|
Khartoum to Ethiopia
We had a long day to get to Khartoum, 350 miles of straight, featureless (and petrol free) black top to the capital. We woke early, to get on the road before sun got too fierce. We filled our petrol tank, and every water bottle that we had with us, and stored them on Donkey's roof. If it hadn't been for the kind presence of A and A, it would have been a nightmare, strapping that many bottles of petrol, plus water to Harri.
There is very little to report on the road. We took it in fifty kilometre stretches, pulling in for a stretch and a drink after each section, breaking it down into nice bitesize chunks to digest easily. The riding was so easy, so boring, stick into top gear and switch the brain into neutral. I managed to mentally play my entire Meatloaf back catalogue, watch Rocky Horror start to finish, and recite all the poetry in my head by the time we rested for dinner. We had made it half way before midday, but the wind started to pick up, reducing our speed to forty much of the remaining way. For the first time, we started to feel like a real burden, as Donkey slowed to allow us to slipstream behind, but soon enough we made it into Khartoum. All we had to do was find a hotel and take our first shower in nearly a week. One very sweaty, dusty week.
Only it's never that easy is it? Khartoum apparently has a severe lack of mid priced hotels. You either stay in a palace for $200, or in an overpriced slum for not much less. Apparently it is the UN's doing, wherever they go, they push prices up. Our first port of call was the Blue Nile Sailing Club, but at fifteen dollars to pitch a tent in their car park, it was quite easy to turn down. The absolutely blasted guy wandering around hassling us only helped our decision. Apparently ‘us’ the ‘Jews’ are just like ‘them,’ ‘the blacks,’ and we need to ‘resist the West, especially America.’ It was far too much like hard work to point out the numerous errors in his plans for world well-being, so much easier to agree with how famously anti-America Israel is, how Jewish we were, and how Western we weren’t! He was having a solo party, watching UK premier league repeats on Sky TV, working at a campsite that only accepted US dollars - in between lengthy and confused dialogues about the evils of the West. It’s something I have seen so many times in the Middle East, people who want the trappings of the West, but are still opposed to them.
Three hours of searching led us to a hotel called 'Hotel Dubai,' which although not cheap, at around 35 quid, had everything we had desired. Warm water, a comfortable bed, air conditioning, it ticked all the boxes.
After showering and resting for a few hours, we met for dinner at one of the local cafes, and over tasty and silly cheap chicken, we were each all relieved to find that it was normal for the water to run brown for the first five minutes in the shower. After the pair of us had showered in ours, it looked as if we had emptied half of Sudan into the shower tray. As we ate the chicken, barbequed to perfection and served with bread and beans, a dust storm kicked up from nowhere, and the sky turned dark. In minutes the innocent blue turned angry slate grey, with gold and silver cloud tips looking ominously heavy over the city. I've never seen Han look so happy - it was going to rain - she had been waiting for this moment for nearly three months. Every day I have heard 'when's it going to rain?' Finally it was going to. The dust storm abated as quickly as it started, and the clouds suddenly emptied themselves in a biblical deluge. The neon signs of the dirty high-rise buildings glowed bright against the bruised sky, and the muddy streets turned to rivers before us. Taxis bogged down and pedestrians ran for cover on the sidewalks as lighting scribbled bright chalky streaks across the blackboard clouds. We hid out in the cafe until the rain calmed itself, and then walked the fast flowing streets, enjoying the feeling of rain on our bodies and the smells and sights of a new city.
We all slept like babes, and woke to a fantastic breakfast, of good cheese, sausages, real bread and real coffee. Andrew and Angela left to travel North for some pyramids they had been recommended, but Han and I decided to wait around to get more money, and more lazy times.
There are no ATMs that work with foreign cards in Khartoum, so we had to get money transferred via Western Union. That gave us an excuse to wait another day in the comfort of our hotel, and the next day we were provided with another. Han's insulin had been stored in Donkey's fridge, which had iced up. Insulin is apparently less resistant to cold than heat. Three months of boiling it in our bags hadn't reduced its effectiveness, but two nights of freezing had killed it stone dead. We had a day of looking for insulin in Khartoum, considering the possibility that we might have to curtail our trip and fly home, before finally managing to find a similar insulin to Han's normal in one backstreet pharmacy. Then we had another day, just because we wanted to. I got addicted to Jericho, and we watched far too many cheap films, and far too much American drama for any non-lobotomised person. We eventually managed to leave on our fifth day, empty of excuses, and ready to move on. Khartoum is a great city, but there is very little to stay for. There is little in the way of nightlife, and eating out is restricted. The street food is among the best we have seen, but real restaurants are few and far between. The highlight of Han's week was finding a cafe that did 'real' cake, and a pizzeria that did some of the most delicious pizzas we had ever tried. It did mean a long trip across town, taking our lives in our hands each time.
The streets of Khartoum are not as busy or dangerous as many African roads, but the standard of driving is some of the worst, and the roads themselves are terrible. Rutted mud tracks, broken concrete, open drains, no lights, no signs, no rules, no rights for a little bike with very little might. Riding a bike also leaves you vulnerable to beggars. We began to dread crossing one particular junction, with lights that never seemed to be green. Each time we approached it, we got the same little demons hassling us. The first time, three little girls came up to us, touching and pawing, asking for money. When we refused, they got more insistent, attempting to wrench my hand off of the clutch, or kick me out of gear, one of them started to punch Han in the boob, while her friend pinched her leg. Finally one of them started to spit, before locals chased them off, apologising profusely. In fact each time they hassled us, locals saved us, and could never be more apologetic, always wanting to check that it hadn't soured our opinion of their country.
We waved it all goodbye on that fifth day, and set off for the border.
It took two whole days of riding to reach the Ethiopian border, with very little of note on the road. We stayed in Wad Maddanni for our first night, and Gedaref for the second. While sleeping in Wad Maddanni, we were woken by another tremendous storm, more violent than anything I have ever experienced. In the dark night, the monstrous palm trees bent like gnarled old men under the deluge, the pebble sized raindrops hammered on the window, and the thunder rattled the frames. Lightening lit up the world like a thousand camera flashes every few seconds, throwing the view from our balcony into sharp negative, and burning retinal memories of the garden into our brains. The air was so charged, that every movement beneath our cotton sheet produced static crackles and bright firefly trails of electricity. We fell asleep listening to the storm beating itself out, and woke to a drowned world. At least it meant that day riding was the first for several months where we didn’t continuously choke on dust all day.
Reaching Gedaref, all we had to do was cross the border, and we would be into our tenth country of the trip. We decided to leave the actual crossing until the morning, rather than rush the formalities and end up riding in the dark through a new country. Ethiopia sat waiting one day away. What would it hold? I was born in 1985, the year of Band Aid, I grew up in the 90's, I remember the images from the wars of that decade, and the subsequent hunger. All I know of the country is famine and war, death and destitution, would the country defy my expectations of desolation, disease and destruction? We would find out tomorrow. First we would be receiving another one of our first lessons in the effect of aid and capitalism on third world economies.
The town itself is not much to write home about, a collection of typically ramshackle African huts, intermingled with typically blocky Arab buildings, in the typically Sudanese blend. The dust streets with their open sewer systems had been turned into sticky stinking mud by the previous nights’ storms, and our bike found itself outnumbered and pushed into the gutter time and time again by NGO Landcruisers. The town is famous for its market and its hospitable people, the name of the town is even a reference to the busy souq; ‘Gedaref’ is an anglicised version of the ancient Arabic, meaning (in layman’s terms) ‘if you’ve finished selling, sling your hook.’I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not the paragons of virtue in their emblazoned four by fours ever thought about heeding the ironic moniker. They were the most noticeable feature of the town, with their walled and wired compounds, and their ‘we made the roads so we own them’ philosophy towards driving. Their presence would continue to frustrate us throughout Africa, but at this point it was a novel frustration. We would come to see them as ineffectual, arrogant, misguided and self propagating, but by Gedaref, our biggest bugbear was that they are some of the worst drivers on the roads – always the fastest, always the least considerate and always the last to offer help to anyone. The actual market seemed to us no better nor worse than any other Arab market, only memorable for the collection of truly repulsive characters who made our acquaintance.
The first hotel we were recommended was the ‘Amir,’ which roughly translated, means prince, or is an honorific to address someone in high office, but translated into Gedarefian, it means a large, decrepit and dirty hotel. The manager was busying himself cleaning his nails with a broken drawing pin when I entered the echoing reception, and didn’t see my intrusion as a reason to interrupt his task. ‘Salaam Alaykum,’ I coughed twice, before Hannah came in with her jacket off, and he jumped up so quickly that he lost his drawing pin. Even though we were now in the Christian south, Hannah was still dressing conservatively, and her neckline was perfectly demure, practically up to her chin, but that didn’t dampen his interest. With his attention grabbed, I thought we could get some kind of service, but he still refused to speak to me, preferring instead to speak to Hannah’s chest, which doesn’t speak, or understand much Arabic. His Koran laid open and well thumbed on the desk didn’t have any kind of restraining effect on him, and his terrible manners didn’t even bother to try and hide his unveiled stares. At least with Han in the hotel, we had his undivided patronage, that’s the teamwork we’re perfecting, playing to our individual strengths.
He informed us that the hotel was a shocking $65, and took us all the way through the empty hotel to the top floor to show us the room. $65! That’s $65 for a grubby room, with sheets that had been on the beds since the English left in 1956, a non flushing toilet, and a broken window. I thought that maybe one concession towards justifying the price had been left on the pillow, a pair of little chocolates, like in a Mayfair hotel, but as I looked over, the ‘chocolates’ scuttled away in a flurry of legs and feelers.
All the way back to the reception, I tried to bargain with him, feeling that we had the advantage, as there seemed to be no one else in the hotel, but to no avail. In between slipping on steps and walking into walls (it’s hard to walk in a straight line when you are six foot and trying to walk with your face actually in a five foot lady’s cleavage,) he told me in no uncertain terms that no concessions would be made for foreigners. ‘Why do you want cheaper? Everyone else pays the same price without these complaints. You are American, why not just pay the price?’
That’s when the penny dropped. Nobody else complained because nobody else paid from their own pockets. The rest of the guests passing through Gedaref were all on stipends for their accommodation, the rooms paid for by kind grannies and bleeding hearts back home, pledging their pensions and pay packets after telethons and awareness raising concerts. The drivers of the Landcruisers, dropping in to build roads and wells, and jetting out feeling good after their humanitarian holidays, they all needed somewhere to stay, and why should they haggle over prices when someone else picks up the bill? Who can blame the hotel owner for ramping up the prices and making the most of Sudan’s problems? We were white and Western, therefore exactly the same as the people who were making him rich, so why should we have any discount made for us? Economics in action.
After a few minutes of deliberation, and several more attempts to barter, we gave up and left, thinking we would find somewhere else to stay. The only notable success was the rare encounter of finding an Arab unwilling to barter. We rode through the children playing in the sewerage caked road and into the centre of the bustling market area, where we had been told there were more hotels. The first two were completely empty when we asked for rooms in Arabic, and bargain basement priced, but quickly became full when our passports revealed we were English. The third was in a particularly busy area, full of hawkers and predators. I made to enter the building, leaving Han with the bike, but looked over my shoulder and saw her about to be engulfed by a group of unsavoury looking chancers. Despite the obvious handicaps of being female, and not understanding Sudanese, I thought it best if she went into the relative safety of the hotel, and I stayed with the bike.
I lit a cigarette while simultaneously fending off over-inquisitive hands from our luggage. I greeted several of the closest, but only received wary animal stares in return. For the first time in Sudan, I didn’t feel very welcome, and actually felt that if I did turn a blind eye, we would lose baggage, if not the whole bike. Most of the crowd were young men, and most of them were completely sloshed. ‘Give my money,’ one of them shouted at me from two foot away, close enough to make me back out of his spittle range. I replied in Arabic that I couldn’t, and the crowd looked at me as if I had done something very, very wrong, and very, very rude. Some of them dispersed, seeing that I wasn’t an easy enough target, but the spitting man stayed there, swaying and staring at me. He was truly disgusting to look at, and either completely mad, or completely pissed. He smoked a foul smelling roll up, which had burned down far enough to scorch his lips, which he hadn’t noticed, and which, judging by their burned and chipped state, was something that quite regularly happened. His ragged shorts were held up with a Playstation controller knotted around his waist, and though I recognise that there is no accounting for taste, I thought it an odd choice for a beggar. He wore a dirty waistcoat, open at the chest to reveal a newspaper article stuck to his skin with sellotape, through which some kind of bodily fluid was seeping. His legs also had sores weeping a similar coloured fluid from them. I believe they were Sickle cell sores, and I have no idea whether these were the cause of his awesome hum, or merely contributors, but either way he was an assault on the nostrils.
He asked for a cigarette, more politely now that he was using his own language, and surprised by the switch of manners, I gave him one. Partly because I felt bad for his poor luck in life, and partly because I wanted to know more about him. He also found himself the proud recipient of my back up lighter, which I gave to him partly because I felt bad for his poor luck in life, partly because I wasn’t really sure I wanted to use it after him.
The first question I had to ask was why he was wearing the computer accessory as fashion accessory, to which he gave me a conspiratorial wink, and the wonderfully mental answer, ‘have you seen anyone else wearing one?’ I was forced to admit that I hadn’t, leaving him to conclude the conversation with a proud, ‘exactly,’ in turn leaving me to conclude that he was at least as mad as he looked. The sartorially switched on soak then answered my next question without being asked it. ‘Jarah, biskeen.’ My Sudanese was still lacking, and I didn’t understand until he pointed at the soggy news clipping on his chest. Then I understood, ‘wounded, with a knife.’ He had been stabbed in the chest, yet his dressing was no more than paper and sellotape. He continued to tell me how, but I couldn’t fully understand his slurring and his dialect, the only thing I definitely know is that it revolved around a drunken argument, which I could have probably guessed without asking.
At this point of the conversation Hannah came out, with the bad news that this hotel was ‘full’ too. There was only one option left to us, the $65 Amir, which obviously was where foreigners were expected to stay in the town. We would have to bite the bullet, or try and cross the border before dark, which was swiftly approaching. I had heard bad things about the road South of the border, and didn’t want to tackle potholes, thick mud, potential bandits and moron cows without daylight as my ally. I said goodbye to the unlucky fashionista, and slipped him a couple of pounds as we left. I told him to buy some proper dressings, but I don’t kid myself for a second that is where the money went. Normally I wouldn’t even consider giving money, but his complete insanity and abject poverty touched me.
Back at the Amir the manager didn’t make any more effort to tear his eyes from Hannah’s lady bumps than he had before, but didn’t make us any more concessions than before either. We paid up and retired to our luxury suite. We dumped our baggage, and realised how hungry we were, it was now gone six, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Hannah was tired, and of negligible value to bring out anyway, as she would simply attract more of the wrong kind of attention than necessary. The meagre collection of shops down to the market were lacking severely in foodstuffs, so I walked down to the market again.
The sun had fully disappeared by this time, and just negotiating the streets in the pitch black lightless night was difficult enough, the open manholes and rubbish ditches only added to the fun and games. How many people must fall into holes at night and end up buried to their necks in shit and rubbish in African cities? Maybe it is just dumb Westerners who struggle? The ghostly white robes gliding up and down the street didn’t seem to have a problem. It was simply life as normal for the jet black faces going about their night time business unseen in the night, invisible beneath their white skull caps floating disembodied above their robes. The market bustled in the relative cool of the night time air, hawkers trading, maqhas full to bursting with elderly smokers sipping at the sickly sweet brews, illegal bars topping up the daytime drunks, feral dogs and cats chasing rats in the gutters, chased themselves by equally as feral children. The scene couldn’t have changed much in a thousand years, still wrapped in the same smells, the shisha smoke, the acrid burnt coffee, the stenches of vomit, of impromptu streetside piss stops and unwashed bodies, the all pervading dry tang of dust and mud and heat in the air. The same sounds: the musical muezzins, the steady market patter of born barterers, the mournful howling of lonely dogs and the chatter of children. The constant buzz of two stroke scooters and the ringing of mobiles glowing in dark corners, the only aural anomalies to bring the listener back to the year 2009.
I lingered and soaked up the atmosphere before deciding to buy some bread and oranges. Purchases complete, fat oranges for a song, and fresh baked bread for pennies, I walked back to the hotel. On the journey back, I noticed a huddle of small stalls that had been invisible from the opposite direction, and decided to check out what they offered. The three stalls were all centred around one huge pan, so caked in soot and grease it was probably twice the size it once was, over the top of a coal fired burner. Each stall took it in turns to cook their produce, all of which was completely alien to me. Questions didn’t get me very far either, as none of the traders spoke much Arabic, and I spoke less of whatever one of the 500 odd languages present in Sudan they were speaking. I came to the conclusion that one was selling ‘meat,’ the second was selling ‘meat,’ and the third was selling ‘chicken.’ Not being able to ascertain exactly what ‘meat’ was, I plumped for a bag of chicken, which came looking like popcorn chicken, hot and fried in ancient oil, with a coating of sticky breadcrumbs. That would be nice surprise for Hannah, still sleeping at the hotel.
The manager didn’t look up from his Koran as I walked into the hotel, after all, I’m lacking in the breast department. I woke Hannah, and we sat down for our supper. I took my surprise out of the paper bag, and laid it on the bed like a conquering hero bringing his spoils back for his maiden. Her face animated from its sleepy state and she popped one into her mouth. And then spat it straight back out.
Technically, I hadn’t been led astray, my purchase was from a chicken. I tried to bite into one, and had the same response as Hannah. What looked like little juicy popcorn nuggets of flesh, were in fact, the knobs of gristle from the end of the leg. They were practically inedible, I tried to carry on, as if it was exactly what I had meant to buy, but failed, it was just too unappealing to chew on the gristle and sinew; they went straight into the bin. I would have given them away, but didn’t feel obliged to show the manager any charity, and we were still the sole guests as far as we were aware.
We woke the following morning after a night of surprisingly good sleep, and I immediately regretted leaving the chicken in the bin. It had filled the whole room with a gagging stench, a sweet, sickly, almost rotting flesh stink. I think we should be thankful we didn’t eat more, or we could have been forced to sit several days more in the overpriced hovel. We packed and left, on to Ethiopia.
|
helps answer the question - Why Go? Inspirational stories by veteran travellers Greg Frazier (5 times RTW), Peter and Kay Forwood (193 countries), Tiffany Coates (Mongolia Mayhem) and Rene Cormier (University of Gravel Roads).
Get Ready! covers planning, paperwork, medical and many other topics! "Inspirational and Awesome!" See the trailer here!
What stuff do I need - riding gear, clothing, camping gear, first aid kit, tires, maps and GPS? What don't I need? How do I pack it all in? Lots of opinions from over 150 travellers!
break down language barriers, overcome culture shock, ship the bike and deal with breakdowns and emergencies."Just makes me want to pack up and go!" See the trailer here!
Grant demystifies the black art of Tire Changing and Repair to help you STAY on the road! "Very informative and practical." See the trailer here!
Ladies on the Loose! For the first time ever, a motorcycle travel DVD made for women, by women! These intrepid women share their tips to help you plan your own motorcycle adventure. They also answer the women-only questions, and entertain you with amazing tales from the road! Presented by Lois Pryce, veteran solo traveller through South America and Africa and author of 'Lois on the Loose', and 'Red Tape and White Knuckles.'
Cotton or synth sweat-wicking t-shirts with the cool Horizons Unlimited graphic on the front and a snappy slogan (changing every year) on the back.
Show your route on your panniers. Great conversation starter when you meet people on the road!
Motorcycle and travel books to inspire and inform you!
The definitive guide to planning your motorcycle adventure! This insanely ambitious 2-year project has produced an informative and entertaining 5-part, 18 hour video series. "The ultimate round the world rider's how-to!" MCN UK.
Threaded Mode
