"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