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.