Sudan

10th January

The prospect of setting off from Khartoum was very exciting, as about 1000km away is Wadi Halfa, the northern border of Sudan where we have to take a ferry up Lake Nasser to Aswan. In Aswan we will be just 7 days from Cairo. We were also looking forward to the desert, a real ‘sand as far as the eye can see’ desert, where there are no roads, but where regular glimpse of the Nile and its abundant banks keep you on course. This excitement was tempered by a few problems. Firstly, although Rob seemed to have recovered from his stomach problems after the murky water, he had had a relapse in Khartoum and as we set off it was starting to look a bit like cholera. As I’m sure you’ve realised by now, Rob is far too brave for his own good, and despite 42 loo stops in the first 72 hours after leaving the capital rob stuck on his bike (!). Jonny had also been hit by a bad flu, and for a couple of days we looked a very sorry bunch, sniffling, coughing and squatting our way to Egypt. To make things much worse there was the wind. Some travellers in Gonder, whose precise German accents betrayed their apparent lack of surety, had remarked breezily that they remembered there being quite a wind in the northern Sudanese desert, oh, unt yes, if zey seemed to recall rightly it vas heading south. It does heading south, for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and we are heading north. Most of the time on this trip we have known that there will be a mountain range or a change of direction to interrupt the force of a head wind, but separating Khartoum and Cairo is 2000km of flat, flat sand.

The first 400km out of Khartoum is tarmaced, which we set out on at about 16km/hour, about half what we would normally do. It was terrible. The desert environment, that would have been stunning, just added to the monotony of cycling with one noise, one colour and in one direction…very slowly. In Khartoum we had met another German cyclist (if south east Africa is full of Dutch people, the north east is overrun with Germans) who has been cycling around the world for two and a half years, for fun, and had left Cape Town in April last year to follow the same route as us up to Cairo. He had been seriously deterred by the wind blowing sharply across the Blue Nile Sailing Club and also by the prospect of the ‘no-road’ beyond the tarmac. He decided to catch a bus to Dongola, clear of the ‘no-road’ and half way to Wadi Halfa, to make sure that he would reach the ferry to Egypt on 21st January, which we also had to catch. Cycling so slowly into a wind that we knew didn’t end, we were very concerned about the ferry 1000km ahead of us. We hatched a plan, which seriously took advantage of having a support vehicle but was still a long way off cheating. The Landy became our windshield and our saviour by allowing us to get up to almost 30km/h, and by making sure that we could cover the tarmac section in three days. Staying an inch away from the back of a car does actually take a lot of concentration and also gave Jono far too much control. Two fingers and a cheeky Boer smile would normally be followed by a little prod on the accelerator, with us knowing that if we didn’t keep up with the git it would take a superhuman sprint to catch up having lost our protection, and we would be left languishing in the gale.

Between Khartoum and the end of the tarmac there are no villages marked on the map, but as we soon found out, finding somewhere to stay and eat in even the most desolate parts of northern Sudan is never a problem. Police posts or tea shops (not quite like in the Cotswolds) would happily give us some shelter, or a seldom-used nomad hut would protect us from the wind and the nightly desert chill. As soon as you meet a person here you find kindness and hospitality, and without this Rob’s and Jonny’s illnesses and the extreme conditions would have been much harder to bear. By the end of the tarmac, though, we knew the ‘no-road’ awaited.

16th January

Quick ‘no-road’ update: there is no road. We also feel genuinely windswept. After those first couple of days on the tarmac the protection of the Landy became useless, as not only does it unleash a wave of sand behind it but also not being able to see the road ahead when there isn’t one, isn’t too safe. However, we have heard so much about this stretch that it almost can’t live up to our expectations. We heard stories of walking for miles and only being able to cover 25km a day, but as it happens the sections of very deep sand are quite short, and most of the time we can push hard on the legs and plough through, meaning that our shortest day was about 70km. Rob and I also got a chance to force a bit of compassion on Jonny and Jono, who took on the challenge of a ‘cycle off’ in the desert sand – a 10m race, first with the wind then against it. Wearing their matching Dumb and Dumber multi-coloured woollen caps, fleeces and trousers, they crept into the desert wind and climbed on. The big problem in sand is getting going, but with the wind Jonny was up and cycling after three attempts made the 10m in a flash. Against the wind, they were scuppered and no amount of scrabbling about could get them going. Victory was handed to Jono, who managed three metres in a minute and forty seconds, but there have been accusations of cheating and the video evidence is being examined. Within five minutes Jonny was back in his sleeping bag and Jono had three fags on the go. Smugness only lasted a day for the cyclists however, as the next afternoon we went 100km along the Nile to get a crossing that didn’t exist and had to all drive back to where we started. Sitting in the Land Rover over rocks and sand was the most uncomfortable two hours imaginable, and we were desperate to get back on our bikes when we had crossed the water. We also realised how buggered we would have been without a qualified mechanic this week, as although our 1963 Landy has held up fairy well thus far, it took a battering over the corrugations and suffered a cracked alternator and suspension damage. If you visit a small town in northern Sudan called Abri and hear an incredible array of swear words from the local mechanic, then this is the man that worked many hours with Jono to fix our Land Rover...Jono was worried that his Granny might see the documentary and keel over from the shock of his language, but we don’t think that an hour of beeps will make very good TV, so don’t fret mate! Having no road to guide us does mean that we can travel as the crow flies back towards the Nile and miss out a chunk of the km marked capriciously on our map. Normally, we uneasily ask Jono how many km it is to our night stop on his GPS and the reply is normally ‘as the crow flies 24kms, but on the map…the road seems to take a few strange twists…so you morons on the bikes will be cycling…3, 096, 868km.’ That *&%$ing crow gets it so easy, so it was a relief to be finally going in a straight line in its smug little shadow. All in all, it’s dead exciting to be plodding through the desert and we feel like proper adventurers!

19th January

Wadi Halfa, a step away from Egypt and our return to civilisation, has arrived and ended our stressful trudge through the northern Sudanese sand. In so many ways we have been moved by the last week, and there is no doubt that it will be well remembered. Firstly, we have had by far the best hospitality of the trip from strangers. Every night we have arrived somewhere and been offered a place to sleep by the first person we have met, and in one place there was even a minor squabble over who was going to get to put us up. We have been fed and brought tea like we are old friends, and treated so warmly and generously that we feel desperate to give them something in return, but they often insist not. This has given us a chance to talk to people and find more out about how they live here. Something that we have been struck by in Sudan since we arrived here is the almost total lack of women in public. In the tiniest of settlements, with only a couple of buildings and a simple restaurant, oodles of men sit drinking tea and talking and yet there is not a woman to be seen. There is of course a very complex set of religious and cultural reasons for this, and it would be naïve to imagine that they are merely playing hide and seek round the back while the men take a break from toiling the fields. An English teacher we stayed with (Mohammed), after laughing over our suggestion that his wife join us for supper, explained to us her role is in the kitchen and in the fields, “like an animal”. There are aspects here beyond our understanding or our experience, but this is something that shocked me more than I had expected. Ultimately, religious laws apart, this can be added to our experiences of women as the providers, housekeepers and mothers of Africa.

Mohammed also added to our experiences of Sudanese people as generous, warm and open, as we found again the next night, and every night until we reached Wadi Halfa. The other very memorable part of the last ten days has been the desert. Until we reached a small place called Debba, on the west bank of the Nile, we had been surrounded by sand, but travelling on tarmac, which seemed to make a huge difference. On a road, which is obviously a sign of development, you feel as if you are on your way out of the desert and somehow more attached to where you are going than where you are. When the sand consumed the road and a bend in the Nile took it out of sight, we were alone in the desert, cycling in the same sand that we could see forever, and we felt genuinely in awe.

Sudan seems to have been a country of everyone getting ill, and just as Rob arrived here on 1st January with an unknown cholera like bug, so it has recurred as he leaves. Jonny’s sore throat is back (although better known as “death virus” as it causes total immobilisation and an inability to travel further than 1m for a pee) and I also had a mystery fever that took my temperature up to over 41° which none of us really understood, apart from Dr Jono, who said the cure was definitely eating lots of meat. Our hosts said I should go for a swim in the Nile, but as with Jono’s meat idea it seemed like a last ditch remedy, and I also had an infected cut on my shin that had made my leg swell up. I was going to plump for Dr Rob’s advice, which is whatever the problem, keep on cycling, but getting nearer 42° and a fatter, redder leg I had to go for Dr Jonny’s mantra: stay in one position for as many hours as possible. Although Rob’s symptoms eased, Jonny’s flu didn’t turn into anything more serious and my temperature gradually fell, this has been the closest we have come to feeling helpless and potentially stranded. When our handy health book likened Rob’s affliction to cholera we really didn’t have a clue what that meant or what we could do in the middle of the desert if he collapsed from dehydration. When the thermometer read 41° all we knew was that it was 4° above normal, that anything above 38° constitutes a fever and that 42° often results in death, but beyond that we were four idiots that had antibiotics that expired in 1997 and a medibag drenched in Sudacrem. For the first time we knew that we were taking something on that seemed like a tough slog through the sand, which we were fit and strong enough for, but that could have turned into a nightmare. We have been lucky on this trip and taken care of ourselves just about well enough to get to Egypt in one piece, but most of the time we have let the fact that we don’t have enough money to do this dominate every decision, including those that severely affect our health. You don’t really need much weight on you to cycle, but after Rob’s illness he has reached a point where if he does not consume as many calories as he burns every day, which is tough at the best of times, his body will start to burn his muscles for energy, which makes you terminally weaker when you need to be getting progressively stronger. We have been condemned to this state of affairs by a cripplingly small budget and finite overdraft limits, but it is not something that I would let happen again if I did anything similar in the future.

22nd January

We are still stuck in Wadi Halfa, having been supposed to leave yesterday and unsure as to whether we are going to leave today. Wadi Halfa, or Vadi Halfa as we normally hear it, (the Germans are everywhere!) is not somewhere you want to be stuck when you have just emerged from the desert, as, quite simply, there is nothing here. Before the Aswan Dam created Lake Nasser and Lake Nasser covered Vadi Halfa there may have been something worthy of ten minutes here, but now there is nothing but endless bureaucracy and yelps of Teutonic frustration (‘zis vould not happen in….’). Egypt was aptly described as ‘ze road to paradise’ and for our trip we would have to agree, but at the moment we are stuck in the car park and it smells of stale vee.

24th January
Arrival in Aswan
They have everything here! Really everything! Anyone who tells you that they could live forever in a hut with a bit of wood and a handkerchief is a liar, because when you see a shop full of Maltesers and a big neon sign saying ‘PIZZA’ after a month of sand and soggy beans you get a flush of happiness that makes you proud to be a shallow westerner. This, unfortunately, lasted for about five minutes (spent scoffing chocolate), and very quickly we started to feel a bit out of sorts, a bit confused and very out of place. We have cycled from South Africa to Egypt, two countries that feel more like Europe or Asia than Africa, but it is everything in between that has made this trip so incredible, and now it has come to an end. Aswan is a beautiful city, with dustbins and grass verges, cruise ships and cinemas and road signs and dog leashes. People sit smoking shisha and sipping Turkish coffee in piazza cafes that could be in Nice or Rome, and tourists wander the swept streets haggling for jewellery like they would in Athens and Istanbul. We are so relieved to be here after a tough month in Sudan, and to be able to eat well and see doctors makes us relax like we haven’t been able to for quite a while. Moreover, mine, Jono’s and Rob’s mums are coming to visit for a week and we have Becks back in the team, whose absence has made us feel at a loss for 2000 miles. But Africa is over for us, and within a week we won’t blink an eyelid at a light bulb or a road marking, which all seems just a little bit sad.