Massawa

Last weekend, as Caroline has already described, we headed down to the coast to the port of Massawa on the Red Sea and then to Gergusum, a beach hotel nearby to try and relax in the infernal heat.

It’s difficult to know how to describe the Old Town which occupies a small island. It looks like what I might imagine an old Arabian port to be but a lot of its buildings were rebuilt by the Italians after a devastating earthquake in 1921. Wile Asmara, with its Italian art-deco glories which are now decaying slowly for lack of investment, avoided war damage Massawa took it in the neck in 1990, during the struggle, and is now almost a ghost city.

I have previously referred to the over-use of the phrase "war-torn" when the media mentions Eritrea, well for Massawa it is appropriate though the use of photos of the city (a barefoot child alongside a devastated building is the usual one) to illustrate current articles is perhaps out of place since Massawa's wounds are old ones.

Incredibly, amongst the ruins, people live a precarious existence with structural collapse never far away. The guidebook we have refers to a couple of wooden structures, a famous balcony and the remains of the canopy from a covered walkway in the bazaar section both of which now seem to have gone. We hope temporarily but, in the case of the former, there seemed to be a lot of old wood piled up behind the building. Given that Eritrea is one of the world's poorest countries it seems that Massawa will never be rebuilt and, like Asmara, its destiny will be to rot away though from a very different starting place.

P