From: Eri-News (er_news@dehai.org)
Date: Sat Oct 04 2008 - 14:01:42 EDT
October 5, 2008
Journeys
Recalling La Dolce Vita in Eritrea
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
WE were covered in soot, sitting on rock-hard benches, hot, sweaty
and crawling along at maybe five miles an hour.
But we were loving every minute of it, chugging straight up a
mountainside, puff by puff, in a 1938 steam train built by the
Italians when Eritrea was the jewel in their African crown. Outside
our windows unfurled a sun-blasted landscape untouched by modernity —
stone walls, trickling waterfalls, boys tugging camels, women with
beautifully braided hair and gold hoops through their noses trudging
up the mountain paths. The sky was impossibly blue — it always seemed
to be like that here — and from the railway tracks 7,000 feet above
sea level, we could see for hundreds of miles in each direction.
“More popcorn?” our hostess asked.
The whole creaky carriage car was redolent with the irresistible
smell of freshly popped popcorn.
“Yes!” I said. “More popcorn!”
Eritrea, for better and for worse, is a nation locked in a time
capsule. Visiting here is like spending your vacation in a vintage
shop. Old men in dapper Fedora hats and antique Italian shades haunt
Harnet Avenue, the palm-studded main drag in Asmara, the capital. The
city itself is a showcase for some of the world’s boldest, most
whimsical examples of 1930s Art Deco architecture, perfectly
preserved by the thin desert air.
There’s the Cinema Impero, built in 1937, with a facade that looks
like a circuit board. And Bar Zilli, with its curved walls and
porthole windows.
Most of these are not museum pieces and are still being used and
lived in, relics from a long-gone era somehow still alive.
One exception is a very unusual, now shuttered gas station more akin
to an airplane, or a space ship about to take off. I took a stroll
one day and suddenly came upon its long concrete wings just hanging
there in the air. The gas station almost looks like its levitating.
As barefoot women in traditional gauzy white shawls slipped past, I
stood there thinking: when did this thing land here?
Asmara the architectural marvel is not so much the purposeful result
of a hard-fought preservation battle. No. There were battles, real
ones, and it was Eritrea’s bloody history of conflict and civil war
that has kept this little-known sliver of a country along the Red Sea
hermetically sealed to the outside world. The result is a surreal,
out-of-body tourist experience, where you feel dislocated from just
about everywhere else, but euphoric and inspired by what is in front
of you. Africa? The Mediterranean? The Middle East? South Beach? It’s
hard to pinpoint exactly what Eritrea feels like.
There’s almost no crime. Asmara is known as one of the safest cities
in Africa. Most people don’t even bother to lock up their bikes. The
climate is ideal, 70s and 80s during the day, 60s at night. The
hotels are cheap but rich with character. On the coast, the beaches
are deserted. And the water? Evian clear.
If all this sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. But it does come
with a hefty caveat. American-Eritrean relations are at a historic
low point, with American officials accusing the Eritrean government
of sponsoring terrorism in Somalia. It’s a long story, having to do
with the chaos in Somalia and the poisonous relationship between
Eritrea and its much larger neighbor, Ethiopia, which happens to be
America’s new B.F.F. (best friend forever) in Africa and is currently
occupying Somalia. The Eritreans paint themselves as victims of a
Western conspiracy. The accusations and counteraccusations could have
some tourist fallout because the United States has made it hard for
Eritreans to get visas and the Eritreans may do the same.
So far, though, that doesn’t seem to be happening, and tourists,
especially design buffs, are trickling in. Eritrea is pushing its
tourism industry and the Eritrean ambassador to Washington told me
that he continues to process hundreds of visas for American tourists
and that this summer there were several large American tour groups.
Once in Eritrea, though, the paperwork is not over. You must apply
for permits to travel outside of Asmara and explain where you will be
staying and for how long.
It all sounds kind of Orwellian. And it is, indeed, a drag. My
advice: Be patient and follow the rules.
Eritrea has always been a bit of a hot potato. It was colonized by
the Italians at the end of the 19th century, seen as strategic
because of its location at the mouth of the Red Sea. Italy didn’t
have many colonies, and Eritrea became the canvas for its overseas
dreams. Italian professionals and artisans flooded into Asmara and
built shoe factories, laboratories, plazas, hotels, the railroad and
even an alpine-style cable car. Between 1936 and 1941, Italy’s
Fascist rulers transformed dry, dusty, little Eritrea into one of the
most industrialized, modern colonies in all of Africa. The one
blight, though, was a harsh apartheid system that prevented Eritreans
and Italians from living, working or even drinking together.
Not long after the Italians were defeated in World War II, Eritrea
was colonized again — this time by Ethiopia, next-door. In response,
Eritreans launched a guerilla war. Men and women, Christians and
Muslims, farm boys and physicians fought together in the trenches for
their country’s liberation. Eritreans call this period “the
struggle.” And after 30 years of struggling, they won. Eritrea became
independent to much fanfare and optimism across the world. Its leader
was a lionized guerilla hero. The year was 1993.
Since then, that guerilla hero, President Isaias Afewerki, who is
tall, handsome and mustached and has been called Africa’s Tom
Selleck, has struggled to find his way. He has rejected most foreign
aid, no small feat in Africa, especially in the Horn of Africa, one
of the most reliably chaotic and famine-prone regions on the planet.
But Eritrea’s economy suffers, with long bread and milk lines (though
as tourists we had no problem stuffing ourselves on homemade
tagliatelle and gelato), and many young Eritreans are tied up in the
military.
Since independence, Eritrea, population 5 million, has gone to war
(or nearly gone to war) with just about all of its neighbors:
Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti and Sudan. The worst conflict was
in 1998-2000, when Eritrea and Ethiopia battled over a seemingly
insignificant border town. As many as 100,000 people were killed. So
it’s not hard to see where Eritrea gets its bunker mentality from.
I traveled to Eritrea last fall with my wife, Courtenay, from
Nairobi, Kenya, where I am based as The Times’s bureau chief for East
Africa. We flew on Nasair, a regional airline, to Asmara.
The minute we landed at Asmara International, I was struck by how
bright the light was. Asmara is located on a stony plateau, 7,700
feet above sea level. It is essentially a city above the clouds.
Asmara became an Art Deco laboratory during the 1930s for designs
that seemed, well, just too out there for mainland Italy.
Rationalism, Novecento, neo-Classicism, neo-Baroque and monumentalism
are among the varied avant-garde styles played with here. The result
today is hundreds of aging, sherbet-colored buildings that are still
standing, some needing a coat of paint — or two — but otherwise
intact. With its plentiful palms and sunshine, the whole city has a
decidedly Miami Beach vibe, minus the miniskirts and Ferraris.
The star of the show, and for good reason, is the Fiat Tagliero gas
station, designed in 1938 by Giuseppe Pettazzi to look like an
airplane, a spaceship or possibly a bat. Mr. Pettazzi’s extraordinary
flourish was the concrete wings that jut out a total of more than 90
feet. The municipal authorities at the time required him to build
pillars under the wings so they wouldn’t collapse, which was an
unforgivable insult to Mr. Pettazzi. According to local legend, Mr.
Pettazzi installed detachable pillars, and at the station’s opening,
he pulled out a pistol and forced the builder to remove the supports.
Needless to say, the wings are still there.
We saw many of these modernist gems as we strolled around Harnet
Avenue. The whole city, with its broad boulevards and wide sidewalks,
was laid out with the passeggiata, or evening stroll, in mind. At
sunset, thousands of people hit the main drag and you can feel the
communal spirit, going back to the days of the struggle. “Do not talk
about self,” read one sign in English. “It will be done when you leave.”
It was in this collective, understated spirit that Eritreans built a
most original war memorial. Eritreans chose not to put up a statue of
Mr. Isaias or some other famous man but of a pair of giant sandals —
yes, sandals. The shida sandal, a $3 black plastic shoe that is
actually quite uncomfortable unless you’re hiding in a bunker and
have bigger worries, is the official symbol of the struggle. In the
center of town is a pair of 20-foot-long sheet metal shidas. In the
1980s, Eritrean rebels built a mobile shida machine underground that
survived countless bombings. The sandals became legendary.
We found most people here friendly, unless the subject was politics,
which then seemed to bring out a prickly side. Eritreans are fiercely
proud of their independence and reluctant to criticize their
government, which has jailed political opponents. “The problem with
Eritrea,” explained an Eritrean friend who has left the country, “is
that half of my friends are in prison and the other half put them
there!”
After a few days in Asmara, we headed to Massawa, Eritrea’s
swelteringly hot and therefore not surprisingly sleepy beach town. We
took the steam train about a quarter of the way and then had a driver
meet us and went by road for the rest. The train was built by the
Italians starting in 1887 and still operates, though mostly for
tourists. Along the way, the train stopped many times to load up on
coal.
“The engine’s good,” the train’s equally ancient engineer, Seyoum
Kidane, reassured me. “Just a little leakage.”
Massawa is hot, moist, quiet and battle-scarred. It’s a place where
you can see the cost of the struggle, like the Ottoman-era buildings
with their roofs blown off and sea walls raked by machine-gun fire.
There is a beautifully decrepit old bank building along the water
where we picked our way through the cobwebs and rubble and found an
enormous safe still half open (somebody had already cleaned it out).
Some of the world’s most spectacular diving is in the Red Sea. There
are a few dive shops in Massawa with rentable gear and boats to take
you to the Dahlak Archipelago, which includes more than 200 islands
and dozens of wrecks.
At night, when it cooled down a bit (it was still probably about 90
degrees), we took a stroll. The roads by the port are straight, wide
and empty. The 300-year-old Ottoman quarter, on the other hand, is a
maze of little alleyways and crumbling coral houses. The smell of
frankincense wafted from under the beaded curtains of the bars.
Shirtless old men sat at tables in the open air, draining beer from
unmarked brown bottles and slapping down dominoes.
There is not a lot going on in Massawa but that’s part of the appeal.
We had dinner at an outdoor fish restaurant called Sallam. The fish
was barbecued Yemeni-style by slicing it in half, smacking the whole
thing against the walls of a fire pit and baking it to a black crisp.
It arrived on plastic plates with the meat dropping off the bone by
the handful. It was cheap — $20 for four. And delicious.
In many ways, the story of Eritrea is the story of modern Africa, so
much promise melting into so many problems. In just 15 years, Eritrea
has gone from being the darling of the West, the egalitarian, crime-
free, little-country-that-could, to a struggling, closed-off society,
which, in a way, makes it all the more interesting to peek into.
Modernity will eventually come, hopefully peacefully, and until then
Eritrea will remain a remarkably authentic, singular place to visit.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
One of the cheaper ways to get to Eritrea from the United States is
to fly on EgyptAir (www.egyptair.com.eg) from New York to Cairo and
then connect in Cairo to Asmara. A round-trip ticket is around
$1,700. Other flight options include Lufthansa (www.lufthansa.com)
from Frankfurt, with a short stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Or
Eritrean Airlines (www.flyeritrea.com) from Frankfurt or Rome. There
is also Nasair (www.nasairgroup.com) from Nairobi, Kenya, which we used.
A good travel agent to finesse these details is Travel Inn, in
Marbella, Spain (34-952 82-9017; www.arrakis.es/~travel_inn/).
WHERE TO STAY
Italia Albergo (13 Nakfa Avenue; 291-1-120740;
www.albergoitaliaasmara.com) is a gorgeous old-school hotel right in
the center of town. The Albergo was actually Eritrea’s first hotel,
opened in 1899 and refurbished three years ago. Its lavishly
appointed suites include big marble bathrooms, Corinthian columns and
balconies that swing open to the street. Single rooms are $88 and
double rooms are $132. (In Eritrea, prices are typically quoted in
either dollars or nakfa, the local currency, with a current exchange
rate of 15 nakfa to the dollar.) Book ahead for October and November,
the busiest tourist time of year, thanks to the idyllic weather. The
hotel does not accept credit cards.
In Massawa, we stayed at the Red Sea Hotel (291-1-552839), right on
the water. The rooms were clean, simple and, thankfully, air-
conditioned, with a double room costing $32.
WHERE TO EAT
Asmara has excellent, inexpensive food. Lunches are usually no more
than $10 and dinners $20.
The Albergo serves up tasty Continental cuisine in a dining room that
is nothing less than elegant.
We also enjoyed Casa Degli Italiani (Mengesha Yohannes Street,
291-1-120791), the old Italian club from the Fascist days, with a
huge Italian flag still flapping. The service is slow, but it lets
you admire the pigeons in the courtyard. Most importantly, the
mozzarella is home-made and the spaghetti Bolognese (110 nakfa, or
about $7) is excellent.
There are also some great local finds, like the Blue Bird Restaurant
(291-1-117965). Eritrean food is a lot like Ethiopian food: mashed-up
lentils; beef with peppers; spongy injera bread — all washed down
with tej, a honey wine served in grenade-shaped decanters. Dinner for
two should run about 160 to 200 nakfa.
We found a very helpful travel agent in Asmara — Tedros Kebbede, of
Travel House International, (291-7111-487,
www.travelhouseeritrea.com). Mr. Kebbede can arrange guided tours,
drivers and trips on Eritrea’s steam train. He can also help with
hotels in Massawa.
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