lot of abyss around us. A little further on and 3 metres higher up, I see a man with a beard sitting on a ledge. That must be the end of our hike. Two more airy jumps over a depth of hundreds of metres and one vertical climb of 3 metres and we're there. Or so I thought.

After I’ve climbed the last few crazy metres, one of the guides immediately comes over the ledge to me. Suddenly it all goes very fast. The man leads me along, we go around the corner of the rock towards the big void, he keeps giving directions and before I know it, I’m walking over a 10-metre-long ledge that is one metre wide. On one side of the ledge is a steep wall that’s 200 metres high and on the other side is 300 metres of yawning abyss. There’s nothing to hold on to. Nothing at all. I’m glued to that wall. The ledge doesn't seem to lead anywhere either, all I can see in front of me is air, rock, the little ridge and that idiot. The more I crawl up against the wall, the harder it wants to push me down the abyss. All this happens within seconds, my guide keeps up the pace. I’m overwhelmed. Before I know it, I am pushed into a hole in the middle of the rock.

A round hole in the middle of the rock wall leads to a cut-out hole of about 6 m2. Niels is sitting there on the ground, his eyes blurry. Elmar is laughing a little. I’m overwhelmed by a nauseating feeling of panic, fear of heights, fatigue, dizziness and confusion. It all feels surreal. Where. the fuck... am I? I can feel the floor of the hollow moving under me (Niels later said he felt the same thing). I can't get my head around the fact that I'm 300 metres above the ground in a hole in a rock with the only exit being a 30 cm wide ledge (that's what I thought). I can't get over it.

In the hole is a small wooden door leading to a church that is carved even deeper into the rock. That was the whole reason for this climb. The door opens and the priest gives us a tour. It’s beautiful. Our mountain guide tells us about the wall paintings, 'those are the 12 apostles'. I think to myself: 'Well done goofball, you can go on and on about your apostles, while I think about how I’ll decorate this room, because I am going to be stuck here FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE! Everything was still spinning. I have pudding in my legs and am convinced that I’ll collapse if I go up that ledge again. Back in the cave, I look up through the gaping hole. Impossible. You can't see the ledge from inside, there is only distance, depth and height out there. I slide on my butt towards the hole and carefully look at the ledge. To my delight, I see that the ledge is not only 30 cm wide but at least 80 cm. It gives me just enough peace of mind to attempt the way back. While I cry on the inside and think of shoes (That's important, guys! Shoes give you peace and support! Always.), I scramble out first.

June 1st, Afar Ethiopia. Until now, we’ve been on the high plateau of Ethiopia. That’s the ‘developed’ part of the country with a mild climate. Now we travel to the lowlands, which is the wooden shacks part of the country with the officially hottest climate on earth. We’re going to climb an active volcano in the dark (because during the day it’s too hot to do so). Great plan of course! After a tough hike of more than 10 km, we reach the top of the volcano around 11 pm. I’m standing less than half a metre from the crumbling edge looking down into the crater while the wind is blowing in the direction of the hole. Not very ‘safety first’-like. About 50 metres below, through the sulphur fumes, we can see crazy lava explosions in the crater. The lava lake sounds like a wild ocean, but a few octaves higher. An amazing experience. After surviving this, I put on my suit in the camp a little further down the road and we shoot some amazing photos and videos at the lava lake. We spend the night on top of the volcano in the open air, among all sorts of critters. “If you have to go to the toilet, you can go behind the camels.”

June 2nd, Afar Ethiopia. We’ve been driving for a few hours and now we’ve arrived in hell on earth. We get out of the car in a desert-like landscape and there’s absolutely nothing there. It’s at least 46 degrees but the wind blows like crazy. Wind force 7 at least. No cooling anywhere. The drinking water is scorching hot. Our accommodation is a hut made of sticks and straw. The hut is only for cooking. We sleep outside on rickety wooden beds. Our guide has just told us that the local Afar tribe is the most aggressive tribe in all of Africa. “Very aggressive, yes. But no problem, we sleep outside.” We’re supposed to stay here for two nights. Within two minutes, we decided that this wasn’t a good idea. We squeezed all locations and photo shoots into one day and left with squealing tyres after one night.

I won’t mention the heavily armed guards who followed us everywhere as we were only a kilometre away from the war zone with Eritrea. My mother is reading this report too, you know. She’d be going crazy. Aaaaaanyways, it all went well! And luckily, we still have the photos!