Off the Tourist Track a New Train from the Capital “No Problem,” She Replied Brightly, Neighbor, Brought Peace to Their Without Breaking Stride
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C M Y K Sxxx,2019-04-14,TR,001,Bs-4C,E1 3 SEATTLE The South Park neighborhood, on the upswing. 8 BEFORE TAKEOFF Interpreting the airlines’ boarding rules. 9 PARIS Six restaurants with delicious food and tasty prices. DISCOVERY ADVENTURE ESCAPE SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2019 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARCUS WESTBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Clockwise from top left: a Harar Jugol merchant; Lebu Station, the western terminus of the new train line at Addis Ababa; a convenience store in Harar Jugol; coffee, or buna in Ethiopia’s Amharic language; the air-conditioned new train; Harar Jugol, a maze of narrow alleys; and the beach in Djibouti on the Gulf of Tadjoura. Off the Tourist Track A new train from the capital “No problem,” she replied brightly, neighbor, brought peace to their without breaking stride. “A technician shared border for the first time in more of Ethiopia to the Djibouti is dealing with it.” It was only later that than 20 years. coast offers a desert journey one of our Ethiopian neighbors told us However, for every two steps for- into the Horn of Africa’s we had struck some errant livestock. ward there has been one back. The passengers — my photographer With the economic miracle stalled past, as well as its future. Marcus Westberg and I among them — by drought in 2016, and antigovern- merely shrugged. We had never kid- ment riots tearing through the Oromia By HENRY WISMAYER ded ourselves that this trip would be heartlands the same year, Ethiopia re- We were around 30 miles shy of Dire entirely without misadventure. mained transitional, ill at ease with the Dawa, Ethiopia, when the train hit a In the nine years since my first visit, pace of change. Last month’s horrify- cow, its impact signaled by an abrupt a lot had changed in Ethiopia. The ing crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight drop in speed and a sharp judder rip- economy had boomed, with years of 302, which killed 157 people from 35 sustained 10 percent annual growth pling through the couplings. countries, couldn’t help but recall the yielding significant jumps in life ex- trauma of the late 20th century, when “What’s happening?” I asked the pectancy, living standards and G.D.P. carriage attendant, as she hurried Ethiopia was a place all too synony- In September, a rapprochement with mous with tragedy. along the aisle. Eritrea, Ethiopia’s glowering northern CONTINUED ON PAGE 4 C M Y K Sxxx,2019-04-14,TR,004,Cs-4C,E1 4 TR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2019 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARCUS WESTBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Off the Tourist Track CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 na’s National Railway. Still, the thing that had brought me back An hour later, we were enjoying a rare here seemed like a concrete embodiment of sensation: swift, ceaseless movement progress: Ethiopia now had a state-of-the- through a sub-Saharan landscape. The train art train. In 2011, the government an- itself was a sterile beast, but the passengers nounced that a new electrified railway had brought the atmosphere with them. The would be built between Addis Ababa and carriage full, we shared our row with a con- the tiny neighboring country of Djibouti, vivial family, laughing as their youngest aided by Chinese loans and expertise. Five member leaned from her mother’s arms to years and $3.4 billion later, the first freight pilfer some of the dozen pounds of fruit we’d train made the 470-mile journey, revolution- stockpiled in paranoid anticipation of a izing landlocked Ethiopia’s access to the breakdown. Red Sea, where Djibouti’s Doraleh Port pro- As the tiled roofs of Addis gave way to cesses 95 percent of its international trade. thatch, the large windows offered a moving After several postponements, a pas- pastoral of Ethiopian life. Yellow domes of senger service went online in January 2018 harvested teff, Ethiopia’s national crop, or- and quickly became a symbol of Ethiopian namented the periphery of every village; ambition — the first stage of a planned net- boy herders stopped to watch as the train work that, if realized, will span 3,000 miles. hammered by. Three hours out of Addis, the For tourists, it promised cheap, air-condi- rails bisected the Awash National Park, tioned travel far from the Rift Valley scarps where dust devils danced around the base and rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia’s of an extinct volcano, and antelope could be Northern Circuit, in a region that nonethe- seen grazing on acacia trees. Local folk mu- less incorporated some of the most remark- sic tinkled from the public address system. able sights in the Horn of Africa. After all the caveats, and despite the in- terjection of a hapless longhorn, the train ‘Bring Food’ hissed triumphantly into Dire Dawa at 15:27, eight minutes ahead of schedule. The day before we intended to depart, we went to buy tickets at Lebu Station. The City of Djins new line’s western terminus was a cavern- ous mustard-color building topped with Despite its soporific air, Dire Dawa, effec- twin cupolas, which sat incongruously on tively the railway’s midpoint, is Ethiopia’s Addis’s southwest outskirts. In the vacant second largest city, a fact it owes to the old ticket hall, the man at the counter seemed French-built train line that had fallen in and genuinely shocked when I asked him for out of use since its inauguration in 1917. A two tickets to the city of Dire Dawa. Yet village backwater a hundred years ago, more disconcerting than his reaction was Dire Dawa grew over the century into a ma- the sheet of paper taped to his window. At- jor transit hub for Ethiopian exports, not Clockwise from above: pinnacles near Lake tributing recent disruptions to “local vil- least khat, a mild herbal stimulant that is Abbé; a Harari market; the platform of the lagers,” it then issued an explicit deterrent: farmed intensively in the surrounding hills. old railway line; the Islamic outpost of “Reminder: Think twice before purchasing But the place we were more interested in Harar; and a campsite near Lake Abbé. your tickets.” was a 30-mile minibus ride east. The train had availed us the chance to visit the Is- The ticket vendor’s parting words: lamic outpost of Harar. “Bring food.” It was discombobulating after the prim naed beards filled many of the alleyways, And so it was no small relief when there modernity of the train to plunge into Harar prostrate in nests of discarded twigs. the next morning was the train at the plat- Jugol, about 120 acres of tight-knit alley- Through our young translator, Emaj, one of form. Its Chinese provenance was con- ways, encircled by 15-foot walls, which is them complained that the price of khat was firmed by the ethnicity of the “Captain” ush- widely considered to be the fourth holiest increasing. The crop had become so lucra- ering people aboard, and by our salmon-col- site in Islam. We stayed in a gegar, a tradi- tive, its users so hooked, that the wholesal- or tickets, the same as those issued by Chi- tional Harari home, that had been con- ers were now increasing their prices. Drug- HENRY WISMAYER is a writer based in London. verted into a guesthouse, where we slept in Dealer Economics 101. a garret that was formerly a storage room At nightfall, two men headed out of the for grain. In the adjacent main room, the city carrying a basket of meat-scraps, then owner and her friends drank thick coffee on crouched in a clearing and called out into a RED SEA ornate carpets. It was an oasis that belied patch of scrubland. We looked on as eight the kaleidoscopic bustle outside. spotted hyenas emerged from the shadows Beyond the gegar’s wooden door, Old Ha- to feed from their hands. Over the years, rar was a treasure-house of curious muse- this nightly ritual has become a draw for ums and muftis’ shrines. But far more entic- tourists, who gather to shoot photos under ing were the streets themselves. At times, it the beam of car headlights. But Emaj told us felt like a town designed to intoxicate the it also has a more supernatural purpose: to senses. From the main square, our pre- keep the dogs close, because of the ghosts. Djibouti CityCity ferred route into the labyrinth was via Ma- The hyenas have their own entrances into kina Girgir, the tailors’ road, so named for the city, where they are said to be the only the sewing machines that line it, girgir be- creature capable of seeing and swallowing French meter-gauge railway. ing the onomatopoeic word for the clacking Djins, spirits of Harar’s past inhabitants, of the needles. In the spice market, drifts of A stern woman at the entrance, suddenly sometimes malevolent, who stalk the alleys all smiles once we agreed on a price for en- dried chilies elicited sneezes from browsing under cover of darkness. shoppers, while in the meat market, be- try, donned a conductor’s cap and beckoned us in. On the train from Addis, we’d seen Harar mused tourists took cover as black kites cir- Railways Old and New cled and dived to snatch shreds of goat from remnants of its ancestor running parallel to the stall-holders’ palms. In every street, Before reboarding the train for Djibouti our course, sections of it buckled in the heat, NATIONAL walls had been enlivened by pink and blue City, we made a stop in central Dire Dawa.