The northeastern region of Ethiopa, where the Britons went missing, is the hottest place on earth. Average temperatures are 34C and often rise much higher.

"It is a very remote place and looks like the inside of the Earth," says Philip Briggs, author of The Bradt guide to Ethiopa. "You are going in to a desert area that is the hottest place in the world, with lots of hot springs and volcanic activity. It is an expedition.

The kidnapped tourists were in a convoy of four vehicles in Dalol, traveling to the salt mines in the Afar region.They left Mekele on Sunday for a two-day drive to Hamedali, a remote village that is the last staging post before visiting the salt lakes. Then they went on a two-hour drive to Dalol to visit the salt mines and were supposed to return to Hamedali

Times columnist Matthew Parris, a man also drawn to geographical extremities, visited the region last year in search of salt for a BBC Radio 4 documentary.

In Parris's article, Descent into Hell, he vividly described the brutal landscapes. "Hell lies 3,000m (10,000ft) below Mekele, below sea level, in the deserts of the Danakil Depression. A hundred miles over dry mountains and down the other side is an inferno of a place: one of the hottest and most inhospitable on Earth.

"A range of volcanoes, some extinct, some still spitting sulphur dioxide and simmering orange lava, lines this basin; and a range of hills keeps out the Red Sea. And at its lowest point a salt lake shimmers and stinks in the burning sun, its centre a dead, black sea, its margins a great, unbroken rim of solid salt crust."

According to Briggs, Ethiopa is becoming a popular destination in Africa. "It is not in the Top 15 but is high in the second division. It has a lot going for it - historical monuments, un-western tribes and space."

Charlie Hopkinson of Dragoman Overland, which has run tours through Ethiopia for a decade, said: "Travellers visit for the country's history and culture - in the north the amazing Christian sites, in the south the tribal heritage, the birdlife around the great lakes along the Rift Valley and trekking in the Simien Mountains'"

An estimated 5,000 British tourists visited Ethiopa last year - but fewer than one per cent would have visited Afar, said Briggs. "You need multiple 4x4s and it probably not the safest place to visit. There is a lot of banditry and you'd need a degree to understand the complex relationships of the region. A lot of people carry machine guns and it is a hard, hard area."

Salt is an important commodity to the region, with Parris following the camel trains. The small town of Berahile is "really the last outpost of modern Ethiopian administration before things turn seriously primitive," he says. "Berahile is a sort of Clapham Junction of the camel-train community. Encamped on the river bed that evening, we counted (as we drank beer, cooled in a deep puddle covered with hessian sacking, at the soldiers’ bar above it) perhaps 500 camels and their drivers."

Most Britons visiting the country are independent travellers, drawn by the monastaries of the northern highlands. A regular visitor, Philip Marsden, travelled to the north last year on assignment for The Sunday Times. "Gorges half a mile deep slice down through the uplands. In places the plateau survives as small, flat-topped islands — ambas — surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs," he wrote.

But on a previous visit, Marsden reported on the fledgling ecotourism industry, with Ethiopa attracting birdwatchers from Europe in large numbers. His article, Ethiopa starting as it means to go on, concentrated on two eco-lodges that had just opened in the country.

"Go to Kenya or Tanzania, if you want to follow forest paths furrowed deep by the feet of previous visitors," he said. "But Ethiopia in every respect remains that rare thing, a territory of diverse and little-seen wonders."

Ethiopa is still a country dominated by Soviet-style hotels and Soviet-style service, he said, where a rim of concrete safely separates hotels from anything green or muddy or natural. But Bishangari Lodge, one of the eco-lodges he visited, is like "a spring of clear, bubbling water (which is what its name means in Oromo).

"In terms of its tourism, Ethiopia retains the refreshing impression that it has hardly begun, that the country is an empty canvas yet to have the forms and colours of visitors splashed across it. So it was hardly a surprise when, back in Addis Ababa, I heard about a new eco-lodge at Bilen in the Afar region.

"Bilen is a five-hour drive east from the capital, from the green highlands to the desert fringe, from the densely populated heart of the Amhara empire to the hot lowlands, where the pastoral Afar people have never really taken very seriously the notion of central government.

"About 70 years ago, Wilfred Thesiger stopped for a few days at Bilen’s springs. He was the first to explore this region and would shoot at the birds and beasts and any of the Afar that threatened his caravan. He relished being able to report that the necklaces worn by Afar men for prestige were made up of the severed testicles of their enemies."

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