At first sight Asmara, capital of Eritrea, brings to mind not so much the Italian colonialists’ ‘Piccola Roma’ as Babar’s Celesteville draped in bright bougainvillaea and flaming poinsettias, sturdy date palms in the centre of quiet squares just right for elephants. The famous winged Fiat Garage built in 1938 and other ornaments of Italian modernist architecture are sadly decaying icons of Eritrea’s past. Conversely and expectedly beautifully kept British and Italian war cemeteries outside Asmara and in the bowl of hills surrounding the town of Keren are clues to the end of the Italian colonial dream and the start of alternative occupations and turbulence that have beset the country ever since.
The streets of Asmara are not only littered with flower petals but also with a blue confetti of international telephone call cards, signposts to the displaced diaspora of Eritrea, a population spread all over the World. It is unlikely there is a single family in the country without at least one relative abroad, the result of the endless upheaval of the second half of the 20th century and the pervading fear that eats into the spirit of Eritrea’s people under her ruling regime in the 21st. Escapees from a country where the mindset, if not the apparent lifestyle, is that of prison camp survival, continue to leave at a rate of about 80 per month regardless of risk or cost. 10 out of every hundred may manage to leave through properly legal channels.
For the rest, the dangers are growing as refugees become more of an irritant and less of a concern to those countries and those international agencies for which sheer numbers have reduced individuals to a faceless and too needy mass. Israel’s open door policy to Eritrean refugees who survive the deathly hazards of trafficking gangs, borders and deserts has resulted in growing crime perpetrated by those, usually young men, with no rights, no work, no money and no alternatives. The ones who do not get as far as Israel’s street corners are being held for ransom in the Egyptian desert, tortured and killed when payment is not forthcoming, their bodies used for organ harvesting.
The nomadic Rashaida tribespeople, refugees themselves from Saudi Arabia in the mid 19th century, kin to other Bedouin tribes and traditionally highly successful camel traders, move freely across desert borders and will, according to Eritreans, ‘trade in anything’. They are now trading humans. Their transitory camps are scenes of poverty and desolation but the new Toshiba pickups, tucked under rough corrugated shelters and the show off standard in this part of the world, suggest far greater affluence than the hard selling of ‘traditional’ bead necklaces and a dubious line in fortune telling with cowrie shells. Rashaida girls are veiled from the age of 5, only their husbands may in due time see their faces. Sharp eyed and sharp tongued, they offer further potential wealth to their families in suitable alliances amongst a tribe that has never married outside. Small groups of other children, underdressed, undernourished and sickly, are shoved aside in the scramble for possible tourist largesse. The Rashaida are also traditionally slave keepers.
So why risk life and limb to escape a lifestyle in a country where the currency, the nakfa, is unaffected by external currency fluctuations aside from a wholly arbitrary rate against the US dollar? The man with a valuable camel or herd of cattle can afford to buy gold jewellery for his wife and food for his children. Aside from this there are the foreign remittances even if some of these are used in the competitive building of cavernous orthodox churches, mosques or gigantic echoing Roman Catholic cathedrals that rival Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian religious architecture for vulgarity. Construction has always been good relief work one supposes. In fact there is reasonable food security in Eritrea, an important consideration in this hungry part of the World. Eritreans proudly inform visitors that everything is organic – by necessity as it happens with no imports of alternative growth accelerators, but markets are full and people can eat. Housing is affordable; fuel is more complicated. Petrol or diesel are high cost items that make travel in the country the most expensive aspect of tourism if and where permits allow of course and we will come to that.
Education is free, surprisingly broad, at tertiary level at least, and pinned apparently to no fervent ideology. Fervour is in fact distinctly missing in Eritrea today where survival depends on an almost zombie like slowness of movement and a similar carefully schooled process of circumscribed thought. Of course it is not true of everyone, housewives bustle round fish markets and stop to gossip with neighbours, children chase hoops or kick footballs, bicyclists attack the roads as if their lives depended on it – Eritrea has won the African Cycling Championship 3 years running, extraordinary for so tiny a population and a source of huge pride. In rural weekly markets, people bargain almost energetically for camel loads of wood for cooking or gujerati patterned imported Chinese cloth. Slowness, however, is the key to existence, to lasting through the fear until things change. Thinking, for the young particularly, is unsafe – they must school their thoughts, blank out imagination, breathe, eat, sleep and enjoy the surface existence of a beer or a delicious thick juice with friends in an hotel piano bar. It is about survival, that’s all.
They are underemployed of course, the would be fashionable urban young. In rural areas there remains the timeless compulsion of animal husbandry the responsibility for other life requiring adherence to the forever timetable of nature. Animals from donkeys and camels to dogs look unusually healthy for a poor country in spite of a dearth of veterinary care beyond that apparently provided free in Asmara by the Ministry of Agriculture for those who can get there. Military service, now without a fixed end, hangs over young people from their early teenage years. It is effectively mass forced labour with groups of conscripts living in rough and inadequate camps building and mending roads and theoretically in a state of constant readiness for Ethiopian incursions and travel permit infringements. A recent directive has required the majority of office workers to take two hours military training every morning. The general apathy of workers faced anyway with an existence where their efforts are largely unrewarded by any change in life or status has been exacerbated by the exhaustion of a further pointless exercise to the extent that opening hours everywhere from museums to ministries have become almost entirely random.
The tourist is most affected by the circumscriptions and hopelessness of life in Eritrea in the matter of the permits required to travel anywhere beyond Asmara. This of course is after he has run the gauntlet of a system of communications between Eritrean embassies abroad and the relevant ministry in Asmara that may well be based on smoke signals or carrier pigeons for the time it takes to acquire a tourist visa. In fact the visa entitles one to nothing much beyond entry to the country at Asmara airport and a stay in the capital for the stated period. To go anywhere at all outside involves permits. For groups of more than five, there are a handful of possible destinations, for the individual tourist they are currently more reduced. Early in 2012 diplomats in Asmara were informed that they were not allowed to travel outside the capital. This directive has been rescinded but the issuing of permits seems based as much on individual whim as official policy and bribery not only doesn’t work but is completely out of the question.
All currency must be declared on arrival, a form received on which exchanges will be carefully noted to check against any residue left unchanged on departure. There are of course ways round paying entirely fictional official prices for Nakfa but it is essential to be clear about these in advance – there is absolutely no question of any open black market trading. To offer someone dollars is, in their eyes, reality or not, akin to offering them a ticket to arrest and imprisonment. The description of Eritrea recently as an open air prison is certainly one bought into by many of its inhabitants. North Korea in the sun is another or perhaps North Korea through rose tinted spectacles, an extreme ideology is less apparent but fear pervades every aspect of existence.
Nobody is sure of the levels of corruption at the top of government – it would be a rare regime run on fear where its upper levels were not salting away insurance against a rainy day although it seems possible that the President himself, Isaias Afewerki, the unreconstructed freedom fighter, may be less tainted by dirty money than many of his ilk, this at least his population choose to hope. Afewerki ‘s stand against the efforts of supportive neighbouring Muslim states, particularly Saudi Arabia, to make the country one of their number has retained the loyalty of older people, some who still speak an Italian ‘dialetto’, and those for whom the memory of the Ethiopian occupation and war of independence is worse than anything that happened before or since.
Eritrea’s dual religious personality continues although to describe the country as having religious freedom would be an exaggeration given the questing finger of government in every pie. Within the country, religious persecution may be fairly even handed and less to do with modes of worship than imagined dissent of any sort – reports by Christian refugees of persecution are mainly focused on their treatment by Muslims inhabiting and people trafficking in border areas or border guards too scared themselves to do other than follow orders whatever their religious persuasion.
Border areas are completely forbidden to tourists, whose limited tour possibilities presently stretch barely 100km from Asmara; to the north, as far as Keren; to the East mercifully to the coast at Massawa and the Dahlak Islands if you can get a boat; on southwards as far as the remains of the ancient port of Adulis or the greater archaeological site at Qohaito if you are in a minimum group of five. West of Asmara towards the Sudan is out as is Dankalia and the whole of the coast beyond Adulis or any remaining of the ancient hill top monasteries like Debre Bizen or Debre Libanos. Entry to their innermost sanctums is, like many Ethiopian Orthodox monasteries, in any case forbidden to women. Looking up at some potential climbs in Ethiopia in the past, often involving ropes and a tightrope style walk over the thinnest rock bridges, a ban for which one female traveller at least has been duly thankful.
So why go to Eritrea at all? A country one and half times the size of Scotland with a population smaller by a million and no Scottish rights to roam. Well, curiosity; because it is there; because it does have the wonderful climate of aging Italian reminiscence and the extraordinary architectural and cultural relics of those same Italian settlers; because, not surprisingly nobody else is there and because Eritrea’s people, those who remain, are a fascinating melting pot of peoples washed up on her shores. It is a beautiful place, the birds are wonderful and one day one both prays and fears, it will be one of the great resort centres of the World. The stunning Red Sea coast, one envisages, and the deserted Dahlak Islands covered end to end with hotels, spas and luxury experiences. It would be nice to hope that the country will open wider to tourists before that happens and that the resort breakout will not be only constructed by and for the Chinese encroaching here like everywhere in Africa, if, given the President’s antipathy to aid and foreign interference, a little less overtly than in some places.
Immediately after independence in 1993 the usual aid circus so familiar to travellers in other new or newly developing countries took off in Eritrea at the same time as educated Eritreans living abroad hurried home and the economy soared. A new border conflict and war with Ethiopia in 1998 and, in the eyes of the administration, a continuing state of war today, has reversed any advances. The original exiles, the educated and professional and more have been exiled once again and the government has had an excuse to take out draconian measures against any dissent or external influence in the country including stopping all forms of foreign aid in the name of national security. As the Bradt Guide of 2007, the most recent guide to the country, puts it, ‘marginal religious groups have been targeted, business owners have been targeted, national service staff have been targeted, students have been targeted.....Eritrea’s jails are heaving with countless people who have been caught up in the politics of a nation stuck fast in the topsy-turvy world between war and peace’.
Bizarre evidence of wars, repression and the aid ban can be viewed by the curious, with necessary permit of course, at the vast dump on the outskirts of Asmara where the rusting detritus of years of conflict is piled up over acres of land. Small settlements are here and there, houses made from old containers, washing neatly strung out along the barrels of adjacent tank guns, small quasi garden areas demarcated by unidentifiable metal shards among the crushed piles of military vehicles. Russian made tanks, rows of nearly new looking landrovers and the small minivans so dreaded by the population as the carriages of torture and death in the days of the Ethiopian Derg and in more recent crackdowns based on their methods. Other containers have burst open spilling brown glass ampoules of god knows what lifesaving medicine onto the encroaching weeds, banned aid that never made it even to the markets that normally in Africa trade so successfully in donated goods. It is strictly forbidden of course for the inquisitive tourist even to notice let alone photograph such waste.
More recent metal debris, the tins and tubs of everyday use, is recycled in a walled off market area in Asmara where the hammering goes on from dawn till dusk and men and boys in makeshift masks fashion the new from the old with oxyacetylene torches. War has left so many scars and such a wealth of relics that the whole country is infested with dumps and rusted metal. Here a tank, there an armoured car degrading into dust near the roadside; the pockmarks of shelling on buildings in the old port of Massawa weakening further structures of crumbling coral stone; even far out into the Red Sea, the burnt out fins of rockets among the scratchy coral and scrub where a colony of Boobys nest on one of the deserted Dahlak Islands.
Steamy Massawa should still be one of Africa’s great ports. Seen as a perfect hub for trade between India, Africa and Arabia by many of its colonists, most notably the Egyptians and the Italians, today, like so much of Eritrea, the old port town is perilously close to complete destitution. Most people have gone, streets are deserted in the heat of the day and only in the evening do the remaining inhabitants creep out of houses that often lean drunkenly into their neighbours and have ceilings held up by faith alone. The island nevertheless retains an extraordinary attraction, the arcades close to the waterfronts now populated by a handful of customers in bars and cafes that were once full of the colour and character of port life. The nightclubs on upper floors have gone now and the best kept building is the ancient Shafi’e Mosque, said to be one of the oldest in Africa, where an aging and chatty Imam encourages rare tourist interest. Nearby there is a remarkable restaurant producing the best fresh caught fish cooked in a tandoor with nan bread of a quality to make an Indian sailor feel quite at home.
The domed former Governor’s Palace on Taulad Island just by the causeway to Massawa Island proper, once the summer palace of Haile Selassie, is almost certainly beyond restitution. During the Struggle against Ethiopia much of the building was destroyed and since Independence it has been left to rot, the destroyed dome and falling arcades like some monument to apocalypse. The rusting iron canopy of the railway station, more like an aging bus shelter, stands at the entrance to Massawa Island where more once showy and splendid Italianate buildings are slowly collapsing. The florid Roman/Moorish remains of the Banca d’Italia building, the empty plinth in front all that remains of a statue of Haille Selassie, blown to smithereens after the Struggle, are still just standing by the port gates. It was intended to be the first knock your socks off building seen by new arrivals to Eritrea.
The port itself moulders quietly in the heat, its cranes unmoving. One Moldavian registered ship lists gently out an anchor. In what might once have been a marina a handful of small motor yachts, rich men’s pleasure craft in another world are the boats confiscated from adventurers or mercenaries coming too close to this inhospitable coast or, it is said, in one case a Greenpeace vessel. That story is not advertised by the organisation itself and may be part of the usual wealth of rumour and counter rumour scurrying amongst a small and tyrannised people where press freedom is, according to Reporters without Borders, the lowest in the world, surpassing even North Korea.
Existing authorised newspapers are thin publications, two dailies and several weeklies in various local languages, football results and acceptable local news. The 2 official television stations are a deadening mixture of ‘cultural’ programmes, indigenous song and dance set against an Eritrean landscape and carefully scripted news programmes. The radio mix appears to be similar. Satellite is, however, available both in many hotels and in private houses and insofar as the internet works, many get their news in occasional bites from the BBC and Al Jazeera websites. Young people are not uninformed about the world, they gather in hotel bars and restaurants in the early evening dressed to be cool, have a drink, watch films and sport on hotel satellites. This is their outlet from the paranoia of daily life when arrest might always be just round the corner.
For the tourist in Asmara, there is little overt evidence of tyranny as young people parade; their elders give a good impression of normal business if you don’t look too closely; bars and cafes apparently thrive on the cup of tea that lasts an hour or two; but the fear seeps in like a draught although the foreigner feels little threatened. The lunacy of government and the possible lack of links between elements jostling for power is demonstrated in oddities – random issuing or not of permits, petty power plays. During the ‘European Film Festival’ held for a week in November for the last 3 years in the glorious red plush Cine Roma with its panelled lobby and cafe, there was an upheaval last year when a film was suddenly banned at the last minute on a whim of the Minstry of Security. The film, like every other shown in Eritrea, had already been passed by the Minstry of Information and the audience was ready and waiting when its German presenter made the announcement. By the next morning the story washing about Asmaran streets was that this had been a ‘gay film’ and therefore fell under any number of cultural and religious taboos. If it had passed through the Ministry of Information it was unlikely to have been something to frighten the horses. It appeared to possess a most unthreatening European 12 certificate.
Unexpectedlyanother film, Italian this time, about the extraordinary Italian war hero, Amedeo Guillet, passed muster with ministries and security.It seems colonial history is not so appalling for contemporary viewers. Amedeo led a cavalry charge of Ethiopian soldiers in 1941 near Keren, the last ever faced by British Soldiers. Guillet died aged 101 in 2010 but had been invited back to Eritrea in 200 after meeting President Afewerki, at the President’s request, on his visit to Rome and perhaps his noted charm still holds sway in the corridors of power.
North of Asmara in the bowl of hills surrounding Keren, the cloud of fear seems to lift a little. Whether that is really the case a little distant from the capital or whether it is the beauty of the road there through the hills and healthy looking tukul villages, or the atmosphere of this pretty town on market day with its biblical herds of goats and camels, brightly dressed crowds intent on gossip and shopping, it is hard to tell. One can well understand the Italians’ liking for the town and Keren is a pleasure and a delight for the photographer even if the inhabitants turn away or hide their faces from the over intrusive lens. Women sell huge black clay flat plates for cooking injera and intensely desirable domed baskets for its storage; the wood market bargaining is in full flow and every shaded corner is heaped with vegetables and fruit from the locality, the straw market selling mats and fans or the raw product; Eritrean beads and gew gaws; bits and pieces from Sudan or maybe Ethiopia, essential coffee, part of the culture of the country after all, grows there and not in Eritrea; cheap Chinese pots and pans; clothes and cloth, used and unused from markets anywhere and everywhere via the mysteries of travelling traders and porous borders.
Italian missionaries have left their mark in Keren, the Roman Catholic influence apparent in a series of large churches, topped off with a vast recently built and peculiarly ugly St Anthony’s Cathedral right next to its older version in the style of St Mary’s in Asmara. Oddly enough the new cathedral’s interior whilst strange has an appealing atmosphere – it is quite big enough one would imagine to fit the entire population of the town inside and must have unusefully absorbed a vast sum in foreign remittances. The Grand Mosque and a rash of smaller mosques supply the needs of the Muslim population while churches of various other denominations proliferate well beyond the needs of the small population. The main Orthodox church, another huge structure is outside the centre as is the Madonna of the Baobab, a huge hollowed out tree containing a 19th century French bronze statue of Mary. The cleared area outside where thousands of pilgrims gather every May is a wildlife haven where a pair of talkative hornbills who have seen it all before are no more bothered by humans than by the local cat slinking under the branch they perch on. The great baobab itself seems sadly likely to fall prey to the powerful strangler fig it is hosting. The hole in its side is a war wound; escaping Italian soldiers sheltered there after the Battle of Keren. The tree was shelled by a British tank but, miraculously, none inside was injured.
The Battle of Keren in World War II is little remembered outside the heads of serious military historians. The Commonwealth War Graves cemetery and the Italian War Cemetery are remarkably kept monuments to the end of Italian colonial ambition in a terrible battle lasting 52 days. On the British side the Royal Artillery, Cameron Highlands, Queen’s Highland Infantry, Leicestershires, Cheshires, and Yorkshire regiments are with RAF casualties, much in evidence. As so often it is the monument to cremated Hindu soldiers of Indian Army regiments such as the Rajputana Rifles, the Punjabis and Mahrattas, so many names fighting a foreign war, that is with the graves of unknown soldiers, the most evocative of waste and sorrow. Today the cemetery has a caretaker and assistant who continue to take a remarkable pride in the swept and weeded perfection of this barren piece of land where huge geraniums nevertheless grow by every grave, the long rows spreading from avenues of shading neem trees.
Like Massawa, Keren in the past had its railway link with Asmara. Today the station, a typical European provincial affair, stands marooned at one end of the town, a makeshift bus station with the inevitable cafe where hawkers sell fruit to customers through departing bus windows. The railway in Eritrea, like so much else, could be and is occasionally a source of tourist dollars. For the steam enthusiast it must be a treasure trove. For the even mildly interested it is a curious delight and a major disappointment to be told that there is no coal except that made available for 40 steam experts and photographers arriving later in the month. They will live with if not on the trains for a 10 day trip on the narrow gauge line between Asmara and Massawa; there and back several times one imagines as the journey is a short if precipitous 70km or so.
The old main station in Asmara, another of those provincial affairs, is now the purview of a group of proud old men, some in their eighties, some perhaps of Italian extraction and all speaking that somewhat impenetrable dialect from which the school level Italian speaker can just about extract a buon giorno. They are scrambling with surprising agility over ancient engines, beating plates into shape, painting and polishing, polishing everything in sight. Although there is a theoretical plan to re-open the railway full time, It is highly unlikely that the somewhat restored lines are currently very safe even if the trains are preened and shone by their pensioner preservers. Thoughts of a sudden collapse, the line subsiding into the valley far below the so called ‘Devil’s Gate’ mountain loop might daunt some visitors both to Asmara and to the rusting weed-filled lines and abandoned carriages at another deserted station on the line just off the Massawa road.
Massawa can be reached from Asmara via the direct road or via the spectacular road to Filfil, upgraded since Independence by more or less forced labour of National Service conscripts. The road rises into the mountains, the air getting increasingly cold as the isolated traveller, adrift on a rocky island above, looks down on a magical sea of cloud covering the wide view that on clear days stretches out to the Red Sea. Whatever the horrors and hardships of life in Eritrea now, its geographical position and the potential of its coast, waters and the islands in it must one day be realised. The Dahlaks were lately the location for Ethiopian prisons. Eritrean prisons now dot the mainland and the tourist imagines concentration camps hidden in areas she cannot reach but most of the islands are now deserted resulting in unparalleled marine riches.
Eritrea is a mecca for anyone with an ornithological bent and such interests creep up on one unexpectedly when faced with such readily available wealth. On our chosen desert island, a pair of ospreys returned from hunting to their huge nest in the centre of the island to the fury of a pair of vociferously belligerent terns protecting their own nest from potential predators aquiline or human and quite ready to dive to the attack. The aforementioned boobys meanwhile stayed, both male and female on or near their hatching eggs shuffling a little nervously at human approach but only abandoning a hatchling briefly when a keen photographer took one step too close to the nest. Perhaps the doting parents trusted to their baby’s white downed, big-headed ugliness to make it an unappetising prospect for a snack.
The water round a clump of witchy looking mangroves was salt, risen up through the coral and spiky vegetation but considerable rain falls in the area and historically islanders on the larger islands collected water in stone cisterns, the remains of which exist today. The weakest and most nervous swimmer has the opportunity here to see every coral fish he has ever dreamt of within feet of the shore, let alone those which may be caught with line or harpoon for evening barbecues. The colours are indescribable, like staring into the greatest and most varied aquarium where there is enough for everyone and sharks seem thankfully well fed. Small reef sharks feed, giveaway fins darting, in the shallows and, on long beaches, thousands of hermit crabs in variously commodious housings scuttle like spiders or build themselves into pyramids overnight that break apart for scavenging food searches at dawn.
This is a strange, wild and beautiful place – belonging to its wildlife for now, there are sand circles in the scrub above the beaches that may have something to do with past battles or who knows what. Fresh but dead fish landed high above the tide line in the evening all facing one way faced the other by morning when opportunistic gulls first decided they might be good eating. One day there will be a luxury hotel here, water piped in, tourist boats bobbing at a jetty – the Qataris are already mentioned as potential developers of some of the islands, the Chinese are always willing. Meanwhile for those that can get here and negotiate boat trips and travel permits (the port office in Massawa is a lean to shack attached to a small striped lighthouse at the outer end of the sea wall) it is an unexploited paradise.
So where to stay on a brief exploration of Eritrea? In Asmara the charming Albergo Italia in the centre of the City seems the obvious choice until one watches the sole waitress in the dining room drag herself from one corner to the other, the zombie walk or perhaps she is just asleep. Beer has not been delivered, most dishes are off today and wine is a ruinous price as, relatively, for a pretty enough room and service ranging from extremely casual to non-existent is the nightly rate. The Asmara Palace is the showoff in town – a huge hideous airport terminal of a place, designed, one is told by Italians. The great engineers and designers should not be proud. Patrons mention hot water not working much above the 2nd floor, poor and surly service to go with high prices. Funnily enough this government owned hotel takes payment in US dollars, the only one that does. The best thing about it, where locals gather for treats, is the coffee shop/bar which serves dictionary sized individual slabs of cake much relished by locals on an evening out and those buying cakes as presents. Eritreans have sweet tooths and cake giving is a standard practice when visiting friends.
As it turns out, the understated and undistinguished modern block that is the Sunshine Hotel, near the German Cultural Centre and other international offices, probably has the best, most efficient and friendliest service in Asmara, with plain clean rooms, good food and reasonable internet access until the power goes which is does of course all the time all over the City and everywhere else. There is also an excellent laundry service, money changing and a bar and lobby which are crammed every evening. The only downside is the lack of satellite television or at least it doesn’t work ‘though one can get used to watching bad films through a strange haze of dots and dashes.
In Massawa, the Red Sea Hotel used to be the top choice and service here is still friendly and helpful but rooms are struggling and nothing much works. Taps either don’t turn on or don’t turn off and everything looks as decayed as the rest of Massawa although it is said that there is about to be a revamp – for whom or by whom, heaven knows. The Dahlak Hotel has to be the current best option with an internet hotspot that sometimes works, a massive and filthy swimming pool but it is sea water and rather delicious to swim in avoiding stirring the bottom. There is decent enough food in the dining room, the usual pastas and fresh fish in season. The wide range of alcohol available in the bar may partly be for local consumption but must otherwise be awaiting a huge influx into the rather beautiful buildings of this hotel with the same owner as the Albergo Italia. There appear to be hundreds of rooms although some may not actually be finished. Service at the front desk is unhelpful and uninterested until something goes wrong – a receptionist called the police when a tourist failed to have the correct permit despite his guide’s reasonable excuses – he had been ill, numbers miscounted and the wrong number of permits issued. Staff in the dining room and bar arrive with reasonable despatch and no scowls.
In Keren, there is really only the Sarina Hotel to stay in any comfort and comfortable it is - how often does one find a remote controlled fan, and it worked. Satellite tv worked too meaning the bar was crammed with viewers of films that certainly never saw a larger screen. Service was friendly and food good. The injera with chicken or beef stew, or delicious and favourite shiro, made with pureed lentils and spices, is excellent in many restaurants and hotels in Eritrea, the meat habitually of better quality than in Ethiopia, the product of all those healthy looking, organically fed, herds of animals. Otherwise, guides and drivers here eat pasta, with meat sauce or fish in season – they have injera at home with their families so pizza and pasta are the outside treats and they are good, pasta as properly cooked as one might hope if not necessarily expect in a former Italian colony.
As for travel plans and itineraries, they are inevitably short in a country where tourism is so proscribed and expensive under official rates especially with difficult public transport options, for cars, boats and of course the train. Travel by that desirable mode of transport means either a like-minded group prepared to splash out or the sort of riches that allow shipping in loads of coal from the Yemen and taking the whole train until it runs out – which would be fun if there were a few more places to go to.......At the moment Eritrea is a beautiful but difficult place and only to be visited by those prepared to put up with delays, frustrations and the very real possibility of getting nowhere. Not so different from many developing countries but the paranoia in the country is catching and the fear can eat away the spirit of even the most detached viewer and dedicated traveller
For the rest, the dangers are growing as refugees become more of an irritant and less of a concern to those countries and those international agencies for which sheer numbers have reduced individuals to a faceless and too needy mass. Israel’s open door policy to Eritrean refugees who survive the deathly hazards of trafficking gangs, borders and deserts has resulted in growing crime perpetrated by those, usually young men, with no rights, no work, no money and no alternatives. The ones who do not get as far as Israel’s street corners are being held for ransom in the Egyptian desert, tortured and killed when payment is not forthcoming, their bodies used for organ harvesting.
The nomadic Rashaida tribespeople, refugees themselves from Saudi Arabia in the mid 19th century, kin to other Bedouin tribes and traditionally highly successful camel traders, move freely across desert borders and will, according to Eritreans, ‘trade in anything’. They are now trading humans. Their transitory camps are scenes of poverty and desolation but the new Toshiba pickups, tucked under rough corrugated shelters and the show off standard in this part of the world, suggest far greater affluence than the hard selling of ‘traditional’ bead necklaces and a dubious line in fortune telling with cowrie shells. Rashaida girls are veiled from the age of 5, only their husbands may in due time see their faces. Sharp eyed and sharp tongued, they offer further potential wealth to their families in suitable alliances amongst a tribe that has never married outside. Small groups of other children, underdressed, undernourished and sickly, are shoved aside in the scramble for possible tourist largesse. The Rashaida are also traditionally slave keepers.
So why risk life and limb to escape a lifestyle in a country where the currency, the nakfa, is unaffected by external currency fluctuations aside from a wholly arbitrary rate against the US dollar? The man with a valuable camel or herd of cattle can afford to buy gold jewellery for his wife and food for his children. Aside from this there are the foreign remittances even if some of these are used in the competitive building of cavernous orthodox churches, mosques or gigantic echoing Roman Catholic cathedrals that rival Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian religious architecture for vulgarity. Construction has always been good relief work one supposes. In fact there is reasonable food security in Eritrea, an important consideration in this hungry part of the World. Eritreans proudly inform visitors that everything is organic – by necessity as it happens with no imports of alternative growth accelerators, but markets are full and people can eat. Housing is affordable; fuel is more complicated. Petrol or diesel are high cost items that make travel in the country the most expensive aspect of tourism if and where permits allow of course and we will come to that.
They are underemployed of course, the would be fashionable urban young. In rural areas there remains the timeless compulsion of animal husbandry the responsibility for other life requiring adherence to the forever timetable of nature. Animals from donkeys and camels to dogs look unusually healthy for a poor country in spite of a dearth of veterinary care beyond that apparently provided free in Asmara by the Ministry of Agriculture for those who can get there. Military service, now without a fixed end, hangs over young people from their early teenage years. It is effectively mass forced labour with groups of conscripts living in rough and inadequate camps building and mending roads and theoretically in a state of constant readiness for Ethiopian incursions and travel permit infringements. A recent directive has required the majority of office workers to take two hours military training every morning. The general apathy of workers faced anyway with an existence where their efforts are largely unrewarded by any change in life or status has been exacerbated by the exhaustion of a further pointless exercise to the extent that opening hours everywhere from museums to ministries have become almost entirely random.
All currency must be declared on arrival, a form received on which exchanges will be carefully noted to check against any residue left unchanged on departure. There are of course ways round paying entirely fictional official prices for Nakfa but it is essential to be clear about these in advance – there is absolutely no question of any open black market trading. To offer someone dollars is, in their eyes, reality or not, akin to offering them a ticket to arrest and imprisonment. The description of Eritrea recently as an open air prison is certainly one bought into by many of its inhabitants. North Korea in the sun is another or perhaps North Korea through rose tinted spectacles, an extreme ideology is less apparent but fear pervades every aspect of existence.
Nobody is sure of the levels of corruption at the top of government – it would be a rare regime run on fear where its upper levels were not salting away insurance against a rainy day although it seems possible that the President himself, Isaias Afewerki, the unreconstructed freedom fighter, may be less tainted by dirty money than many of his ilk, this at least his population choose to hope. Afewerki ‘s stand against the efforts of supportive neighbouring Muslim states, particularly Saudi Arabia, to make the country one of their number has retained the loyalty of older people, some who still speak an Italian ‘dialetto’, and those for whom the memory of the Ethiopian occupation and war of independence is worse than anything that happened before or since.
Eritrea’s dual religious personality continues although to describe the country as having religious freedom would be an exaggeration given the questing finger of government in every pie. Within the country, religious persecution may be fairly even handed and less to do with modes of worship than imagined dissent of any sort – reports by Christian refugees of persecution are mainly focused on their treatment by Muslims inhabiting and people trafficking in border areas or border guards too scared themselves to do other than follow orders whatever their religious persuasion.
Border areas are completely forbidden to tourists, whose limited tour possibilities presently stretch barely 100km from Asmara; to the north, as far as Keren; to the East mercifully to the coast at Massawa and the Dahlak Islands if you can get a boat; on southwards as far as the remains of the ancient port of Adulis or the greater archaeological site at Qohaito if you are in a minimum group of five. West of Asmara towards the Sudan is out as is Dankalia and the whole of the coast beyond Adulis or any remaining of the ancient hill top monasteries like Debre Bizen or Debre Libanos. Entry to their innermost sanctums is, like many Ethiopian Orthodox monasteries, in any case forbidden to women. Looking up at some potential climbs in Ethiopia in the past, often involving ropes and a tightrope style walk over the thinnest rock bridges, a ban for which one female traveller at least has been duly thankful.
So why go to Eritrea at all? A country one and half times the size of Scotland with a population smaller by a million and no Scottish rights to roam. Well, curiosity; because it is there; because it does have the wonderful climate of aging Italian reminiscence and the extraordinary architectural and cultural relics of those same Italian settlers; because, not surprisingly nobody else is there and because Eritrea’s people, those who remain, are a fascinating melting pot of peoples washed up on her shores. It is a beautiful place, the birds are wonderful and one day one both prays and fears, it will be one of the great resort centres of the World. The stunning Red Sea coast, one envisages, and the deserted Dahlak Islands covered end to end with hotels, spas and luxury experiences. It would be nice to hope that the country will open wider to tourists before that happens and that the resort breakout will not be only constructed by and for the Chinese encroaching here like everywhere in Africa, if, given the President’s antipathy to aid and foreign interference, a little less overtly than in some places.
Immediately after independence in 1993 the usual aid circus so familiar to travellers in other new or newly developing countries took off in Eritrea at the same time as educated Eritreans living abroad hurried home and the economy soared. A new border conflict and war with Ethiopia in 1998 and, in the eyes of the administration, a continuing state of war today, has reversed any advances. The original exiles, the educated and professional and more have been exiled once again and the government has had an excuse to take out draconian measures against any dissent or external influence in the country including stopping all forms of foreign aid in the name of national security. As the Bradt Guide of 2007, the most recent guide to the country, puts it, ‘marginal religious groups have been targeted, business owners have been targeted, national service staff have been targeted, students have been targeted.....Eritrea’s jails are heaving with countless people who have been caught up in the politics of a nation stuck fast in the topsy-turvy world between war and peace’.
Bizarre evidence of wars, repression and the aid ban can be viewed by the curious, with necessary permit of course, at the vast dump on the outskirts of Asmara where the rusting detritus of years of conflict is piled up over acres of land. Small settlements are here and there, houses made from old containers, washing neatly strung out along the barrels of adjacent tank guns, small quasi garden areas demarcated by unidentifiable metal shards among the crushed piles of military vehicles. Russian made tanks, rows of nearly new looking landrovers and the small minivans so dreaded by the population as the carriages of torture and death in the days of the Ethiopian Derg and in more recent crackdowns based on their methods. Other containers have burst open spilling brown glass ampoules of god knows what lifesaving medicine onto the encroaching weeds, banned aid that never made it even to the markets that normally in Africa trade so successfully in donated goods. It is strictly forbidden of course for the inquisitive tourist even to notice let alone photograph such waste.
More recent metal debris, the tins and tubs of everyday use, is recycled in a walled off market area in Asmara where the hammering goes on from dawn till dusk and men and boys in makeshift masks fashion the new from the old with oxyacetylene torches. War has left so many scars and such a wealth of relics that the whole country is infested with dumps and rusted metal. Here a tank, there an armoured car degrading into dust near the roadside; the pockmarks of shelling on buildings in the old port of Massawa weakening further structures of crumbling coral stone; even far out into the Red Sea, the burnt out fins of rockets among the scratchy coral and scrub where a colony of Boobys nest on one of the deserted Dahlak Islands.
Steamy Massawa should still be one of Africa’s great ports. Seen as a perfect hub for trade between India, Africa and Arabia by many of its colonists, most notably the Egyptians and the Italians, today, like so much of Eritrea, the old port town is perilously close to complete destitution. Most people have gone, streets are deserted in the heat of the day and only in the evening do the remaining inhabitants creep out of houses that often lean drunkenly into their neighbours and have ceilings held up by faith alone. The island nevertheless retains an extraordinary attraction, the arcades close to the waterfronts now populated by a handful of customers in bars and cafes that were once full of the colour and character of port life. The nightclubs on upper floors have gone now and the best kept building is the ancient Shafi’e Mosque, said to be one of the oldest in Africa, where an aging and chatty Imam encourages rare tourist interest. Nearby there is a remarkable restaurant producing the best fresh caught fish cooked in a tandoor with nan bread of a quality to make an Indian sailor feel quite at home.
The domed former Governor’s Palace on Taulad Island just by the causeway to Massawa Island proper, once the summer palace of Haile Selassie, is almost certainly beyond restitution. During the Struggle against Ethiopia much of the building was destroyed and since Independence it has been left to rot, the destroyed dome and falling arcades like some monument to apocalypse. The rusting iron canopy of the railway station, more like an aging bus shelter, stands at the entrance to Massawa Island where more once showy and splendid Italianate buildings are slowly collapsing. The florid Roman/Moorish remains of the Banca d’Italia building, the empty plinth in front all that remains of a statue of Haille Selassie, blown to smithereens after the Struggle, are still just standing by the port gates. It was intended to be the first knock your socks off building seen by new arrivals to Eritrea.
The port itself moulders quietly in the heat, its cranes unmoving. One Moldavian registered ship lists gently out an anchor. In what might once have been a marina a handful of small motor yachts, rich men’s pleasure craft in another world are the boats confiscated from adventurers or mercenaries coming too close to this inhospitable coast or, it is said, in one case a Greenpeace vessel. That story is not advertised by the organisation itself and may be part of the usual wealth of rumour and counter rumour scurrying amongst a small and tyrannised people where press freedom is, according to Reporters without Borders, the lowest in the world, surpassing even North Korea.
Existing authorised newspapers are thin publications, two dailies and several weeklies in various local languages, football results and acceptable local news. The 2 official television stations are a deadening mixture of ‘cultural’ programmes, indigenous song and dance set against an Eritrean landscape and carefully scripted news programmes. The radio mix appears to be similar. Satellite is, however, available both in many hotels and in private houses and insofar as the internet works, many get their news in occasional bites from the BBC and Al Jazeera websites. Young people are not uninformed about the world, they gather in hotel bars and restaurants in the early evening dressed to be cool, have a drink, watch films and sport on hotel satellites. This is their outlet from the paranoia of daily life when arrest might always be just round the corner.
For the tourist in Asmara, there is little overt evidence of tyranny as young people parade; their elders give a good impression of normal business if you don’t look too closely; bars and cafes apparently thrive on the cup of tea that lasts an hour or two; but the fear seeps in like a draught although the foreigner feels little threatened. The lunacy of government and the possible lack of links between elements jostling for power is demonstrated in oddities – random issuing or not of permits, petty power plays. During the ‘European Film Festival’ held for a week in November for the last 3 years in the glorious red plush Cine Roma with its panelled lobby and cafe, there was an upheaval last year when a film was suddenly banned at the last minute on a whim of the Minstry of Security. The film, like every other shown in Eritrea, had already been passed by the Minstry of Information and the audience was ready and waiting when its German presenter made the announcement. By the next morning the story washing about Asmaran streets was that this had been a ‘gay film’ and therefore fell under any number of cultural and religious taboos. If it had passed through the Ministry of Information it was unlikely to have been something to frighten the horses. It appeared to possess a most unthreatening European 12 certificate.
Unexpectedlyanother film, Italian this time, about the extraordinary Italian war hero, Amedeo Guillet, passed muster with ministries and security.It seems colonial history is not so appalling for contemporary viewers. Amedeo led a cavalry charge of Ethiopian soldiers in 1941 near Keren, the last ever faced by British Soldiers. Guillet died aged 101 in 2010 but had been invited back to Eritrea in 200 after meeting President Afewerki, at the President’s request, on his visit to Rome and perhaps his noted charm still holds sway in the corridors of power.
Italian missionaries have left their mark in Keren, the Roman Catholic influence apparent in a series of large churches, topped off with a vast recently built and peculiarly ugly St Anthony’s Cathedral right next to its older version in the style of St Mary’s in Asmara. Oddly enough the new cathedral’s interior whilst strange has an appealing atmosphere – it is quite big enough one would imagine to fit the entire population of the town inside and must have unusefully absorbed a vast sum in foreign remittances. The Grand Mosque and a rash of smaller mosques supply the needs of the Muslim population while churches of various other denominations proliferate well beyond the needs of the small population. The main Orthodox church, another huge structure is outside the centre as is the Madonna of the Baobab, a huge hollowed out tree containing a 19th century French bronze statue of Mary. The cleared area outside where thousands of pilgrims gather every May is a wildlife haven where a pair of talkative hornbills who have seen it all before are no more bothered by humans than by the local cat slinking under the branch they perch on. The great baobab itself seems sadly likely to fall prey to the powerful strangler fig it is hosting. The hole in its side is a war wound; escaping Italian soldiers sheltered there after the Battle of Keren. The tree was shelled by a British tank but, miraculously, none inside was injured.
The Battle of Keren in World War II is little remembered outside the heads of serious military historians. The Commonwealth War Graves cemetery and the Italian War Cemetery are remarkably kept monuments to the end of Italian colonial ambition in a terrible battle lasting 52 days. On the British side the Royal Artillery, Cameron Highlands, Queen’s Highland Infantry, Leicestershires, Cheshires, and Yorkshire regiments are with RAF casualties, much in evidence. As so often it is the monument to cremated Hindu soldiers of Indian Army regiments such as the Rajputana Rifles, the Punjabis and Mahrattas, so many names fighting a foreign war, that is with the graves of unknown soldiers, the most evocative of waste and sorrow. Today the cemetery has a caretaker and assistant who continue to take a remarkable pride in the swept and weeded perfection of this barren piece of land where huge geraniums nevertheless grow by every grave, the long rows spreading from avenues of shading neem trees.
Like Massawa, Keren in the past had its railway link with Asmara. Today the station, a typical European provincial affair, stands marooned at one end of the town, a makeshift bus station with the inevitable cafe where hawkers sell fruit to customers through departing bus windows. The railway in Eritrea, like so much else, could be and is occasionally a source of tourist dollars. For the steam enthusiast it must be a treasure trove. For the even mildly interested it is a curious delight and a major disappointment to be told that there is no coal except that made available for 40 steam experts and photographers arriving later in the month. They will live with if not on the trains for a 10 day trip on the narrow gauge line between Asmara and Massawa; there and back several times one imagines as the journey is a short if precipitous 70km or so.
The old main station in Asmara, another of those provincial affairs, is now the purview of a group of proud old men, some in their eighties, some perhaps of Italian extraction and all speaking that somewhat impenetrable dialect from which the school level Italian speaker can just about extract a buon giorno. They are scrambling with surprising agility over ancient engines, beating plates into shape, painting and polishing, polishing everything in sight. Although there is a theoretical plan to re-open the railway full time, It is highly unlikely that the somewhat restored lines are currently very safe even if the trains are preened and shone by their pensioner preservers. Thoughts of a sudden collapse, the line subsiding into the valley far below the so called ‘Devil’s Gate’ mountain loop might daunt some visitors both to Asmara and to the rusting weed-filled lines and abandoned carriages at another deserted station on the line just off the Massawa road.
Massawa can be reached from Asmara via the direct road or via the spectacular road to Filfil, upgraded since Independence by more or less forced labour of National Service conscripts. The road rises into the mountains, the air getting increasingly cold as the isolated traveller, adrift on a rocky island above, looks down on a magical sea of cloud covering the wide view that on clear days stretches out to the Red Sea. Whatever the horrors and hardships of life in Eritrea now, its geographical position and the potential of its coast, waters and the islands in it must one day be realised. The Dahlaks were lately the location for Ethiopian prisons. Eritrean prisons now dot the mainland and the tourist imagines concentration camps hidden in areas she cannot reach but most of the islands are now deserted resulting in unparalleled marine riches.
Eritrea is a mecca for anyone with an ornithological bent and such interests creep up on one unexpectedly when faced with such readily available wealth. On our chosen desert island, a pair of ospreys returned from hunting to their huge nest in the centre of the island to the fury of a pair of vociferously belligerent terns protecting their own nest from potential predators aquiline or human and quite ready to dive to the attack. The aforementioned boobys meanwhile stayed, both male and female on or near their hatching eggs shuffling a little nervously at human approach but only abandoning a hatchling briefly when a keen photographer took one step too close to the nest. Perhaps the doting parents trusted to their baby’s white downed, big-headed ugliness to make it an unappetising prospect for a snack.
The water round a clump of witchy looking mangroves was salt, risen up through the coral and spiky vegetation but considerable rain falls in the area and historically islanders on the larger islands collected water in stone cisterns, the remains of which exist today. The weakest and most nervous swimmer has the opportunity here to see every coral fish he has ever dreamt of within feet of the shore, let alone those which may be caught with line or harpoon for evening barbecues. The colours are indescribable, like staring into the greatest and most varied aquarium where there is enough for everyone and sharks seem thankfully well fed. Small reef sharks feed, giveaway fins darting, in the shallows and, on long beaches, thousands of hermit crabs in variously commodious housings scuttle like spiders or build themselves into pyramids overnight that break apart for scavenging food searches at dawn.
This is a strange, wild and beautiful place – belonging to its wildlife for now, there are sand circles in the scrub above the beaches that may have something to do with past battles or who knows what. Fresh but dead fish landed high above the tide line in the evening all facing one way faced the other by morning when opportunistic gulls first decided they might be good eating. One day there will be a luxury hotel here, water piped in, tourist boats bobbing at a jetty – the Qataris are already mentioned as potential developers of some of the islands, the Chinese are always willing. Meanwhile for those that can get here and negotiate boat trips and travel permits (the port office in Massawa is a lean to shack attached to a small striped lighthouse at the outer end of the sea wall) it is an unexploited paradise.
As it turns out, the understated and undistinguished modern block that is the Sunshine Hotel, near the German Cultural Centre and other international offices, probably has the best, most efficient and friendliest service in Asmara, with plain clean rooms, good food and reasonable internet access until the power goes which is does of course all the time all over the City and everywhere else. There is also an excellent laundry service, money changing and a bar and lobby which are crammed every evening. The only downside is the lack of satellite television or at least it doesn’t work ‘though one can get used to watching bad films through a strange haze of dots and dashes.
In Massawa, the Red Sea Hotel used to be the top choice and service here is still friendly and helpful but rooms are struggling and nothing much works. Taps either don’t turn on or don’t turn off and everything looks as decayed as the rest of Massawa although it is said that there is about to be a revamp – for whom or by whom, heaven knows. The Dahlak Hotel has to be the current best option with an internet hotspot that sometimes works, a massive and filthy swimming pool but it is sea water and rather delicious to swim in avoiding stirring the bottom. There is decent enough food in the dining room, the usual pastas and fresh fish in season. The wide range of alcohol available in the bar may partly be for local consumption but must otherwise be awaiting a huge influx into the rather beautiful buildings of this hotel with the same owner as the Albergo Italia. There appear to be hundreds of rooms although some may not actually be finished. Service at the front desk is unhelpful and uninterested until something goes wrong – a receptionist called the police when a tourist failed to have the correct permit despite his guide’s reasonable excuses – he had been ill, numbers miscounted and the wrong number of permits issued. Staff in the dining room and bar arrive with reasonable despatch and no scowls.
In Keren, there is really only the Sarina Hotel to stay in any comfort and comfortable it is - how often does one find a remote controlled fan, and it worked. Satellite tv worked too meaning the bar was crammed with viewers of films that certainly never saw a larger screen. Service was friendly and food good. The injera with chicken or beef stew, or delicious and favourite shiro, made with pureed lentils and spices, is excellent in many restaurants and hotels in Eritrea, the meat habitually of better quality than in Ethiopia, the product of all those healthy looking, organically fed, herds of animals. Otherwise, guides and drivers here eat pasta, with meat sauce or fish in season – they have injera at home with their families so pizza and pasta are the outside treats and they are good, pasta as properly cooked as one might hope if not necessarily expect in a former Italian colony.
As for travel plans and itineraries, they are inevitably short in a country where tourism is so proscribed and expensive under official rates especially with difficult public transport options, for cars, boats and of course the train. Travel by that desirable mode of transport means either a like-minded group prepared to splash out or the sort of riches that allow shipping in loads of coal from the Yemen and taking the whole train until it runs out – which would be fun if there were a few more places to go to.......At the moment Eritrea is a beautiful but difficult place and only to be visited by those prepared to put up with delays, frustrations and the very real possibility of getting nowhere. Not so different from many developing countries but the paranoia in the country is catching and the fear can eat away the spirit of even the most detached viewer and dedicated traveller
