M and T's Xmas Message

It has come to our attention that certain members of the Finnish community are whining about our lack of Finnish language blogging. So here you go guys, enjoy...

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..

Business as usual

14th-20th - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Addis Ababa - African diplomatic capital, biggest city in Ethiopia, another dustbowl. In all fairness, "Addis" is a city that isn't too hard to like. It's reasonably simple to get around, has its fair share of communist-inspired landmarks (the concrete, red-star-topped Derg monument and the enormous concrete sea of Meskal Square. It also has an array of restaurants serving injera with everything one could possibly wish for. Ethiopia being the first country I've ever visited where I actually care about the food, this is a good thing.

Addis was also the city where we took care of business - visas were needed, as were US dollars for Somaliland and Djibouti Francs, and I had to extend my visa. We checked into a hotel in the nicely named Haile Gebreselassie Street before moving to another cheaper option in the even more wonderfully named Democratic Republic of Congo Street, and spent most of the days sorting out business before taking care of pleasure (injera and beer) in the evenings, meeting up with Cole and Amanda again during the second half of our moderately productive stay in Addis. Our first experience was positive - we had no money and couldn't find an ATM and so we went to a restaurant to ask if we could pay with Visa. No, was the answer, but we could eat there and come back to pay another day if we wanted! Strange in a country where most people seem to be after money by hook or by crook but we didn't complain! Our second experience was more typically Ethiopian - the visa extension. After being shunted from office to office, we eventually got hold of the form I needed and filled it in, before being approached by someone in some sort of uniform whose exact purpose of being there I wasn't too sure of.

"Hi, what do you need?"
"I need a visa extension, where can I take this form?"
"We are very busy today, can you come back to hand it in tomorrow morning?"
"No."
"OK, well just give it in to that office. But we are closing for lunch, so come back in 2 hours."

After another delightful injera, we headed back and sat around waiting for a long time before I had my form taken in, and was pointed to another room where I was to wait for ages again, M was informed that she couldn't wait with me and ignored the guy telling her with considerable ability, and finally I paid my 20 dollars and was barked at to come back at 3 the next day to pick up my extension. Taking previous experience into account, we rocked up at 4.30pm and avoided the queues. I was free for another month!

Generic Addis street scene

The visa run was rather more eventful as we had by this point run out of dollars, and Ethiopia has a curious rule whereby you can't change Birr to any other currency unless you have a flight ticket out of the country. Djibouti was first up.

"Fill in this form, bring one photo, and 40 dollars."
"Can we pay in Birr?"
"No."
"But we can't find dollars anywhere and we have none left"
"Well..." And he shrugged and went back to his business. This would obviously be a tough one.

We decided to try our luck at the Somaliland office instead.

"Fill in this form, bring one photo, and 40 dollars."
"Can we pay in Birr?"
"No."

The deja vu was considerable. However on our explaining our predicament, the delightful ladies in the Somaliland office put in a couple of phone calls and told us with a smile that we could pay in Birr if we wanted. Within 15 minutes the visas were ready and we were sent off to the head of the mission who signed it and gave us some nice info about the country with the exception of the Somaliland Shilling exchange rate, which he told us he had no idea about having not been to Somaliland for two years.

Hurrah!

Our hunt for dollars continued until later that day when, having tried every bank in Addis, we wandered into a travel agent looking for a flight ticket from Djibouti to Nairobi to try and find our way around this impasse. When the woman behind the desk asked if we wanted the price in dollars or birr, a metaphorical lightbulb flickered into life over my head and I asked her if, by any chance, she might know where we could get hold of some US dollars because it's so hard to find here and we've tried everything and if she had any idea could she please tell us because otherwise we can't get any of our visas and can't leave Ethiopia at all please please please. The pleading had the desired effect and she closed the door, went off into a backroom and came back with 80 dollars and a calculator. We shoved our ill-gotted gains deep into our pockets and disappeared into the sunset, celebrating with more injera and Dashen beer.

Next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early with a steely determination, and charged down to the Djibouti embassy.

"What do you want?"
"We've come to get visas."
"We are closed today."
"But...ehh... we were told to come back today!"

We were shown a notice board where it was announced that the embassy would be closed on that day due to the Muslim New Year. Next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early with a steely determination, and charged down to the Djibouti embassy. This time, everything worked out, we were told with a smile to come back at 3 in the afternoon to pick up our passports. And we were ready to go! We'd got a surprise email from Cole and Amanda that they had been inspired by our Somaliland advertising campaign in Bahir Dar and that they'd got their visas too, so we were to have a little gang there for New Year! A similar advertising drive on behalf of Djibouti failed, so we agreed to meet up in Hargeisa in a week or so.

Aside from embassies and monolithic communist monuments, Addis doesn't have much in particular to see. Having spent many evenings wandering around the different suburbs and taking in the atmosphere, and instead of sitting around for another week eating injera and drinking Awash wine and Dashen beer, we got ourselves a minibus heading to Dire Dawa, from where we would try to get to Djibouti City and find somewhere sunny to spend Christmas holidays while thinking of everyone back home huddling up for warmth...

A reminder of the glorious past!

Escape from Gonder (attempt 2)

12th December-13th December 2009 - Days 75-76 - Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

First things first - Giorgio turned out to be a crook. It shouldn't come as that much of a surprise really that at some stage our luck with people would turn, and I think Gonder is where this happened, not that we noticed until the last day there.

On our last full day in Gonder I decided to make sure I didn't have malaria before setting off on the road again (as I had been having a pretty awful flu for the last two week or so), and so we made our way to the local clinic for the second time during our visit in the town. This time we went to a different clinic from the one Giorgio took us to though, and ended up paying 35birr for my visit and lab test whereas last time in the other place we had paid 100birr each for just doctor's consultation alone. Thankfully at least the test result was negative and I was reassured enough by the fact that there should not be any worry even if I would happen to collapse so we eventually made our plans to leave Gonder for Bahir Dar. In his friendly way Giorgio helped us with the travel arrangements which turned out to be effectively the second stitch-up he would impose on us. We got our minibus tickets through a broker he knew and were promised "a good price, not faranji price!" of 150birr per head. On the minibus the next day we came across some kind of an official list of minibus and bus fares for different distances inside Ethiopia (which we of course photographed straight away) with the referenced price of only 45birr per person for our said trip. So we lost some there too.

And upon us discovering all of this Giorgio lost our respect. Not for the reason we would not understand why people here operate in the way they do and accept that to an extent as part of local way of life, but for the reason we had asked him blatantly flat out about the price being the right one and trusted his word after the two weeks we spent hanging around with him with no obvious trace of him trying to benefit from us in any way. Quite the opposite, he had actually helped us on many small occasions and bargained for our share too - also not forgetting his hospitable invite to his house for peanut tea on the last night as I was still not feeling too good. After all, he could have just told us that we simply will end up paying faranji price because that's the way it goes.

In Bahir Dar we stumbled across a cheap bed for the couple of nights we spent there and got over our disappointment with Giorgio by spending a nice and sunny afternoon and evening at a few different terrace restaurants. We have really started to get into the whole injera (the Ethiopian national flexi-pancake-like bread with which, or more literally on which, all local food is served) thing by now, especially after the discovery of the best beer to go with it, Meta.

We also booked ourselves on a small tour around Lake Tana and its monasteries, and had a happy reunion with Cole and Amanda the next morning right before embarking on the tour. They had successfully survived the Simiens, of which I'm still jealous, and arrived to Bahir Dar on the same night as we had. We spent another sunny day out on the lake as part of our different tours but arranged to meet up later. The trip to the lake showed the true side of tourists' interests as none of the people in our boat really cared to see more monasteries than one (there are about 15 in total) and preferred to go scout out for hippos at the outlet of the Blue Nile which is found at the southeastern corner of the lake. And what do you know: I got to the see my two first hippos!

The evening was good fun with local Awash wine (the yellow-label used mainly for cooking), me and Amanda playing DJs and jamming to various tunes (including the shared interest for Bo Kaspers Orkester, the Ark and Stevie Wonder among others) to the annoyance of the boys, injera for dinner, some more wine and a round of ouzo shots, Jungle Shit (as re-christened by Amanda), yet another bottle of wine (this one red and hunted down by the boys at about 2am while swerving away from suggestions of prostitutes), and T and I eventually catching our minibus to Addis Ababa at 4am in a rather more than tipsy state.

Our tipple of choice

Additional information to be declared in this post: our names to be given to hassling kids asking for them all the time from hereon are Poncho Bordel for T and Trumpet Mochacchino for the undersigned. Thanks for the inspiration go to Muffin Rodriguez and Fairydust Bananahammock.

N.B. Trumpet's camera was stolen during the said minibus ride to Addis for which reason there are no scenic pictures to be published for this post. Trumpet will try and kick Poncho in the balls to take more pictures in the future in order to preserve the visual quality of this blog.

It was a long time coming! Cole finally triumphs at Jungle Speed

Here today, Gonder morrow

25th November-11th December 2009 - Days 58-74 - Gonder, Ethiopia

It's been an up-and-down few weeks, during which we have had many experiences and met many people. Most important of all these was Giorgio, an enthusiastic, talkative, friendly guy, invariably dressed in baggy gangsta jeans. He worked as a drummer in a local nightclub, which he invited us to one evening and where some of our group made fools of themselves in wonderful (and photographed) style.

Grant weaves some of that Saffer magic...

We bump into Giorgio most days as he wanders around town, meeting and greeting friends. For most of our time in Gonder, this meant our excursions to restaurants or shops before crawling back to the Belegez Pension, our home for the last two weeks, under the haze of illness. On one of these days Giorgio was concerned enough that his promises each day were not being fulfilled ("You will be better tomorrow, I am sure of it! I will pray for you!") and dragged us off to the doctor. After a consultation for both of us and an enormous needle full of painkiller into the butt for me, we headed back to bed with various medicines and still not sure of what ailment we were affected by. M didn't manage to work out what she had and I did manage to unearth that I had an "infection". After a course of medicine I'm up and about again while M is still in bed with flu-like symptoms. Well... 50% success rate isn't bad is it...?

Giorgio (right). Giorgio's friend (left).

Who let the Qat out of the bag?

One of the days that we bumped into Giorgio was a Sunday, his only day off work. This could mean only one thing - it's qat day! Qat is some kind of stimulant grown in the hills of Ethiopia and Kenya and exported to Somalia and Djibouti where it is responsible for enormous economic damage as men sit and chew the leaf all afternoon instead of working. Ethiopia seems less badly affected but people still like to have a good munch of the stuff. We partook in this activity just when we were starting to feel slightly ill ("It will make you better, I am sure of it!") and decided that it was a make-or-break day. Either we'd get better or we'd go downhill. As I crawled back to the Belegez feeling rough and my mouth covered in ulcers, it became clear that, at least for me, it was break rather than make.

Qat itself tastes slightly bitter and doesn't really have much of an effect at the beginning. It comes in bags (of 50 grams, in our case) and you rip the leaves off the stalks and mash them up with your teeth. Eventually the leaf disintegrates to become small pieces of leaf and juice - the juice is swallowed and the small pieces of leaf remain stuck between your teeth where they become irritating enough that you take another leaf or 3. Eventually, you end up in a state of slight euphoria and total concentration with enormous pupils and a total inability to sleep. This concentration led M to read about Ethiopia's endemic birds throughout the night (a subject she had no previous interest in) and me to repeatedly play a game of golf on my mobile (which I normally have very little patience for). For the next 4 days, ulcers in my mouth made it painful to eat anything at all, and M's flu symptoms got worse.

Would I do it again? Probably. Would I have 3 bags of the stuff next time? Probably not.

The Debark Adventure

Day 70 saw a sense of renewed optimism and energy. We had bumped into Canadian Cole, an uncanny George Michael lookalike and Swedish Amanda, an uncannily typical-looking Swede. They had met in Nairobi and bickered at each other ever since. They seemed to enjoy each other's company though, and we enjoyed theirs as we went around Gonder's "Royal Enclosure" from its days as Ethiopia's capital, and the Debre Berhan Selassie church which was impressively decorated, but full of European tourists toting zoom lenses the size of small rocket launchers. Finally, beers were taken at the Goha Hotel terrace, on a hill above Gonder. Thus was formed the Simien Mountains 4-day-trek team!

Fasiladas Castle - proof that we're not only getting sick and drinking beer, but that we're also being cultural.

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.

By way of compensation for making everyone wait for ages and then giving a very uninspiring post, I present a selection of our favourite Ethiopian menus.

Fancy some Egg Bread Craps in your Meat Louf?

Ah, Special Roosted Decide Meat!! My favourite!

They really ARE everywhere...

"Beer eh? Let's give it a go..."

23^th-24^th November 2009 – Days 56-57 – Gallabat, Sudan/Metemma and Gonder, Ethiopia

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 Ethiopia required a visit to only one office. After the guy took about half an hour to enter the names and professions of four people into his book we finally walked free into Ethiopia, the land of mountains and legal beer, and realised there were no buses left onwards.

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 Sudan, we were starting to think that Ethiopia may be tough going.

Change of scenery #1: Greenness!

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.

Change of scenery #2: Mountains!

Arriving at Gonder, we bumped into the Belgians from Khartoum who told us about a place to stay a little uphill from the town centre and we went there only to meet Grega, Boris and Josko, the Slovenian bikers we had met in Khartoum as well! Beer, smiles and pizza flowed until it was time to go to bed. After all that we had been warned about in Sudan, Ethiopia suddenly didn’t seem so bad after all.

Change of scenery #3: no comment

A Hasty Escape...

20^th-22^nd November 2009 – Days 53-55 – Khartoum to Gedaref, Sudan

Sudan is a lovely place, it really is. Aside from cold beer, it only lacks one thing – ATMs which are accessible to khawajas. You come in with cash, and make sure it’s enough to get you to the next country. This had already caused us to miss Port Sudan and, as we got to the bus station in Khartoum, it became clear that we might have to miss out on Kassala as well. With that, we got onto a bus to Wad Medani, the furthest we could go at that time in the afternoon. It’s apparently a big honeymoon destination but I suppose that people who come here reserve their hotel rooms in advance as we ended up on a 2 hour trudge around town trying to find any spare beds at a price which suited our rapidly dwindling reserves. One place finally had space for us and knocked over 50% off the price for the poor khawajas. Another desperate search for cheap food ensued, leading us to very little aside from a small pack of barking dogs and a pizzeria, in which we got the largest, cheapest pizza to split between us. Very luxurious.

Just a highly comical picture!

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 Ethiopia. Sudanese friends, taxi drivers and casual acquaintances alike have all expressed the same opinion on Ethiopia – “very beautiful country, very... difficult people...”.

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 Sudan “in style”. This involves a Fanta and a pizza each – the Fanta came quickly and the waiter appeared to have forgotten our pizza which was slightly bizarre given that we were the only people eating there. Finally we had our typical Sudanese meal – Margherita with ketchup. Very luxurious again.

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.

Goodbye Sudan - we'll be back!

More pyramids, more aimless walking...

17^th November 2009 – Day 50 – INTERMISSION! – Bajarawiya, Sudan

We had been talking about seeing the Pyramids on the Sudanese side ever since we had seen the ones in Egypt, if not before. Yet we had rolled right by them on our way down to Khartoum from Atbara without even poking our heads against the bus window while passing Meroe, close to where they lay. Therefore we organised a separate mission to go back up there to see them and luckily got some company in the form of Sean the American, who also wanted to see them before heading north via another route. Sean had inquired about connections already in advance and hence we knew we were in for some bargaining and mild physical assault at the Bahri (Khartoum North) bus station. We formed a tight pack and marched to the station in the morning of our desired departure with a clear plan to aim for breakfast first and foremost and only start negotiating about tickets after things would cool down a bit around us. The plan worked quite well in that me and Sean got our brekkies and sat down to watch T being ripped apart by a gang of eager ticket agents. T sorted us out with correctly priced tickets – SP15 each – soon enough and with both sleeves still attached to his shirt. We even had time for some juice and shai and money changing before scheduled set off time, which obviously was one hour too optimistic compared to the actual set off time.

The juice man.

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 village of Bajarawiya and can easily be seen while driving past, which meant we only had to ask to be dropped off the bus at our preferred spot. Sudan does not receive the kinds of tourist herds that roam the sites of its northern neighbour, so the place is not exactly signed with neon lights, nor is there any array of stalls selling tourist merchandise. Still, we were greeted with two helpful guys on camels riding towards us as soon as we became visible to them in the distance. We kindly declined their offers to take us to the pyramids, as we wanted to enjoy the view of them slowly approaching us in front as we walked towards the site. Entry to the site cost SP20 per person which we paid to the ghaffir who occupied a mini-museum kind of hut at the corner closest to the highway. We were unarguably the last and perhaps the only visitors of the day, so we got the last three quarters of an hour of sunlight at the site all to ourselves.

Toplessness is usually not a bad thing, but in this case...

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 Egypt, as these ones were built later under the Kushite kingdom. The shape is both shorter in height and narrower in width, with a steeper angle to them. They also have a passageway with pylons leading up to the door of the burial chambers which can be accessed on earth level, whereas in Egypt the way to the chambers loops underground and resurfaces inside the pyramid. The hieroglyphs here were still in good shape in some of the chambers, all of them you cannot even access to evaluate for yourself. The only major shame on this site is that it was looted by an Italian treasure-hunter expeditor who thought it would be a good idea to blast open all the tips of the pyramids in an attempt to find riches from within. Apparently the only treasure he found was some golden jewels inside the tomb of one of the queens buried here, but that was about it for his booty. These jewels were shipped to museums in Europe and Sudan now hosts only the hollow pyramid carcasses. That’s the way the cookie crumbles in the world sometimes, as is well known.

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 Khartoum with T the same night still. Sean, who had a tent and no imminent hurry, left his stuff by the ghaffir’s place where the man had said it would be OK to camp for the night. We found some ful and sheya, a type of fatty kebab meat, and indulged ourselves in those while testing out the soft drink we had heard about but had had hard time finding until now, Pasgianus. This amazing refresher is a mixture of apple and karkadeh flavour, the latter being the bright red infusion drink made of hibiscus flower that can be enjoyed hot or cold. My definite favourite in the Sudan selection.

Another pyramids and sunset picture but this time not a soul in sight!

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 Khartoum, or even to the close-by town of Shendi where we could stay over and get a bus back from early in the morning. No one was going towards that direction, and we learned from one of the guys that Shendi is another 40kms away and it’s 34kms to the police checkpoint as well. We’d thought that would have been slightly closer and considered it a good back-up as nearly all vehicles must stop there and thus would be easy to approach. I guess that plan fell through. So we sipped our drinks slowly weighing our options. There was a kid sleeping on one of the rope beds next to our table, we could surely just bunk in the corners of this place if we asked nicely. The host of the first roadside restaurant had offered for us to camp in his corners too, we just took our leave with optimism about getting a lift.

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 Blue Nile for us, and soon found ourselves in some Palestinian guy’s car which the wanderer had waved down for us. This friendly soul dropped us off in front of the locked gates of the sailing club, and we crawled underneath them and tiptoed our way back onto Gunboat Melik’s deck for some more Zzzzzs.