Djibouti: the least heard-of state in the world?

The Red Sea is not only home to thousands of unheard of – even undiscovered – fish , it is also bordered by some of the most remote places in the world. One of those is Djibouti, a tiny country that few people have even heard of.

Fittingly, perhaps, Djibouti found its claim to fame in the final scene of the 1968 cult 'Planet of the Apes', Charlton Heston encounters a displaced Statue of Liberty and it dawns upon him that his escapades in a hitherto unknown world have actually taken place on a post-apocalyptic earth. Scenes from the movie were shot at Lac Abbé, near Djibouti's western border with Ethiopia. It's a baking plain of crazed mud filled with a silvery lake naturally poisoned by a cocktail of salts. Surrounding it is a saw tooth range of calamine-coloured chimneys, wickedly beautiful, and squeezing out sulphurous gases which give Lac Abbé its local name: "the stinking lake". This is Djibouti.

CIA world fact book describes Djibouti as "desert; torrid, dry". And with neighbours like Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia it's easy to see why. Home to half a million people, the country occupies a strategic geographic location at the mouth of the Red Sea and serves as an important location for goods entering and leaving east Africa.  During the Gulf War it was the base of operations for the French military France has thousands of troops as well as warships, aircraft and armoured vehicles in Djibouti – formerly the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas - contributing directly and indirectly to more than half the country's income.