Lac Abbé bristles with hundreds of limestone chimneys, some rising more than 50 metres from a cracked salt plain, steam still leaking from their tops at dawn. The towers are natural, built over millennia by hot springs that deposited dissolved minerals grain by grain around their vents. The lake itself is the final basin of the Awash River, which flows in from the Ethiopian highlands and never leaves — with no outlet to the sea, water simply evaporates and the salts stay behind. All of it rests on the Afar triple junction, one of the very few places on land where three tectonic plates meet and slowly pull apart, so the ground here keeps cracking and venting heat from below.
Reaching the chimneys means a long, unpaved drive across open desert shared with Afar herders leading camels and goats to the shore. The hours around sunrise and sunset are what people come for: low light turns the towers to black silhouettes, dust softens the horizon, and the plain looks less like Earth than like somewhere the map ran out. Greater and lesser flamingos wade the lake's shallow, mineral-crusted margins, and after dark — with no electric light for kilometres — the sky fills with stars. Most visitors stay a single night in dome-shaped Afar huts at a small camp near the towers. The lake is only a fraction of its former size today; drought and irrigation drawn from the Awash upstream have been shrinking it since the mid-20th century, leaving many chimneys stranded on ground that was once underwater.