Eritrea

Getting to Eritrea turned into one of the longest travel days of my life. I was originally supposed to fly there from Somalia with a layover in Ethiopia, but after a terrorist threat temporarily shut down Mogadishu’s international airport, my flight was canceled. Instead, I rerouted through Hargeisa in Somaliland, then Dubai, before finally reaching Asmara after a very long day of travel.

Eritrea felt unlike anywhere I had ever visited. The capital, Asmara, seemed frozen in time. Built largely during the Italian colonial era, its wide boulevards, cafés, cinemas, and elegant Art Deco buildings gave it a character unlike any other African capital I had seen. In some ways, it felt more like southern Europe than East Africa.

One afternoon, I stopped at Albergo Italia, one of the city’s oldest hotels, dating back to the late 1800s. The manager, Tekle, invited me into his office and spent nearly an hour sharing stories from his life. He spoke about growing up during Eritrea’s long war for independence and later serving as a soldier during the border war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s. For me, it felt like a real-life history lesson. Instead of reading about those events in a book, I was hearing them from someone who had lived through them. Later, I visited Asmara’s famous Tank Graveyard, where hundreds of destroyed military vehicles from the war for independence lie rusting together in enormous piles. Walking among them was a sobering reminder of the conflict that shaped modern Eritrea.

Leaving the capital behind, I traveled to the Red Sea port city of Massawa. The moment I caught sight of the sea, I was flooded with memories of swimming in the Red Sea as a young boy in Egypt with my grandmother. Walking through the city, I visited the Mosque of the Companions, believed to be the first mosque built in Africa, dating back to the early seventh century. Yet wherever I went, reminders of Eritrea’s past were never far away. Many of Massawa’s beautiful Ottoman and Italian buildings still bear the bullet holes of the country’s war for independence decades later. Those scars may be part of Eritrea’s history, but they weren’t what defined the country for me. I left remembering its people, its history, and a culture unlike anywhere else in Africa.