Crossing the Sahara

I’m in Khartoum sitting on the bank of the river Nile and feeling really pleased to be here. When I planned the trip, Khartoum was one of those places that I set as a mile stone: if I’d made it this far I would have crossed the Sahara Desert on my motorbike. It’s not a giant step for mankind but for me this is quite an achievement. This is a stretch of land I can be proud of having traversed; for the rest of my life. I hope that one day if I have grandchildren I will tell them the story of how I followed the Nile and crossed the Sahara before there were tar roads, hotels and petrol stations in the desert…

Time has gone really quickly and we haven’t had a single rest day in the last two weeks. Today we have to check the vehicles and stock up on various supplies and register yet again at the “Aliens Control Office”. (Yep, straight out of Men in Black and just as bizarre.) Our party now includes a Landrover and two Swedes. What a lucky girl I am to be travelling with three blond, blue eyed boys!

13 October: Egypt – Luxor to Aswan in convoy

After having spent a few relatively relaxing days in Luxor we woke up early to join the 7am convoy to Aswan. A trip to Egypt would not be complete without having joined at least one convoy!

I quite enjoyed the experience. We did get to ride really far too fast and at times it was a bit hairy. I don’t know why it amused me as much as it did, but it did. There were two big buses and maybe eight minibuses of sorts and us: two bikes. There was a police car at the front and one at the back. Come 7 there was a big hoot and we were off Paris-Dakar style. It’s a mad rally race for 150 something kilometres to Aswan in which the buses all did whatever they could to over take each other. Some were faster on the straight so would whiz past, others were nippier on the rough bits, they were off, only to be overtake later… It was ridiculous. Mostly I tried to stay out of the way but every now and then I could pass simply because the buses couldn’t fit through a small gap in the traffic, knowing full well they would then be busting their guts to overtake me on the open road. Don’t know why! But it was fun. Anyway, wedged between police cars that hooted and chivvied us on if we slowed down a fraction, we were in Aswan before we knew it.

We went straight to the ferry office to confirm our bookings. This quite obviously meant trying to understand some incredibly complicated regulations. Actually, in my travels I had already learnt that bureaucracy makes no sense and there is no point in trying to understand the process – just understand the instructions and do as you are told. As long as we had all the relevant pieces of paper ready – that was all that mattered.

While we were sorting out our tickets we met the other “European” contingencies who were travelling with 4x4 vehicles. The ferry that left the week before, the one we were initially planning to take, had four bikes on it but no overland vehicles. I was REALLY hoping that there would be vehicles going with us. Even more so, I was hoping that they would be REALLY nice people and very kind and agree to carry some of my luggage.

At first I met Harry and JB who were in a Landrover with another guy and a girl. My gut feel was that these were nice enough people but possibly a bit on the young side. Actually, I can’t put my finger on it but I realised that we wouldn’t travel together easily. I guessed that they were all freshly graduated from university an on a bit of an adventure back to their home which is Kenya. We would look out for each other but I can’t deny being pleased that they would be on the same road but disappointed that we wouldn’t be riding together.

Shortly afterwards two lanky Scandinavian chaps walked into the office. They were stereotypical Swedes with their blue eyes, blond hair and very neat clothes and spotless Landrover. We didn’t chat much when we first met but from the first moment I quite liked these guys. They had an easy-going feel about them. I could tell that they were as happy to meet us as we were to have met them. So that is how we came to be travelling with Richard and Martin who are brothers taking a nice new Landrover from Sweden to South Africa.

It’s one of those things I love about travel: meeting people. I think it is possibly the thing I like most about travel. People. Both in the countries that you visit as well as those people you pick up along the way.

The rest of our time in Aswan was stocking up with food and any other obscure bits we felt we really needed. I don’t have anything nice to say about Aswan although it’s meant to be one of the nicest Nile towns in Egypt. We didn’t have time to do touristy stuff and the constant haggling in the market does wear one’s patience a bit thin.

16 October: Sudan – Ferry to Wadi Halfa, Dongola and Khartoum

Monday morning we arrived at the port with plenty time to spare. We were way earlier than we needed to be but we preferred to be hanging about rather than rushing. Our little team jelled really well from the very beginning. Not only did we need each other but the Swedish brothers were really decent, caring and funny.

The ferry sets sail on Monday and any time on Monday is acceptable! Our bikes and the cars had to be loaded onto a barge that would arrive in Wadi Halfa a day later. All the guys helped to heave the bikes onto the ferry and we tied them down as best we could. It was just horrible peering over the side of the passenger ferry and seeing my blue baby (an essential ingredient for my travels) dwarfed by the mountain of boxes and sacks that seemed to have been tossed willy-nilly onto the barge. I looked at Martin who was probably having the same thoughts as he watched even more refrigerators being pilled up around his Landrover. “Well,” he said, “Lets see if they get there.”

We travelled second class which meant we could find ourselves a space on the deck. Harry and his bunch and our bunch stuck together. There were eight of us and it was nice having company for a change. We were instructed to colonise an area near the captain’s office. This meant that we got to meet the captain too who was a skinny man wearing utterly Arab clothing and didn’t look anything like a captain to me. However, he clearly was the captain as he got to shout at every one and shouted a lot. We all sat mesmerised by his ranting. Some other passengers had sat in the wrong place which set the captain off shouting and smacking the walls and railings. I could only pick out the word “Allah!!” used countless times as he slapped the deck, the door, the wall and fortunately stopped short of slapping the passenger. A mere five minutes later he came over and enjoyed having photos taken with us. The whole shouting episode didn’t seem to have stressed him out at all. Had that been me, I would have had to take a nap afterwards.

By the end of the ferry ride we all knew each other a little bit better. Chloe was pretty much the only woman company I’d had so far on the trip and there seemed to be so little we had in common. She was a sweet bubbly girl with wide innocent eyes (that I don’t doubt are far from innocent) and a dimpled smile that appears constantly with almost no provocation. I found myself quite intrigued by her blithe, ditty femininity and then thought, “Oh my God, I’m becoming a man.” I’d never before really cared that I was a tomboy but this trip was making me miss the little things about being a girl.

I’d also been thinking about the road from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum. I’d heard from many travellers that there is no tar between Wadi and Dongola. From Dongola there would be some road. Well. Roads would be a bit dubious all the way to Nairobi. I had a lot of time on the ferry to really stew over this. Stew, brood and mull it over a lot. I had time to really wonder what the heck I was doing there. I still had bruises from my lessons in the White Desert and this was for real. I had to dig my heals in and remind myself that THIS WAS THE DREAM. I wasn’t going to be a wimp. I decided that I would do the whole nine hundred kilometres on my bike if it killed me. It didn’t matter how long it took or how I did it. I would have to rely on myself being really stubborn to get myself through.

As if the ferry ride wasn’t long enough, we then had to wait the best part of a day to be allowed out of the port. The barge finally arrived midday the next day. By the end of day we had the bikes cleared through customs. It was only the following day by noon that we finally had permission to travel. Bloody hell! I had all that extra time to turn those sand roads into monsters that were more terrifying than any nightmare I had ever had.

I was finally in the thick of it. The toughest bit of road was right there ahead of me. Fortunately, I could only ever see as far as the horizon and so I took on each bit of dusty, sandy, rutted road as it came my way. The guys all said the desert looked like a lunar landscape and I will just have to believe them. I was too busy looking at the road to take much of the landscape in. We did stop from time to time and then it is impossible to not be overwhelmed by the beauty and tranquillity of the desert. By the evening we were literally eighty kilometres away from the nearest civilization and it was brilliant. I felt really great when I stopped. Great that I’d stayed on my bike all day and we were all in one piece and vehicles still going. I was also utterly exhausted.

We took four days to cross 400km, reaching Dongola by following the Nile using maps and GPS. The road is not a permanent road and although we all felt really confident and calm, we were aware that it would be really easy to get lost and with the daily temperature reaching 45 degrees Celsius, getting things wrong would have fairly serious consequences. From time to time Harry and his crew caught up with us and then dashed off again in a cloud of dust. We only briefly stopped in the villages to get cool drinks and bread but slept out in the desert. It was a really magic part of the trip. Every evening we sat around a little camp table, Paul cooked dinner and we made jokes and laughed. We were in bed by eight and then woke up again before sunrise so that we could do the bulk of our miles in the cool morning air.

By the time we reached Dongola we were all exhausted and the bikes in particular had taken a beating. My advice to any other biker girls who plan on doing this trip is start doing press ups now! The ruts were as deep as 30cm and sandy too this means strong arms are required. I felt like I was doing thousands of push ups for hours on end. The bouncing was so violent that it felt as if the flesh was being shaken off my bones. Girls, get a seriously supportive sports bra.


When we reached Dongla we stayed in a hotel and had our first shower since leaving Aswan. The next morning I had my first puncture and later in the day, a second one. This was really frustrating as so far, we believed the road to be tar so it could take two days to reach Khartoum but having lost time, it would take three. The tar road seemed to be in short stretches followed by road works and we were back onto the same rutted sand roads. Clearly the road was being built and will in the future be an excellent new road… All the same, it was disappointing to whiz along for 20km and then back into dirt at 30 miles per hour for another 50km. Our hopes would raise a bit as we reached more tar but all the tar stretches were just a tease.

The most frustrating sand was what I believe is called “bull dust”. This is really soft powdery sand that is often really hard to see. The front wheel just plunged down into a puff of dust and the steering swung violently. Miraculously I only fell off once in this dust. Probably because Paul went first and so I managed to avoid hitting the worst patches at speed.

About as frustrating as bull dust is all the bureaucratic bull shit. We have to register in towns but are free to sleep wild without any hassle. It is always a run around requiring copies of everything and signatures of people who are not there. Ball ache.

While the people who make the rules and enforce them do our heads in, the Sudanese people we have met so far have been really hospitable, generous, helpful and polite. As aliens we are a bit of a novelty but mostly treated really well.

And a week later, here I am in Khartoum and everything is shut, celebrating the end of Ramadan! I apologise for this being a short blog. So much more has happened and we have seen so much and met people and had an extraordinary time. The problem is that we need to leave tomorrow to reach the border of Ethiopia before our visas expire and the bikes need some work before they get battered all the way to Addis. In any case, I think I might write a book at the end of the trip so I have to keep some stories for later.