Massawa

The rest of the story of Massawa…after experiencing the sand storm, we quickly opted to wait inside our hotel for the taxi driver to return. An hour and fifteen minutes after our planned meeting time, he came and took us to the Massawa beach. On the beach, the air was much cooler than in the city and the Red Sea was a very welcome site. The wind was still quite strong and that made pretty large waves that Hannah and I both took advantage of. Throughout our trip, Hannah decided that one of her goals was to see and ride a camel on the beach. She asked around, and found that the camels had been put up for the day because the beach was nearly completely devoid of people. But, with some luck, the camel man got one of his camels out specially for us. Hannah finally got to ride the camel, and I took a spin for myself. We got a myriad of pictures of her, myself, and then the two of us together riding the camel on the beach, through the water. They are very gentle animals, always chewing, and will talk with some provoking. They sort of remind me of cats, only bigger, and useful.

After we'd had enough of the beach, we went back to our hotel where we had quick showers and then we were off to dinner and to see the city. We were taken to the port area where presumably the city center was or had been. As I said before, to describe the city of Massawa, I would use the word Bizarre. On the surface the city looked impressive from afar with large, majestic-looking buildings, many of which were probably built by the Italians. The creepy part came in realizing that basically all of these huge buildings were essentially vacant. And around them within the town, the roads were dirt and people lived in the sides of buildings with very, very little. We wandered around finding a "new" hotel that was apparently the place to be. This place was huge with a nearly olympic-sized outdoor pool at the center. It looked like the perfect place that had been constructed for tourists. That was all on the surface. The hotel itself looked already run-down and was completely empty. There wasn't a soul in the pool and it seemed almost like we were trespassing into some secret hideaway when we went exploring. It was like it was built for something that never quite materialized.

There was a bar there and since the restaurant we planned to eat dinner at didn't open until 7pm, we opted to get an appetizer at this hotel. We ordered fried shrimp because we thought that would be safe and two glasses of red wine. What we got instead was two glasses of red-label whiskey further driving home the concept that you never really know what you are going to get when you order anything in this country. We tried our best to give the whiskey away, asking nearby people if they wanted it, but no one did. Unfortunately, we did end up paying for it in the end despite the mistake. I would like to add that at dinner the topic of our conversation centered around the absolute bizarreness of the city and its apparent vacantness.

When 7pm finally rolled around, we made our way to our dinner restaurant, a place called Selam Restaurant, which was recommended by everyone who has ever been to Massawa. Not for the food so much as the experience. The restaurant is literally a hole in the wall place that even the local people of Massawa didn't seem to know much about. They serve fish--medium or large--and bread, which is made of only flour, salt, and water. You get to go in the back of the kitchen and pick your fish--no specific species, presumably just whatever they caught that day. The fish and the bread are both cooked in a hole, which is essentially just a fire pit. The fish are first cut in half and rubbed with Berber (my favorite Eritrean spice) and then are put in the fire pit to cook. The bread is smashed on the wall of the fire pit flat and is much like Indian naan. The restaurant seating is all outside and there were swarms of cats around the tables begging for fish and having the occasional fight underneath some lucky person's chair. We ate our fish and bread, which really wasn't too bad and then spent the rest of the time feeding our left overs to the crazy cats underneath our table. At the most, we counted I think 9 cats under our table. All of which were skin and bone.

We both crashed that night at our hotel with our air conditioner blasting. The following morning, we headed back to the beach bright and early before 9am where we stayed for a good 2-3 hours reading and wave riding. We had lunch at the beach restaurant and then took showers before heading back to our safe-haven of Asmara around noon. As I mentioned, on the way back, we had to stop to air up the front passenger-side tire as it was going flat. It was the second leg of the trip that I noticed a wire sticking out of the drivers side dash board that was smoking and the taxi driver would periodically play with it. Not sure what it was. I'm very thankful we made it home.

We stopped at a small village on the way back so that our driver could buy some road-side watermelon. There, three little girls were selling peanuts and some other grain and were very intent on selling some to us. One thing I have observed is that the people will take any opportunity to sell something if possible or to beg for money or whatever we have. Luckily for these three little girls, I had some extra granola bars--nature valley fruit and nut variety--that I passed out. The girls were extremely eager to grab at these bars, but of course they kept on begging for more, more, more. To get them to stop, we made a game out of making funny faces at each other, which included smashing my face up against the cab window, which they all found hilarious.

Hannah and I were ecstatic to make it back to Asmara and the safety and comfort of our hotel rooms after our weekend trip. Massawa gave us a new perspective on the country as a whole, and it wasn't all pleasant. The large empty buildings, which reminded us of a vacant movie set, was eerie, but the people were still just has friendly and welcoming.