Danger! Road Ahead
On Sunday I got the chance to visit the Tekeze hydroelectric dam, the biggest construction project currently underway in Ethiopia. After 6 years, it’s now just less than a year away from being complete. Three hours drive on unpaved road to get to the $400 million project which will have the capacity to supply electricity to the whole of Tigray. The dam is over 180m high and will generate 300mw of power, though currently they’re using electricity from Mekelle while the project is completed – which may explain the power cuts we’ve been having recently.
Permission is required to be able to visit providing a letter and showing our residence IDs to prove that we weren’t Eritrean spies! We were also taken down to the turbine area, over 100m underground, accompanied by armed guards, giving the visit a James Bond villians lair feel.
On the drive there our windscreen was broken by children throwing stones, fortunately the damage wasn’t too bad – just a few big cracks on the top left of the drivers side. The drive home was less eventful, though in Hagareselam we came across this warning sign, not sure whether we should be careful of ghosts or aliens…
On stopping there for coffee, I was a bit surprised to find that some of the children knew my name, but then remembered that I’d stopped there a couple of months ago when our bus broke down, so they must have remembered from then!
My Ethiopian photo count is now up to just over 3000 (yes, thousand!) – that’ll be well over 10,000 by the end of a year here, so please keep a week free for the photo slideshow when I’m back in the UK 
