Midnight Oil

It’s 1:06am in the morning. Just got into Gedaref, Sudan. Big drive.

The luxury cruise boat docked into Sudan Port (probably a little bit smaller than Ningi boat ramp) at 1pm. Customs faffed about for hours on end and acheived nothing untill they let us leave at 4:30 in the arve. A good hour before what some of the pessimist’s where expecting. 2 hours later than the optimist’s though! And i was an optimist. Unfortunately i dont have many photo’s from today, but i will get them up when i can.

We started our slog on a very ordinary road and guess what? The road got worse for a few hundred k’s, then it got slightly better. But never cracking above the ‘ordinary’ standard. 700k’s took us 8 hours, we stopped twice to take a piss.

Sudan, is, flat. We climbed a few hundred feet out of the port and then barely moved 30 feet for the whole journey. Even in the dark, you can just tell that it is flat, unbeleiveably flat. The straight stretches you can see car headlights way on the horizon coming toward you, but they are still 40k’s away and take ages to reach you.

It has been blowing a gale the entire time. With so much sand everywhere (it’s a desert), the sand dunes occasionally cross the road, making you do an impromptu detour. By now everything is dirty, my white jacket that only had a few oil/grease stains is now brown with dirt and sand, sand in my eyes, ears, nose, hair and even my crack.

Every now and then i had to stomp on the stop peddle because of wandering camels or donkeys….. or wandering locals.

I’m going to sleep, another border crossing into Ethiopa tomorrow and 600k’s. Hopefully the daylight will bring more photos.

James