To Wadi Halfa…

Early morning in the Nubian Desert...

I left Dongola at 6.45 am, and headed north for Wadi Halfa, 400 odd kilometres away. I was glad to be away so early, and for the first hour I was able to ride with my visor open, as the sun had not yet brought its energy sapping heat to bear down on the bleak landscape I was riding through…

"Hey there, the sun is in my eyes..., lets get moving...!"

The new tarred road was a pleasure to ride on, and very little traffic was out on the road. In fact, I saw perhaps a dozen vehicles on the entire trip up to Lake Nasser, where Wadi Halfa sits baking on its eastern shores.

For the most part the road followed the course of the Nile, past Argo and Karman Azul, and then cut across the desert to rejoin the river at Delgo, where I made the first of my planned stops for water and a quick breakfast of biscuits… I had earlier decided to break the trip into three equal portions, by stopping at the 135 km, 270 km and 400 km marks. My first stop was in the shade of a little mound through which the road had been blasted…

From there the road followed the original gravel tracks on the Garmin all the way to Abri, the biggest settlement between Dongola and Wadi Halfa. There are many tiny villages all along the banks of the Nile, but the tar road bypasses all of them.

Second water stop at the 765 km marker...

At the 270 km mark, I stopped again, but this time there was no shade, so I did not hang around too long, drinking my second bottle of water and getting back in the saddle after only a few minutes.

I had stopped at the 765km marker post, which advises travelers how far from Khartoum they have come. These markers can be found on every tarred road, and can be confusing if you do not understand their meaning. They have no bearing on where you are going, or the last major town you have come from… They only signify the distance from the capital city…

The area in this part of northern Sudan is one of broken hills that look like basalt… The black rocky outcrops, whose bases are covered by the golden sands of the Greater Libyan Desert, stand baking in the sun… The only signs of life are closer to the river, where doves and cattle egrets seem to abound… Out near the road, there is only a foreboding silence, and the lonely, endless wasteland of sand and rock…

Winding through sun blasted basalt rock...

I had plugged U2 into my I-pod, and listened to them all the way to Wadi Halfa, which took the edge off this long, hot ride…

The Big Fella gets four litres, while I have to make do with one...

Exactly 100 kms from my last stop, I ran out of fuel… I had been watching my consumption with an eagle eye, because I knew that I might not make it to Halfa on one tank, and had been riding conservatively all the way from Dongola, hardly ever exceeding 110 km/h…

I emptied the four litres I was carrying into the tank, and rode the last 30 km just as carefully as I had the previous 380 km… I think the fuel in Dongola had been “cut”, as I should have made it to Wadi Halfa….just…!

"With these two bottles, I thee do save..."

The road runs close to the Nile, where it peeps out from behind a village from time to time...

I pretended not to see the police control point on entering the traffic circle just outside town, and cruised through it, ignoring the waving arms of two policemen… I skirted the mud brick houses by taking the road that loops around the town, and entering it from its eastern edge… I aimed for the tallest building I could see, assuming that it would be near the centre of town. Wadi Halfa is a small place, and this was borne out by the fact that as I came to a halt in the main street, a man came running over to me with a cell phone in his outstretched hand…

Entrance to Wadi Halfa... Not a cheerful place...

“Talk here, talk here…” he said breathlessly…

“Can you take a message, old son; I’m trying to find a hotel…”

My request was ignored, and while I was pulling in clutch and changing into neutral, the guy shoved the phone up against my left ear…

“Mr. Ronnie, Mr. Ronnie…” a voice shouted, “It is Mazaar… My brother in Khartoum said I must assist you…!”

“I see… And where are you now…?”

“I am looking at you from the end of the tar road… Please come to me…”

I rode a short distance up the road, turned off down a sandy stretch of open land and there waving frantically was “Mazaar”…

“Salaam Aleikum..! Welcome to Wadi Halfa…” he greeted me…

“How did you know I was here..? I asked…

“I know everything that happens in Wadi Halfa!” was his reply…

Bet he didn’t know where they kept the “Rum and Raisin Ice Cream” though… I made a mental note to ask him later, but for the moment, I just wanted to get into some shade, and drink something cold…

He ushered me into the entrance of a little “hole in the wall” place where I removed my jacket and helmet, and sucked on my last bottle of water, while he began describing what I would need to do to get sorted for the ferry leaving on Wednesday…

“Hang on a minute… Let me first get checked into a hotel, have a shower, and then we can go through all the details later…” I said…

The little cactus in the flower pot was a nice touch...

“But you are in the hotel… This Hotel Defintood… You are welcome…!”

“I see…” But I didn’t actually… “Can I see the rooms…?” I asked…

“Surely… Follow me…”

He led me into a courtyard where metal doors on either side led to rooms that held two metal cots each, and…nothing else… Plaster was falling off the wall to expose the mud bricks it had hidden for decades, the cement floor looked like it had last been swept a few weeks back. The mattresses could best be described as “decorative” as they were barely an inch thick…

Not what I had become accustomed to...

“Is this it?” I asked a little apprehensively…. “And how much will you be paying me to stay here…?” I asked…

My question was ignored, as he pointed to the ceiling and proudly said, “It also has a fan…”

“Yippee-a-aye!!” I shouted, “A fan..!!! So this room is like a big convection oven, then…!! Lovely…!! Just what I was hoping for…!! Is there a shower somewhere here…? And perhaps a toilet, too…?”

But I had internet, AND a fan...

He led me down a darkened corridor on the other side of the courtyard, to an outside area where four tiny shower cubicles stood…

“And we have running water…!” he said…

“Which is a good thing,” I replied, “otherwise I would be having an “air shower”…!”

The price for the room was SDP 7.00 (R 25.00) for the bed, and if I wanted the whole room, I would have to pay for the other bed as well… Which I thought was a little unfair, and told him so…

“Ok, Ok… You pay for one bed, tonight, and two beds tomorrow, because we will get full before the ferry arrives… Otherwise you must share with another person…”

“Agreed!! But only if that other person is a Super Model who took a wrong turn leaving Cairo…”

This was as close as I was going to come to the toilets behind that far wall...

Mazaar then asked for my passport and Carnet, filled in the form, tore out the Sudanese bit and handed it back to me…

“Wait a minute…! The customs officials have to do that, and I need their stamp on the form…” I told him…

“Never mind, we will do that tomorrow… I am doing this for many years now, and I fill the forms for them…”

“What about the bike… I can’t leave it out there,” I said pointing out into the desert…

“No problem, you must bring it inside the hotel…” He opened the double doors, and I rode the bike into the “reception” and parked it in a corner…

“Do not leave anything lying loose on the bike…” he then said, “There are Egyptians here…”

“And Sudanese…!!” I reminded him…

“Sudanese not steal!” he said defensively, “It is the Egyptians…!!”

I had heard that there was no love lost between the locals and their northern cousins, who still saw Sudan as a place from “whence cometh the slaves”… Many Sudanese had told me that the Egyptians were too lazy to have built the Pyramids at Giza, and that Nubians (today’s Sudanese) had built the pyramids  for them…

“I think they should change the name of this place,” I informed him, “From Wadi Halfa to Wadi-the-hell-am-I-doing-here…!”

“There are worse places in Sudan!” he retorted…

“Heavens to Betsy…! You’re kidding, right…!”

“No, no… Not kidding… Much worse…!”

I could feel a migraine developing, and wasn’t sure if I was dehydrated, or if it was just the heat, or maybe it was the sight of where I would be spending the next two days, that was bringing it on… Either way, I decided to go with the flow, and let Mazaar handle all the customs formalities for me…

I asked about an internet connection, and he told me that he would get me connected directly from my phone!! Clever chap this Mazaar!! He downloaded a program off his own laptop onto mine, then punched in a few codes, connected my phone to the laptop, and minutes later, I was on-line!! What a bonus!! I spent the afternoon downloading a few posts I had written over the last few days, bringing my website up to date, and then went off for a shower… I avoided the toilets, as I could smell them from my room which was almost 30 metres away… A bottle would have to do, while I figured out a more hygienic way to commune with nature…

The Big Fella retires to a corner in the reception, to ponder the ferry trip ahead...

Later, as I took a walk down the road to see the “sights” as it were, I noticed the Landrover of my French friends parked near an outdoor restaurant. I pulled up a chair and ordered half a chicken and rice, and for once the chicken was cooked to perfection… Further south, in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, the chefs had made certain that the chicken would never come back to life, by boiling it until it had the consistency of a slip-slop… We sat discussing the various documentary requirements that the Customs and Immigration guys needed, and agreed to meet again tomorrow night to compare notes of how our separate “fixers” had done…

I strolled back to my hovel…er, I mean my hotel… at 9.00pm, where “the streets have no name” (too much U2 today…!!) and will never have street lights either… Despite this, I was completely at ease, responding to half a dozen “Salaam’s” that issued forth from the darkened doorways I passed… I found the courtyard in front of my room filled with beds that had been dragged out from their rooms… Men were stretched out on them, sipping tea from the small glasses which it is traditionally served in…

“Don’t get up,” I said loudly, “It’s only me…!! Sorry I’m late, busy day at the office… Have I missed anything…?”

No response at all, except for half a dozen blank stares…

No sense of humour, these Sudanese…!!

I lay down on my cot, feeling the sweat trickle down my temple and into my ear… In minutes I was soaking wet…

“You can turn off the heat now…!” I shouted to no one in particular… Silence from the courtyard… Then a muttering in Arabic, which loosely translated, I judged to mean,

“The Gowajah has gone mad…!! Too much sun on that white skin…!! If he’s dead in the morning, Abdoulah gets the bike, and Ishmael gets the laptop…!! Mohammed can have that fancy jacket he is wearing to use as a saddle on his donkey…!!”

I fell asleep chuckling to myself, and dreamt that I was swimming though a bowl of soup…

No, I am not winking at a Bedouin girl, its the sun, damnit...

© GBWT 2010