Is situated 517 km south east of Addis. It is a beautiful commercial city, founded more than a century ago.

ET provides a daily flight to and from Dire Dawa and Addis Ababa or by drive, takes 8-9hrs, asphalt road.

Here one can visit the large market of Dire, Kefira, often attended by rural Oromo and Afar in traditional garb. It is busiest in the morning and definitely worthy to see. The Awadai chat market is also another sight catching market.

The other one is the Afetissa market; situated at the place of narrow, meandering streets and square buildings. It is about 500m east of the main bridge across Dechatu Wadi (a dried up river bed, which in the rains become a roaring torrent, divides the railway town from the settlement that pre-existed it.) The market is well stocked with a bright variety of goods. And here, you may hear different local languages including Amharic, Oromo, Afar, Somali and Arab along with some French and English.

The Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway; which reached the spot in 1902, five years after the first spur led out of the port Djibouti in the French enclave on the Horn of Africa, is another prominent figure of the city.