And the rest of you can too. Just not as much.
Merry Xmas!!
NB. We may be experiencing technical difficulties... let us know if the video works..
The "Commanding View of the City" from Goha Hotel
We stocked up on supplies, got each other out of bed at 7am and trekked off to Gonder bus station and hit the road for the 100km (6 hours) ride to Debark along a road/path which was made largely of dust and potholes. That same evening, the trek was arranged - park fees were paid, tents were rented, we met our scout (who is compulsory in the park and wanders around holding a large gun in case something untoward were to happen) and went to eat. Cole and I had some beers later in the evening and we arranged to wake up again at 6am, ready to get going early.
M's bugs, however, were having none of this and she wasn't up for any trekking. Rather than stay in Debark where the altitude makes it pretty cold, I dragged her into a truck and we returned Gonder and to the Belegez. This little adventure cost us 800 birr, a phone (which disappeared somewhere) and a pashmina (which was left in the hotel). Pretty good going, even by our high standards!
What next?
Gonder is nice enough - an old-looking town with an attractive setting - but we've seen a lot of it and we're just waiting for an improvement in the health situation before we head off. For a reason that, again, I haven't managed to work out, M got a 2 month visa for Ethiopia while I only got one month and this means that we have to be in Addis Ababa this weekend for me to get it extended. After that we've rehashed our plans to go to Djibouti and Somaliland, hopefully in a more active state.
Fancy some Egg Bread Craps in your Meat Louf?
Ah, Special Roosted Decide Meat!! My favourite!
They really ARE everywhere...
The plan was simple – get to the border, cross over, get as far as possible on the other side. As always, the plan didn’t come off as it should. For once though, it wasn’t entirely down to our own incompetence! On the bus on the way down we got a message from the South Africans – “Grant sick, too weak to cycle, we’re stuck at the border”. Hoping that was it was nothing serious, we found them at a rustic funduk where it seemed he’d gone down with malaria. We weren’t going to leave them behind so we stayed in Gallabat for a few hours, helping them through the somewhat complicated and typically Sudanese overly bureaucratic immigration and to carry their stuff through to the Ethiopian side. After being shunted from office to office on the Sudanese side we were relieved to find that entering
We were by this point surrounded by the usual border-town crowd of guides and hangers-on who informed us that there would be a bus to Gonder at 6am next day, and took us to a bar (where they eventually declared they had no money and we paid for their beers) and to a place to stay, where we agreed a price for the rooms. When darkness fell, the manager came along and announced that the price we had agreed was wrong, and an argument started while Grant was busy expiring in his room. We didn’t want to judge any country from a border town but with these experiences compared to the ones we had in
Metemma is a long, dusty road lined with shacks, restaurants serving beer and the Ethiopian staple injera, which is a type of large sour pancake which doubles as knife, fork and spoon all in one. An injera comes with beans or meat piled on top – you rip off a piece of injera, scoop up the meat or the beans with it, and eat the result. With good tactics, you finish the injera and the topping at the same time. After being charged a reasonable price for the injera we decided not the push our luck and headed back to sleep, ready to rise at 5.30 next morning.
And rise at 5.30am we did (or at least nearly)! By 6am we were at the bus station, Grant and Bast having decided to put their bikes on the roof for this stretch of the journey to make sure that Grant could get to a hospital for testing as soon as possible. After protracted and friendly negotiations with the driver about how much the bikes would cost (“Listen my man, I’m not going to talk to you if you continue acting like a prick”) we finally set off into a new world – a green, mountainous world where it was early 2002, the sun reached its apex at 6 in the evening (according to the Ethiopian calendar and clock respectively) and we couldn’t read anything. After 2 months learning to read Arabic, we were back to square one – Amharic is a strange looking language indeed! The bus journey took on a familiar pattern though – people piled on to fill every possible space, loud Ethiopian pop music blared out from the speakers, and M kept falling asleep in improbable positions.
In a rare display of discipline, we managed to get up early (read: reasonably early) and headed off to the bus station, where we quickly discovered that we indeed didn’t have enough money to go to Kassala so we headed off on the cheapest bus possible (found with the friendly help of yet another Sudanese happy to help out a khawaja for nothing) and trundled off to Gedaref, the closest town of any size at all to the only open border crossing between Sudan and Ethiopia. It’s a classic border town with plenty of business, plenty of rip-offs and nothing much of interest. We checked into a cheap hotel and enjoyed the last of Sudanese hospitality, unsure of what to expect from
The #1 enduring memory of Sudan - the tea ladies who provided us with so much...
Not much happened in Gedaref – a few bites to eat, a bit of walking around, lots of lazing. The room was hot enough to stop us sleeping until we passed out early in the morning and this contributed to yet another spectacular failure to wake up in time to get to Ethiopia, so we had another enforced night in Sudan. Hurrah! The next day featured equally small amounts of activity and a trip to a hotel restaurant to celebrate our last night in
After another largely unsuccessful night, where the heat of the room combined with an electricity cut which eliminated the overhead fan, we slept in pools of our own sweat for a few hours and finally got up on time to head to the Gallabat/Metemma crossing. Very exciting.
We had been talking about seeing the Pyramids on the Sudanese side ever since we had seen the ones in
On the road we also made a couple of lengthy stops which were mostly attributable to us being khawajas and therefore our papers’ being checked extensively. Our initial plan had been to get to the pyramids in the early afternoon, in good time to have a walk about and set up camp outside in the desert before sunset. Us being us and leaving later than would have been ideal, and Africa being Africa and making us wait around on the road, we got there only an hour before sunset and only had time for a quick stroll before darkness fell upon us.
The pyramids are situated right next to the Atbara-Khartoum highway near the
There are two clusters of pyramids at Bajarawiya, at walking distance from each other. We only saw the ones closer to the highway which counts more pyramids in numbers than the other cluster. The pyramids here were partially very well preserved and for the parts that weren’t, they had been restored to some extent. Their shape is different from the ones found in
After spending our precious sunlight minutes, we hesitated on whether it was actually that much of a good idea for T and I to camp out here in just our sleeping bags without a tent and with time pressure to get travel permits to the eastern parts of the country from Khartoum quickly enough still before our visas would run out. As we couldn’t make up our minds there and then, we all headed off back towards the highway to see whether there would be some food available at one of the roadside stops and whether we could hitch a lift back to
The fun began for me and T as we decided to take our shot at getting a lift back and parted ways with Sean who headed back to camp by the pyramids. We started walking towards the next lights that we could see in the distance, waving our arm out as any vehicles passed us by and remembering that there was at least one petrol station we had passed on the way here and possibly some other roadside restaurants. The police checkpoint didn’t seem to be far either, to our recollection. So we walked about a kilometre to the first lights – the presumed petrol station. We walked a few kilometres further, passing a dead donkey and loads of exploded rubber tyres by the side of the road in peaceful co-existence – indeed a roadside restaurant. We hadn’t managed to wave anyone down by the side of the road as most of the vehicles were huge trucks in full load and with no space in the cab. We therefore stopped for another beverage with a sneaky plan to inquire for anyone going to
It was now past 10pm so there would not be many private vehicles on the roads anymore at this time. We asked one more Hilux that was parked at the restaurant, but as it was full already we walked back to the side of the road and put our arms out again. One, two, three, four trucks went by. A couple of private minivans that didn’t stop. A truck-bus stopped and we asked for our chances but heard that we’d cause trouble at the police checkpoint. Another truck, and behind it the saving grace: a big vehicle with very dim lights making it hard to tell what type of vehicle it was. It turned out to be a be a very comfortable bus heading back to Khartoum between services with a couple of very friendly driver guys and apparently the lady friend of one of them inside. The guys promised to take us onboard and we agreed to pay SP15 for the ride each. This included air-conditioning, reading lights, bottled water on the bus, a stop for some shai on the way and the whole back of the bus to ourselves with plenty of space to stretch out!
We were woken up by the driver at 2am when the bus had arrived to Bahri. We got out half-asleep but happy to be back in the big K. Last leg of the race still involved getting back to the sailing club. We asked a lone wanderer on the street for the way to the bridge over to the right side of the