Senafe

Senafe sits in the far south of Eritrea’s highlands, close enough to the Ethiopian border that in another political reality you could walk across it before lunch. Instead it sits at the end of its own road, a small town with a military checkpoint on the way in and a sense of finality that is partly strategic and partly geographical — because a few kilometers south of the town, the highland plateau simply ends, dropping in a series of cliff escarpments toward the Ethiopian lowlands in a view that is one of the more vertiginous things I’ve seen in Africa.

I came to Senafe because of Qohaito — the ancient plateau ruins that lie to the north — but I stayed longer than planned because the town itself had a quality I hadn’t encountered elsewhere in Eritrea. It felt genuinely frontier: smaller and rougher than Asmara or Keren, the main street unpaved and dusty, the restaurants serving food that arrived in the order it was ready rather than the order it was ordered, the guesthouse operated by a man who seemed simultaneously pleased and puzzled by my presence. There is a straightforwardness to towns at the edge of things that I find more comfortable than resorts designed to be comfortable.

The ancient ruins of Metera are within reach of Senafe — a pre-Aksumite archaeological site with stelae, carved inscriptions, and the remains of buildings that predate the common era. The site is less visited even than Qohaito and even less explained, which means walking it with a local guide who speaks both Tigrinya and a working knowledge of what was found where. My guide had grown up in Senafe and had his own relationship with the ruins — he’d played among them as a child, knew which stones had been moved by archaeologists in the 1960s, had opinions about what the carvings meant that differed from the academic consensus and were probably more interesting.

The escarpment viewpoints south of town are the geographic drama. The plateau breaks apart suddenly and the land drops in stages — first a cliff, then a slope, then another cliff — until it reaches the Afar lowlands far below, brown and flat and impossibly remote-looking from up here. The air on the rim is cool and dry. The air below is presumably neither. I sat at the edge for a long time watching the shadow of the escarpment move across the lowlands as the sun dropped, and when I stood up my legs had gone slightly numb from the cold of the rock.

Returning to the guesthouse after dark, the town was quiet in the way that small towns without much artificial light are quiet — not silence but a kind of dimness of sound that matches the dimness of the sky. A generator ran somewhere. A dog argued with another dog. Someone was cooking injera and the smell of it — a slightly fermented, tangy smell that I’d come to associate entirely with this country — drifted across the street and I followed it to a restaurant that hadn’t been there at lunch, or perhaps had been there and I’d missed it, and I ate dinner by the light of a single bulb and went to bed at nine.

When to go: October through March. The permits required for Senafe — and for visiting the ruins nearby — need to be arranged in Asmara before your trip; check requirements before heading south. The border area has periodically had access restrictions, so confirm the situation on the ground before planning a trip.