The Meroë Dam Project

The Merowe Dam (also known as the Hamdab Hydro Project) opened in 2009 with great publicity: it was the largest contemporary hydropower project in Africa. 9km in length and soaring to 67m high, the dam holds back a reservoir extending over 170km upstream. 10 vast MW Francis turbines are expected to generate an annual yield of 5.5 terawatt hours (TWh), necessitating the upgrading of the national grid to cope with the extra supply. 

            The plan for a dam at the Fourth Cataract is not a new one. It was proposed several times in the early 20^th century, and revived again in 1979. Feasibility studies took place but lack of investor interest stalled proceedings until 2002. Construction began in 2004 with the China International Water and Electronics Corporation constructing the dam, the German firm Lahmeyer International managing the project and providing civil engineers, and Alstom (a French company) supplying the generators and turbines. The project cost $1.2 billion, with the majority of funding coming from the Middle East and the China Import Export Bank.

            Whilst Sudan’s need for a reliable electricity supply is not debated, the environmental, human and archaeological damage caused by the dam and, more especially, the reservoir it has created have been of ongoing concern. The reservoir has increased the surface area of the Nile by an estimated 700km², increasing water loss due to evaporation by as much as 1.5 billion m³.  Although an official plan was in place to re-house 60,000 people who would be affected by the flooding, the UN expressed concern in 2007 that many displaced people had received neither information nor assistance from the government as the reservoir’s water level rose. Those who were forcibly resettled argued that the land they were given was of inferior quality and that compensation for assets (notably homes and date palms) was inadequate. The compensation scheme only covered the settled population, and so nomads have been excluded from help entirely. 

            As with the Aswan Dam to the north, the Merowe Dam has also heralded an archaeological disaster. A significant area between the Fourth and Fifth Cataracts was submerged, drowning beneath the waters archaeological sites dating back to the Stone Age. The Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project (MDASP) was established in 2006 in a bid to salvage some of the most important sites, but unlike with Lake Nasser they lacked the time, money and publicity necessary to have a significant impact. A number of key historical sites have now been lost.

Highlights of the National Museum of Sudan

Temple guardians from Tabo

Ancient columns rescued from the rising flood waters of Lake Aswan

Max inside the Egyptian temple of Kumma

Temple columns outside the museum

Wall painting of Horus and a pharaoh inside the temple of Buhen

The main museum building

 Additional wall paintings, immaculately preserved, from the Buhen Temple

Egyptian hieroglyphs in near-perfect condition.

Sudan: #1 Emerging Tourism Destination?

What a difference a month makes. In December 2011 we traveled to Sudan on business, taking a careful glance over the country's tourism industry whilst we were there. We met plenty of expats - most of them involved in aid or security - but no actual tourists. Given the comments we'd received before going, this was hardly surprising: most of them involved words such as "dirty", "chaotic" and, particularly in the case of Khartoum, "overwhelmingly dull".

Scroll forward to the start of 2012, however, and readers of Wanderlust, one of the UK's best-selling travel magazines, have voted Sudan as the #1 emerging destination for 2012. How can this be? I'm not entirely sure. Sudan's own statistics, not to mention those of the airlines, show a distinctly limited number of tourists visiting the country who could report home from personal experience, and magazine articles with a positive angle on the country are even more scarce. Where on earth are Wanderlust readers getting their ideas from?!

I'm actually quite pleased to hear Sudan is on the up, but a little apprehensive nonetheless. In 2009 we successfully angled to have Kyrgyzstan included in Conde Nast's Top 10 new destinations for the year ahead. The Kyrgyz were delighted... and then went and had a revolution. The tourists understandably stopped thinking about coming. Now that Sudan is taking teetering steps towards tourism, will it meet a similar fate? Politics in the country seem somewhat fraught and there is concern in some areas that President Bashir may yet become another victim of the Arab Spring.

A Day at the Races: Army and Navy day in Khartoum

Think about horse racing and it's likely that Ascot or the Meydan spring to mind well before Sudan. Unexpectedly, however, the combination of excellent horse stock from Darfur and decades as  a British colony have collided to give Sudan, and Khartoum in particular, a fine equestrian heritage.

Khartoum Horse Club is in the south of the city. From the looks of it, when it was built it would have been on the outskirts of town, but now it is surrounded by apartment blocks, a photogenic mosque, and low-rise homes, shops and animal sheds. Once lush turf has turned to a few dusty tufts of grass amongst the sand, and the grandstand has long fallen into disrepair, but regular races still draw a significant crowd, egging on their favourites.

We headed over to the club for a mid-afternoon meeting only to find the staff in the final stages of preparation for Army and Navy day races. Red plastic chairs were laid out across the grandstand, the stairs were brushed of sand, and the track was dampened to reduce the clouds of dust. We were invited to join the VIPs in the box at the centre of the grandstand, from where we had an excellent view of proceedings