No one told me about the forest. I had a mental image of Eritrea as highland plateau and hot coast, arid in both directions, and so when the road from Asmara descended the escarpment toward Massawa and suddenly dropped into thick green forest, I pressed my face to the bus window like a child. This was Semenawi Bahri — the “northern sea” in Tigrinya, a name that refers not to the actual Red Sea below but to the green ocean of vegetation that covers the escarpment — and it is one of the most unexpected landscapes I’ve encountered in East Africa.
The escarpment between Asmara’s highland plateau and the coastal lowlands creates a microclimate where moisture from the Red Sea condenses against the mountain wall and feeds a forest that has no business existing in this part of the world. There are wild olive trees and African juniper, Abyssinian colobus monkeys moving through the canopy, green and grey vervet monkeys on every roadside, and — after the rains — waterfalls that appear in folds of the landscape and disappear again when the season turns. The road that drops through this forest is a spectacular piece of Italian colonial engineering: hairpin after hairpin, each one revealing a new angle on the valley below.
I got off the bus at a small roadside settlement in the middle of the forest and walked for three hours. The air was astonishing — cool and heavy with moisture, smelling of wet bark and something floral I couldn’t identify. The path I followed went along the edge of a gorge, then dropped into it, then climbed back out on the other side where the forest opened onto a viewpoint over the lowlands. Below me: a brown and ochre desert stretching all the way to the coast, with Massawa’s causeway just visible as a thin line on the horizon. Behind me: the green wall of the escarpment. The contrast was physical.
The hamadryas baboons are everywhere here. They sit on the road verge in family groups, watch vehicles with calculated disinterest, and have clearly identified the precise distance at which humans become boring and stop being concerning. I walked to within ten meters of a large male who was examining something in the grass and he looked at me once, decided I wasn’t relevant, and went back to looking at the grass. This felt like a fair assessment.
The area has an official protected status as a national park, though the infrastructure of a national park — rangers, marked trails, entrance fees, facilities — is minimal. What exists instead is the forest itself, intact and working, doing what forests do without interpretation panels or observation platforms. You drive through, or walk through, and you see what there is to see, and what there is to see is genuinely extraordinary by any measure.
When to go: September through November is the best window — just after the rainy season, when the waterfalls are still running and the forest is at its most saturated green. The dry-season forest (January-March) is beautiful in a different, more muted way. Avoid the height of the rains (July-August) when the road can be difficult and visibility in the forest is low.