Road to Mekele

It always amazes me that everyone seems to know the almost exact distance to different towns in Ethiopia. I suppose the country is not all that big, but when people say, "it's 345 kilometers to" such-n-such town, you wonder if they have some kind of internal map program. However, the real start to understanding the phenomena is to understand that the number of major roads in Ethiopia is extremely limited. Today, driving in the north of town, my driver pointed to a road merging on to ours and said, "that's the road that goes up to Dessie and Mekele". I looked over at the road. It seemed like a rather insignificant little side street to me, but that's when I realized that there are no "insignificant" roads leading into or out of any city or town in Ethiopia. I remembered a while back, in the town of Bahir Dar, when I wasn't allowed to take a picture of the Blue Nile because the bridge was guarded by armed lookouts. The reason for the ban was, if anyone were to damage the bridge, it would only leave one other road out of town and increase the travel time to the capital by an extra day!