As I sit in an Internet "cafe" in Gedaref, the last decent sized town in Sudan before Ethiopia, I begin to hear loud bass pumping through the wall. I continue to check my e-mails, facebook and what happened in the Six Nations at the weekend rugby results. But something is definitely going on. The clunky internet access finally shows me the end of an interview with Brian O'Driscoll and this allows me to let my curiosity get the better of me. So I pop out for a yoghurt. A crowd has gathered on the corner of the street, and in the background there is definitely something on fire.
On closer inspection, the crowd is surrounding three singers who are all wearing Omar al-Bashir t-shirts while some other musicians are playing in the background a type of music that I can't say I've ever heard before. There is a large video screen above the singers also displaying Mr Al-Bashir waving his arms and speaking to various people. There are some men directly in front of the singers in turbans and Jalabiyas waving long sticks over their heads. Flames are now bellowing out of some metal thing in the background. I think a cook has lost control of his oven, but for the interests of story telling I am keeping the possibility of pre-riot arson open. I head back into the internet cafe, no longer worrying about how to start this blog posting.
It's been a crappy couple of days. When we left Khartoum on Saturday afternoon, the weather was repulsively hot. Duncan wasn't convinced that his thermometer's reading of 52 degrees was accurate... The salt crystals forming on his lycra suggested otherwise. I had earlier jammed ice cubes into my drinking bottles, but within half an hour the water inside them was hot. My body must be working some serious overtime to keep me at a reasonable temperature.
To make matters worse, while cycling last night to avoid the heat, one of Linsey's front pannier racks decided to give way, ripping through 4 spokes and sending her bike flying - fortunately the road was quiet... We flagged the first passing truck which took us to a town down the road. The wheel was badly damaged, and when we took the rack to a joiner the next day he simply said "this... is finished." We were aggressively charged money by a man who seemed to be doing us a favour and had another man cause a puncture by adjusting the tyre valve for no reason. And this heat just does not subside.
Things in the east of Sudan have not quite seemed the same as the other parts that we've passed through. One man who helped us find a bus to take us to Gedaref where we could fix the bike properly did not mention the full cost of taking all our stuff. "I'm telling you this is the price"... "No-one understands why you come here"... "People want to get out of Sudan". Despite all the positive experiences of the last 3 weeks, right now I don't blame them. The heat would appear to be getting to everything and everyone.
A decent hotel and shower this evening have made things better and the music has actually cheered me up a bit, even if it has been sponsored by the world's first ICC-indicted world leader. Now I just need to get back to my room...
Next stop Ethiopia!
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Friday, 12 March 2010
Khartoum Characters
After 13 days’ cycling, we’ve spent the last few nights in the spare room of an apartment sharing with 4 Eritrean girls who have made their home here. They have an amazing story – two of the sisters living here spent 9 days and nights walking from Asmara to Khartoum. I asked what they did for water and one of them made a scraping motion in the same way that a child might when digging a pit on the beach. “It’s in the ground” she said.
People may think that I’m crazy for even attempting to cycle down to Cape Town, but it doesn’t even compare to what so many people on this continent have to do just to live a decent life. They see no heroism in this – it’s merely a case of doing what needs to be done to survive. There are probably hundreds of thousands of cases similar to this in Khartoum alone, in a country which is said to be almost as complex as Africa itself...
The heat here is extraordinary – like when you put your face too near an oven door when you open it. 20 hours a day. It never goes above 49 degrees here – the law states that people don’t have to go to work if it goes above 50. I have been told several times that actually the temperature goes above this on a regular basis. According to Duncan’s thermometer on our way into town last Sunday, it was 51 ̊C in the open air.
Given Sudan’s prevalence in the media for some unsavoury reasons, people might be excused for thinking that Khartoum might not be a pleasant place. I have in fact heard it described as the safest capital city in Africa – on the evidence on show, I think that this is quite possible. It is remarkably wealthy in some areas with huge Dubai–style hotels along the side of the Nile. Despite the heat, our stay here has been a hugely regenerative experience (bank account excepted) after 13 days’ cycling through the north of the country, mostly through wasteland barely worthy of being described as desert.
Since arriving we have gratefully experienced the hospitality of British embassy staff and been shown the town by our original hosts, who run perhaps Khartoum’s premier nutritional health centre, which is attempting to tackle the increasing problem of obesity in the city. Something I definitely did not expect to see! We will however be back on our saddles heading for Addis Ababa at the crack of dawn tomorrow (Saturday 13th March) with stories of stone-throwing kids giving us some cause for concern.
I know however that it is unlikely to be as difficult an experience as the one that our current hosts went through. One of the girls that walked all those miles through the desert has just had an application to move to Australia with her fiancé accepted – I truly hope that it will give her the opportunities that she deserves.
People may think that I’m crazy for even attempting to cycle down to Cape Town, but it doesn’t even compare to what so many people on this continent have to do just to live a decent life. They see no heroism in this – it’s merely a case of doing what needs to be done to survive. There are probably hundreds of thousands of cases similar to this in Khartoum alone, in a country which is said to be almost as complex as Africa itself...
The heat here is extraordinary – like when you put your face too near an oven door when you open it. 20 hours a day. It never goes above 49 degrees here – the law states that people don’t have to go to work if it goes above 50. I have been told several times that actually the temperature goes above this on a regular basis. According to Duncan’s thermometer on our way into town last Sunday, it was 51 ̊C in the open air.
Given Sudan’s prevalence in the media for some unsavoury reasons, people might be excused for thinking that Khartoum might not be a pleasant place. I have in fact heard it described as the safest capital city in Africa – on the evidence on show, I think that this is quite possible. It is remarkably wealthy in some areas with huge Dubai–style hotels along the side of the Nile. Despite the heat, our stay here has been a hugely regenerative experience (bank account excepted) after 13 days’ cycling through the north of the country, mostly through wasteland barely worthy of being described as desert.
Since arriving we have gratefully experienced the hospitality of British embassy staff and been shown the town by our original hosts, who run perhaps Khartoum’s premier nutritional health centre, which is attempting to tackle the increasing problem of obesity in the city. Something I definitely did not expect to see! We will however be back on our saddles heading for Addis Ababa at the crack of dawn tomorrow (Saturday 13th March) with stories of stone-throwing kids giving us some cause for concern.
I know however that it is unlikely to be as difficult an experience as the one that our current hosts went through. One of the girls that walked all those miles through the desert has just had an application to move to Australia with her fiancé accepted – I truly hope that it will give her the opportunities that she deserves.
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Aswan Ferry
I can't say I was surprised by the state of the ferry that took us down the Nile from Aswan to Wadi Halfa - we went through the terminal via a process that seemed to have been made up as we went along and eventually made our way onto a vessel full of people pushing, shoving, lying down in every direction, shouting and stacking up huge boxes of all sorts of products being shipped into Sudan from Epypt.
There were about 15 "westerners" on the ship, including the Swiss equivalent of Michael Palin (though luckily not from the Swiss equivalent of Monty Python), most of whom found space on the top deck in among the hundreds of people who had fought to get a bit of space somewhere.
Parts of the boat were hugely crowded and the toilets on board would have to be ranked somewhere in the bottom three that I've seen since I started the journey (that means apocalyptically bad) but apart from that, the 20 hour journey was pretty smooth, with us all sleeping out on the deck in a huge raft of sprawled bodies.
When we arrived at Wadi Halfa, a small dust-ball of a town with rooms costing about $3 for the night, we went through the most long and drawn out visa registration I have ever come across, taking various bits of paper from one office to another over the course of about 2 hours. But it still felt good to be in Sudan and making good progress on our journey.
There were about 15 "westerners" on the ship, including the Swiss equivalent of Michael Palin (though luckily not from the Swiss equivalent of Monty Python), most of whom found space on the top deck in among the hundreds of people who had fought to get a bit of space somewhere.
Parts of the boat were hugely crowded and the toilets on board would have to be ranked somewhere in the bottom three that I've seen since I started the journey (that means apocalyptically bad) but apart from that, the 20 hour journey was pretty smooth, with us all sleeping out on the deck in a huge raft of sprawled bodies.
When we arrived at Wadi Halfa, a small dust-ball of a town with rooms costing about $3 for the night, we went through the most long and drawn out visa registration I have ever come across, taking various bits of paper from one office to another over the course of about 2 hours. But it still felt good to be in Sudan and making good progress on our journey.
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