Category: LONDON TO CAPE TOWN

This is Julie here. Last night the boys crossed into Kenya, and have been advised there could possibly be no wi-fi for a couple more days.

I just wanted to let you all know that you can see exactly where there car is by using the Yellowbrick Road tracking. Here is the link Car tracking

You click on the map where all the little coloured bricks are. Then what I do is go to the little pop up window which comes up on the left with the list of cars, then I click number 11 – Max and James Stephenson; then I go to the top and press the “+” “+” on the slider button, or scroll on the wheel of a mouse, until it zooms right in. The car you click on in the list becomes slightly bigger than all the other little coloured bricks. You can move the map by holding the left click button down on the curser and just move it to where you want to follow the road and the other competitors.

One afternoon I saw their car with another doing zero mph right at the end of the pack, so I called Max just to let him know I could see where they were and ask if they or the other car were OK. Max and accompanying travellors all burst out laughing because they were sitting cross legged on the floor of a cafe, eating with their hands; looking out to the Red Sea.  …. isn’t technology amazing!!! 🙂

Julie

Welcome to Ethiopa!! Is what every piece of paper had written on it held by the hundreds and hundreds of kids lining the streets of villages. The Ethiopian people so far have been the most welcoming and happy and vibrant to see us. It’s been fantastic. 9 out of every 10 people would instantly stop what they are doing (working the land in some form or riding on a donkey) and wave at us hurtling past.

4 hours sleep last night and then back to the breakfast regime of eating some bread (safe option) and making lunch of boiled eggs. Today’s border crossing was drilled into us that it could have been the worst of them all, a small hut with 2 blokes playing some cards and the usual daily traffic across the Sudanese/Ethiopian border would be 2 cars, 5 people and their donkeys. But today had 50 cars, at 9am, ready to hurry up and wait what could have been all day. Surprisingly enough every car was out by 11 and on to the next time control, it was a miracle. Much better quality roads today, beautiful tarmac without the dreaded “OH SHIT STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP BREEEAAKKKSS!!,” that Sudan brought us. Don’t have time to put photo’s up today sorry, i will do a massive photo dump as soon as i can, or at latest on the rest day in Nairobi.

Ethiopa has a massive abundance of 3 things, people, donkeys, and land. At any given time on a road, if you look in each direction you can see; someone walking on the road, someone walking on the road with his donkey fully loaded, or someone walking on the road trying his hardest to control a herd of cows (with massive horns) that got startled from our Klaxon Horn because we furiously waved to the cattle herder. Or someone running after his donkey that has somehow escaped, thats a bit funny.

The road sections today were awesome, rising from the east Sudan plains and weaving our way up a valley and then on to the Ethiopian tablelands (beautiful pictures to follow asap). Started at the bottom at about 700m elevation and furiously climbed our way to 2500m within 17k’s or so. Second or the occasional third gear the whole time.

Small troubles followed us a bit today, we think we got a dose of sub-standard 90octane fuel when we filled up almost 200liters this morning. We were running pretty rough most of the day, lacking a bit of power and coughing/farting/backfiring out the exhaust little bits all the time. We have adjusted accordingly to elevation but we will find out tomorrow when we re-fill up at a more frequented servo (garage for some of the non-aussie readers). Oh, and somewhere this morning the linkage for the hand throttle has come off and dropped away (never to be recovered), rendering the hand throttle not working. Which is a real bummer, because i cant drive it now (as i use it to take off from a stop, and tricky gear situations when i need to right foot clutch[2^nd down to 1^st]) until we get to Nairobi and can fabricate some kind of replacement. Up until now i have driven the entire way, but oh well, i’ll have to learn to navigate tomorrow and try close my mind to all the crunching and grating of Dad changing gears hahaha 😀

It’s funny, throughout the day while im driving i swear i think up of some great little topics and stories to write about from the day, or a really good pun or play on words, but when i sit down and start typing i forget everything. Hahaha.

Sorry i don’t really have time to reply to the comments, but thank you! I read them all and it’s nice to know our experiences can be shared as much as possible.

James

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

Second and last day in Saudi. 400km of transit to be done before 5pm deadline at the port for our final ferry of the trip. 5 out of 5! We made it. More desert today, the hundreds of kilometres just rolled away with more and more barren desert. But we did see a bunch of camels, and a whole lot more rubbish just littering the median strips and caught in the low lying shrubs on the side of the motorway. The road itself was beautiful, 6 lane dual carriageway the whole way. And it’s funny, a heap of people think and say to us, “Oh, you’re Australian, this desert driving is easy for you isn’t it, you do this all the time?!” No, we don’t have to drive a hundred kilometres through the desert just to buy milk in Australia!

A decision was made with Lloyd and Traecy, and David and Nigel that we should pull off the highway sometime into an adjacent town and grab some lunch somewhere local. I can’t upload photo’s now but we had the greatest experience! A tiny little restaurant (couldn’t really call it that but i don’t have any better words) amongst a few other assorted shops in the middle of a town that had pictures of fish on the front, seemed like a great place to stop. We walked in and looked at the menu (a big fridge full of freshly caught fish) and pointed at 4 fish to share between the 6 of us. Took our shoes off, sat down on the floor (in the corner where the rugs where) and had a great conversation with a guy next to us (between us and the other guy and his mate, we filled the restaurant to capacity) and he spoke fairly well English. The deep fried whole fish came out on a huge plate on a bed of fantastic middle eastern rice. Ate it with our hands and it was delicious. 10 bottles of coke/7up, 4 fish and a kilo of rice between us cost 28US dollars. About the same price it took to put 150liters of fuel in our car! Stupidly cheap.

Customs at the Saudi port was again, not a speedy process. But we all got through and boarded the ferry to Sudan. Luxury sea travel if there ever is some!…….. not! Hahaha. This boat will be remembered for a long time. It’s a bit hard to describe without pictures. But at least we have a cabin and a shower, if you can call it a shower. We don’t have a shower rose, it is just a half inch pipe pointed in a general downward direction. Everything is falling apart, nothing has een touched since the 60’s when this boat was probably state of the art. Now it has gone to cross the red sea to die, sometime soon. Hopefully, not too soon. Not many people have keys to open their room and have to call one of the staff with a master key to open it. That’s if their door will even lock….

Funny story; sat down at dinner on the boat before it departed with some of the other Australian contingent and Dave Boddy says “hang on guys, i’ll be back in a second. I really don’t think we should leave our passports and all our money and documents in the rooms. Alot of people have suggested it’s not safe. I’m not going to risk it.” (slightly paraphrased from memory, intent and meaning is the same). “Fair enough,” I thought and he came back to the table with his bum-bag/rucksack thing. Dinner was woofed down by all and everyone petered off to bed. I was the last one to leave and look what i saw hanging off the back of the chair where Dave was sitting, his bag full of his passport and all his other goodies. Hahaha, silly move Dave! And the bad thing is i couldn’t find out where his room is to take it back to him. I bet he woke up in the middle of the night and thought to himself “(insert obscenity here)” and he hasn’t even come down to breakfast yet. Oh well, he’ll work it out soon enough.

Oh, another thing. Yesterday morning at the hotel at breakfast time there was all this talk about the guys in the Porsche had their electronics stolen out of the car. The window pried open and stuff stolen from inside by some local Saud’s. It filtered through and other people said they had stickers stolen, number plates taken, Martin and Josephine had their entire tool kit nicked from their locked boot. We checked our car and had 2 coats stolen (my warm polofleece with Twin View Turf and my name embroided on it, and dads ski jacket), one of my good leather driving gloves, my sunnies case and a 4pack of red bull, and our lock boxes where tampered with but still fine. What complete pricks! The hotel also assured us there would be 24security and guards, but the incompetent fella’s must have fallen asleep of something. Such a bloody inconvenience. And i though the Saud’s where scared of stealing because the punishment is getting your hand chopped off.

We are due to get off the boat at 1pm, then clear customs, then drive 700k’s to Gederaf, on a local Sudanese road. Word on the street is that it will take us 10 hours……

James