Eritrea

Travelling in Eritrea always seems to contain this element of the unexpected. For most visitors, the biggest shock comes on landing in Asmara. The city, built by Italy’s brightest young architects when Benito Mussolini decided to use Eritrea as launchpad for his 1935 invasion of neighbouring Ethiopia, is one of the most architecturally consistent cities on the continent, a marvel of Modernist design.

With its marble-floored espresso bars, glorious Art Deco cinemas and palm-lined central boulevard - which survived Eritrea’s 30-year war against Ethiopia miraculously intact - it feels like Turin or Bologna. The sensation of strolling through an Italian provincial market town, rather than an African capital, is at its most surreal in the evening, when Eritrean youths link arms to stroll along Liberation Avenue in what looks very much like a passeggiata.

But this is a Turin suspended at 7,600ft, for Asmara lies at the same giddy altitude as some of Europe’s ski stations. Ferdinando Martini, Eritrea’s first Italian civilian governor, moved the capital up into the cool of the Hamasien highlands in the late 19th century when he found the sweltering heat of the port of Massawa unbearable. "Three seasons in two hours" boast the tourist posters, and they are exaggerating only slightly.

Sadly, few are reading those tourist posters these days. In the early 1990s, the rebel fighters who had just won their nation’s independence drew up ambitious plans for mass tourism. Eritrea could offer the coral reefs of Red Sea resorts without the fear of terrorism; it had all the sun of the Middle East without the Islamic regulations, as it is half Muslim, half Christian, and alcohol is not prohibited; and when it came to pre-biblical sites and mountain-top monasteries, its civilisations dated back as far as Ethiopia’s. Why, the Eritreans even had something to offer railway enthusiasts, as the steam engines of the colonial era were oiled down and sent puffing up the gravity-defying route to the plateau.

Then came a second, two-year border war with Ethiopia. That conflict, with the economic recession and political crisis that followed - in which President Isayas Afewerki alienated his former Western allies by jailing his critics and closing the private press - dispelled dreams of package tours and charter flights.

What remains is a fascinating venue for the adventurous traveller who likes wandering off the beaten track. And visitors’ money will go a long way: staying in a cheap, if perfectly respectable, pension and eating in Asmara’s best restaurants, I found my daily outgoings cost the equivalent of couple of drinks in a British pub.

Eritrea’s landscape alone is almost worth the air fare. I’ve made the journey scores of times, but the trip from Asmara, lying within touching distance of the morning stars, never ceases to astound me. The mountain ranges ripple into the distance, then through the blanket of cloud cover and down into the furnace of the coastal lowlands.

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