Ethiopia

Ethiopia is the roof of Africa: an enormous plateau split in two by the Great Rift Valley and crowned by massifs above four thousand metres, such as Simien and Bale. That altitude creates ecological islands isolated from the rest of the continent, with afroalpine moorland of giant lobelias and tree heathers where a fauna lives that exists nowhere else. Along the floor of the Rift are strung fresh and salt lakes with flamingos, pelicans and an abundant birdlife, and in the northeast the Danakil depression drops to more than a hundred metres below sea level, with acid springs and salt flats where only extremophile microorganisms thrive. To the southwest, the humid forests of Kaffa keep the wild coffee plants from which all the world's arabica coffee descends.