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.