I’ve had an odd week since leaving Khartoum.
I turned right going out of the city toward Wadi Halfa to take what I thought was the shorter of two routes to that port city on the Nile. I went about 900 km to Abu Hamed only to learn that the last 300 km to Wadi Halfa was desert sand and dirt and even the locals don’t go without at least 2 four wheeled vehicles. I was alone on my one wheel drive bike and had already experienced the effects of heat exhaustion and dehydration – fainted in parking lot in Khartoum. So, I turned around and retraced my path thru the 140 degree Fahrenheit desert on good tarmac to Atbara. Battery died! No new batteries to be had for weeks of the same capacity. So, rigged up the largest (less than half) scooter battery I could find and pulled the fuses so my headlights are off and it works – if I don’t start the engine very often! Was invited to school teaching English and talked to two classes of mostly adults with questions about America and what do I think about Africa and about Sudan.
Very nice and helpful people at the Abaraa Hotel – with AC! In Atbara.
Left for Dongola only 500 km west and north thru the desert again. Made it but now fully dehydrated again and feeling faint. Stayed at Lord Hotel – no AC and fainted in middle of night and banged my head on concrete floor. Wasn’t sure I’d live to tell about it. But, I did and moved to another hotel with AC. I’m drinking water and tea like crazy and spending the hottest part of the day in my nice cool room – feeling better.
Having headed up the wrong road from Khartoum, I missed the boat (once a week) to Aswan, Egypt from Wadi Halfa. So, I stayed in Donglola for a few days before heading up the last 400 km on Monday next. I met some really very nice people here. The Nubian culture is still widely practiced here – relaxed, friendly, helpful especially to strangers. The world should take a lesson from Dongola.
Besides my new friend and helpmate, Abdul, I met at a tea shop his friend Isa. Isa is a Korean orphaned as a child and grew up in Korean orphanage and “never got picked”. I am going to “adopt” him if he’s willing. Sweet man who has moved here to start a tourist business with his Korean family – wife, Eman, and three terrific boys. The boys went to American School in England and all sound like Americans, but helpful at home and polite to visitors. I’m hoping for 3 more grandchildren!
I will leave here in two days – I’ll need some luck to keep the bike running until I get to Cairo where I can get it fixed up like almost new.
Update from Khartoum:
Still alive and heading northward.
We went from Tanzania into Rwanda and to the capital, Kigali with only a temporary hold up at the Rwandan border: Americans don’t need a visa to enter, but Canadians do. Pat and Chris didn’t have a visa. The guy was making a point of lecturing them for not being prepared: “Go back to Tanzania and get a visa from the Rwanda Embassy or somewhere that the internet works and go online and get one – in 30 days.” After some pleading, he relented and allowed that he could issue something that would work and we all got thru with only an hour delay.
Kigali is a very large city that has lots of hills and valleys and lots of foreign Aid and NGO organizations. It is the cleanest city in Africa (that I’ve seen). Every Saturday morning vehicles (except police or medical – or foreigners – who don’t know better ) are not allowed to move on the streets from 8am to 1pm. Everyone (pretty much) puts on some work clothes and goes out on the street and cleans things up. No litter, no dirt in the concrete ditches, no long grass growing along the sides of the roads for about 10 feet back. People seem to enjoy the communal work and the product of a clean and tidy city.
In Rwanda it is against the law to ask someone if he/she is Tutsi or Hutu: “We are all Rwandans” is the slogan of the day. It turns out that there were tribes with those names a 100 years ago, but people weren’t “religious” about ethnic purity. Intermarriage between the tribes was common and it was not an issue.
The Belgian colonialists here decided in about 1904 that everyone who had 10 cows would be classified as a Hutu and those with less would be Tutsi. Then they tacitly endorsed the idea among the Hutu that they were actually an ethnically superior group and should feel themselves “better than Tutsis”. The same kind of propaganda that the German’s used for Jews went on here by the Hutu government for many years before the mass killings began in earnest (there were massacres every year or two since the 1980s).
It would have taken only 5,000 troops for the French General who commanded the small UN contingent on the ground at the time – he asked for 5,000 and was told to do nothing and come home. He disobeyed orders and saved some people, but later had an emotional breakdown.
It isn’t at all clear why the UN decided to do nothing – and we did too and the rest of the world did nothing in the face of clear evidence of slaughter….
Not an up day.
There is a very real effort among the people and government to move forward from that recent terrible history. We went to the Genocide Memorial and saw the mass graves and the pictorial history of the country including what led up to and thru the atrocities. It is a touchy subject. I asked a question about what’s the difference in a restaurant and was told not to ask that in public; wait until we are back home.
We enjoyed our stay in Rwanda, except for the sobering 3 or 4 hours at the Genocide Memorial.
On to Uganda and the very big, dirty, crowded to the maximum with buses, motorbike taxies, trucks, and SUVs City Center of Kampala. We found the City Center Hotel and not too far away the Sudanese Embassy which pleasantly and in 24 hours issued us all transit visas – Americans paid $175, Canadians $60.
I met Patrick’s (the guy I bought the bike from in Johannesburg) brothers, Charlie and Fred, and had a very nice dinner in Kampala with them. Next morning, Fred came to our hotel and interviewed us for a news article on foreigners riding motorcycles thru Africa. Fred works for a new organization.
We went on to a Couchsurfing family in Luwero, a village about 40 km northwest of Kampala. An extraordinary family including Fulgenscio, Clara, Ester, Joseph, Albert, and Agnes the cook and child care helper who lives next door. Fulgenscio was born 47 years ago out “in the bush” in a the small village of Mbirizi – 55 km up a dirt road after leaving tramac about 1 ½ hrs northwest of Kampala (10 km after passing his current home) and then about 10 more km thru trails thru the alternatively dense and open jungle. He is now an administrator (for a living) at the Church Compound with a University degree in Social Work.
His parents died when he was a boy of about 10 – his father of cholera and his mother shortly thereafter of heart failure. He was farmed out to various relatives for the next several years until a nun picked him out as rather special and arranged for him to work and stay at a church run school in exchange for an education. He entered the classroom for the first time at age 17 and worked before and after the school days and every holiday and weekend – learning discipline, carpentry, brick laying, cleaning, farming skills, …. Which would serve his family (he built his current modest but adequate for his growing family – and an occasional couchsurfer from America or Europe …. - brick and mortar home himself) and his community well in the future … as well as getting his basic education accomplished along the way. He got a scholarship to University after completing his secondary school studies.
Fulgencio is a religious man with a nice family, a comfortable (by Ugandan standards) living, and a bright and easy smile. He is driven by a passion to give other kids from his long ago village an opportunity for such a future through education. Singlehandedly, in 2003, he began to make the long and difficult 3-4 hour journey (now by car – then by bicycle then small motorbike) back to the village where he was born. He started a school under a tree with a chalkboard and some benches. That classroom still functions today along with that under a second tree and several concrete classrooms, a kitchen, a well shared with the village, a small office building that also houses the new sewing machine which sews school uniforms for both boys and girls from ages 4 thru 13 – over 200 of them. There are now 8 Full time teachers at the school – including Enock Katoche who is a very young and popular (with the students and the village elders and parents) Head Master who not only teaches classes but is also the principal day to day administrator of the school complex. He has been there in the village for several years working to build the school and recently (6 months ago) married a local woman and moved into their own Habitat for Humanity constructed 2 room home in the village. Had lunch there and it is very solid brick, small, and in 4 more years after he finishes paying the principal loan (at 24% interest!) all theirs.
The first graduates of the secondary part of the school last year scored the highest on the national tests of anyone in the district. These are kids who get NO support from the Ugandan government’s education department – resources are scares in Uganda and go to building infrastructure like roads and to the army (there is a legitimate need for security people) etc.
Fulgensio works as hard as his wife. He hustles support for the school from everywhere and anyone. Without him it would collapse from lack of resources. It serves 10 small villages within a radius of 17 km from the village wherein he was born – a total of about 100 families.
David, by far the oldest among the elders of the village at 66 and still surprisingly vibrant - tends his own cows daily basis, told me (thru an interpreter) that his grandchildren know about computers and speak English as well as Ugandan and the Banyanole, Banyarwanda and Baganda traditional language. “They will be teachers one day.” David, like all the men of the village, still carries a stick (a certain kind of wood which is heavy and somewhat flexible and strong, but not more than a couple inches wide – and about 5 feet long) in case of lions or other threats to his cows or person. Traditionally, men also carried a spear, but if a lion attacks your cow, you hit him/her in a certain place (I’m not sure where, but it’s like a kidney punch) and the lion will run away in pain; if you stab it, you will just make it mad and have a serious battle on your hands. Until about 1950, there were lions in the area and elephants, water buffalo, giraffes, etc. but all have now moved away from the area because of too many people in their territories.
Grateful for the help he was given to “get a life”, Fulgenscio singlehandedly started a school in the village – under a tree with a volunteer teacher in 2003. He visits once a week (an all day often very difficult muddy commute) and hustles support from every NGO or government or private source he can find. Today there are 220 kids, most in uniforms, and 8 teachers 4 substantial school buildings – and still two “tree” classrooms. The kids all get a hot meal. There is a well with water for the school – and the village; women and girls (mostly) used to have to walk as far as 20 km to fetch water for every purpose in the village – cooking, washing, cleaning. Want to help? Email me and I’ll tell you how.
Fugle has a list of many items he wants to bring to the village (and the village members participate in forming the list and determining priorities). Putting a road (dirt) thru the swampy area which often prevents any kind of vehicle from plowing along the trail to/from the village from the other dirt road is high on the list. In the mean time, he wants to buy the school’s headmaster Enook???? A small 150cc Chinese or Indian made motorbike so he can more efficiently go back and forth to the commercial areas for school purposes and so that people from the village in need of medical care can be taken the long distance in a few hours instead of days. He wants to bring solar power to the school so that they can provide electricity and then computers and other devices that will help the children to understand and participate in the wider world. The list is long and varied. Pat, Chris and I bought several hundred dollars worth of school stuff (including 2 footballs (soccer) and a hand ball) but mostly paper, pencils, measuring tools, etc. for the kids and the teachers. Some of the money was donated by friends back home! There was an assembly, speeches, passing out of most of the stuff, and generally we were made to feel like our “stuff” and our interest in the education of the “bush school” children was really appreciated by the children, teachers, parents et al. It was a special day – including the getting stuck in the mud and thinking we might never get out until the rainy season ended.
On to Nairobi, Kenya and a few days of working on the bikes and resting up for the “worst road in africa” part of the trip. Jungle Junction is a biker and “overlander” (4wd people who travel the hard roads too) haven in the outskirts of Nairobi. It is owned and run by Chris ……. A German expat who is an expert mechanic and runs an efficient compound that includes a few bedrooms and dorm room, tent sites, a mechanic shop with 2 or 3 mechanics, a laundry, meal service, kitchen (for fixing your own meals), and day room for hanging out while waiting for …. I had a lot of work done on my bike and it was all without new parts – new parts are hard to come by in Nairobi. I did get a new rear tire and a half new/used front tire. My leaky front forks were polished to remove the fatal scratches that cut thru the seals (still working) and the used up front sprocket was replaced with one from the scrap pile that was only half used up. Change of oil and filter, clean air filter and fuel pump (he took it apart and cleaned the guts of it which were clogged and causing the engine to starve and cut out – sometimes at the most inopportune times, like when passing a bus in traffic. Great job and at fair rates; much better rates than in US or Europe!
We left with both bikes in as good shape as possible and headed north for the worst road. We found it and spent about 5 hours getting the 330 km to Marsabit – half way on the best new road in Africa and the other half on the beginning of the worst road in Africa. The worst wasn’t technically difficult to ride. It was mostly flat and straight. But it was washboarded with a vengeance; no speed to make it work except very slow – 20 km was max for hours. Then it turned into just rocky and some sand and loose gravel and that was a little more challenging technically, but faster – 50 or 60 km/hr. Marsabit was half way to the border.
Before getting to Marsabit, we passed thru a few small villages, some of which were populated by people who were dressed and decorated in a similar fashion to the Maasai of Tanzania. They had a lot of camels and donkeys, but how they managed to make a living out in the desert escaped me. Very colorful garb on both men and women and the women especially had lots of metal and colorful jewelry even those walking along the road 2 miles from the village.
In Marsabit, we stayed at the JJ Hotel, nice enough and with a restaurant and shaded patio. We were noted as the only Mazunga (White people) in town and got more attention than we deserved. We met Jamal’s father (I never got his name other than Jamal’s father) who spoke pretty good English and was an entrepenure. He has a camel safari tour which sounded like it would be fun to do and not too expensive, but we didn’t want to take 3 extra days. So, he walked us over to a shed where some men were making steel/copper bracelets. All kinds of people in the town were wearing one – the copper makes you healthier some how and the combination (if you wear it when you sleep) keeps you from having bad dreams: I bought several. Haven’t had a bad dream since – or, as far back as I can remember, before for that matter.
Jamal’s father wants us to go home and import bracelets so they can employ more men to make the bracelets and bring in some foreign currency, which is the only way to buy foreign goods in Africa.
Jamal, is a chip off the old block. He is in any kind of business he can find to do. He convienced Pat and me that the 330 km from Marsabit to Moyale at the Ethiopian border was much worse for the bikes than the last 165 km that we did to get to Marsabit. We decided to hire Maanual and a mechanic and someone’s old but reliable Toyota Land Cruiser, load both bikes and all our gear and the three of us into it (we didn’t all fit, but ….) and the next morning we set off on a 6 hour very bumpy ride (which would have taken at least 2 days on the bikes and would have beat the Hell out of them – and maybe us too) to Moyale. The road was much worse than the previous day. The landscape was unbelievably barren for miles but with donkeys, sheep, and camels and a lot of people living on rocks – big rocks and nothing but rocks for as far as you could see in all directions. Traffic on that road is light! We did stop twice. Once to change the flat front tire and a second time to see what was up with another Land Crusier jacked up along side the road – 3 guys had been there for 3 days waiting for a replacement axel to be brought to them from Nairobi – they had no water or food and no idea how many more days they would be waiting – no phone service out there either. We left them some water and went on.
The best guess is that in 5 or 6 years, all that bad road will be new tarmac and traffic will pick up considerably. The Chinese are building a 100 km stretch and the Israelis are building another 100 km stretch now. It will change the villages and lives of everyone who lives out there in the desert.
We crossed from Kenya into Ethiopia without incident or delay. The dirt roads of Kenya were replace by tarmac all the way to Addis Ababa – mostly very good road with few or no pot holes. Addis Ababa is another big dirty crowded city. I hate cities!
We arrived in late afternoon with a cloudburst that let loose a major downpour which soaked us and dampened our spirits. The ATM I found was “temporarily out of service”. My cell phone which works everywhere in the world, doesn’t in Addis Ababa; outside the city it works, just not in the biggest city and capital of Ethiopia – go figure. The Couchsurfing we had been looking forward to finding at the end of that day didn’t materialize because we couldn’t communicate. Wet and tired we found a none too good hotel and checked in.
This morning as we sat down to breakfast at the hotel, Pat and Chris told me that they had decided to stay there another day and rest up; this, after I had already checked out and loaded all my gear on the bike and was in full dress for riding.
The atmosphere between us had gotten decidedly chilly in the last several days – for reasons that still escape me. I decided I wouldn’t stay another day, and left alone for Khartoum – several days and 2000 km to the northwest.
About a week before, my GPS decided that it wouldn’t hold a charge (making it useless for navigation) and I have only a gross map of all of Africa. So, thinking finding my way north – even just out of the city – might be very difficult, I went anyway. Pat had told me in Nairobi, after I had asked, that he would put my GPS on his bike and charge it up (good for a few hours navigation in an emergency) “when he felt like it”; he never got to feeling like it in the several days we remained together since.
My GPS was charging about 20 minutes worth when plugged into the laptop, so I was hoping to get out of the city before it died. However, the day I left Addis Ababa alone, the GPS Gods were smiling on me. I had tried putting it on the bike charger mount at least a hundred times before giving up. A week before, I had just put it in my tank bag as useless until I got a new charger mount – in Europe next month! But, this one day it decided to charge and operate pretty much like it was supposed to do. It seems that perhaps – at least for a day - it was cured of whatever ailed it. I went out of the city about 300 km north to a small town with a very nice “international hotel” with a coffee shop and restaurant and right off of a roundabout. I stopped for a late lunch and decided to stay when it turned out the nice rooms with hot shower and TV and everything (except internet) only cost 300 Brii per night – about $17 US.
I’m wrote most of this draft in my nice comfortable bed. I wanted to try an Ethiopian meal for dinner, but the one I saw and smelt the other day when we stopped for a coke in the afternoon wasn’t on the menu – only stuff one might find in an International Hotel. The spaghetti with meat sauce was really very good and the cappuccino too.
The scenery in the northern part of Ethiopia is spectacular. There is one place where you descend from over 3000 meters to 1000 meters, cross a nice bridge with a sign thanking the Japanese for building it, and then go back up to the same height again on the other side.
Oh, after I had left Addis and Pat and Chris came back from their morning walk in the city, they changed their minds about staying there for another day and wound up leaving too. They stopped here at the same nice international hotel just a couple hours behind me.
When we left there for Bahir Dar on the edge of Lake Tana, we left separately again. We were all cordial to one another, but there was little conversation between the three of us. French was the language of the day and I don’t speak French.
In Bahir Dar, we again all ended up at the same place again; a modest biker friendly hotel on the edge of the lake. I told Pat that I was clueless what I had done to offend one or both of them and apologized for whatever it might have been. But, so as to end the escalating tension between us, I had decided to go on from there alone – without GPS (which has died completely again – won’t charge at all even on the laptop), without tools (he brought tools and I brought the tent), and without a camera (I’d managed to scratch the center of the lenses in both of mine). Pat and I agreed that we would travel north from there to Germany at roughly the same times, on the same roads, stopping probably at most of the same places along the way, but separately. This kind of splitting up between bike riders is common – ride together for a while then begin to get on each other’s nerves and split up to ride on apart. I just didn’t think it would happen between us; we had ridden most of Latin America together and now most of Africa too. But, it happened.
I left the next morning and headed for Lilebela and the rock hewn churches, one of the few touristical sites that I was keen to see on this trip up Africa.
But, without a map and with my GPS not working at all, I managed to miss the sign (assuming there was a sign) where I should have turned right off the main good road to Gondar and didn’t realize the navigational error until I was reading “Gondar” on a few signs in a city – most of the signage has changed to Arabic script and I don’t read Arabic script. As I am more interested in riding my bike Up Africa than seeing anything toruistical in particular, I decided not to go back the 185 km for churches.
I continued on from Gondar to Metema on the border with Sudan. I stopped for the night and found a very modest hotel with bars for a door on the room, a fan that was as noisy (from about 6 pm to 1:30 am when the power was on) as the beer drinkers in the courtyard outside the door. There is no alcohol in Sudan so many of the Sudanese who live near the border come to Metema for a beer or two or three.
In the morning, I crossed over into Sudan. The Sudanese immigration was fast and easy (we had all gotten our Visas back in Kampala, Uganda), but the Customs process for bringing in the bike was the most bureaucratic I’ve ever experienced. It took about 2 hours and involved about 9 different officials all with multi-forms (and carbon paper) and a stamp or two. They were all pleasant and the process was easy for me (the forms were mostly in Arabic only) and I had just to sit and wait going from desk to desk as directed sometimes by pantomime, sometimes in adequate English. But, much of the morning was consumed by bureaucracy. Finally, after one more stop at the Internal Security office for another review of my passport and some cursory notes written into a ledger, I was on the road and heading for Khartoum – only seven long increasingly hot hours away as it turned out. I drank 2 liters of water and an orange soda along the way and was still feeling the effects of dehydration when I finally arrived on the outskirts of Khartoum at about 3 - in the hottest part of the day!
I arrived very hot and very tired and still unable to identify a hotel. I had stopped 4 times in the final hour at what might be a hotel, but turned out to be an office building and three very nice private residence compounds.
In Sudan nearly all signage is in Arabic and I still don’t read any Arabic. As it turned out, on my way into the city, a guy in a car wanted me to smile as I passed his car so he could take a picture of the strange site. I asked him to pull over which he did. Mahmoud and his six year old son took me to a nice (and expensive) restaurant in the city and bought me a very fine lunch. My Couchsurfing contact in Khartoum, Omer, was called and came to join us. His couch is unavailable at the moment, but he’s very nice and loaned me a local call phone (my American international phone doesn’t work in this big city either) so we can stay in touch while I’m in Khartoum. Mahmoud pointed me toward the nice hotel a couple of doors down the street from the restaurant and we took a few pictures and I went to register. But, it turned out that I’m not as rich an America as had been supposed; the Chinese operated hotel charged $118 US cash only per night. I managed to locate another hotel a few blocks further down the street – also Chinese operated – that charged me only $50 US per night on the fourth floor (no elevator), but is very comfortable (once you get back to normal breathing). I showered and went to bed and didn’t wake up for nearly 8 hours.
It was explained to me back at the border that I had 3 days to get to Khartoum and check in with the immigration officials there to get my passport stamped one more time. But, nearly everything closes on Fridays (next morning) and Saturday is some kind of national holiday. Not to worry, says Omer, Inshalla things will work out – somehow. I’m looking forward to another fruit smoothie drink at the same fancy, expensive restaurant this morning before finding my way to the immigration office to see if anyone is around to stamp my passport.
My next objective is Halfa Wadi a few hundred more kilometers to the north of Sudan where I will get me and the bike loaded onto a boat for a 200 or 300 km ride down the Nile to Aswan, Egypt and then begin the bike ride down (south to north) the Nile to Alexandria and – hopefully – another boat ride to Italy – where I have will some chance of getting my GPS mount replaced! All I have to do is stay out of trouble and somehow navigate my way thru Egypt’s big crowded cities.
I don’t know when I will get this posted. Internet is very hard to come by and Internet that will accommodate itself to the apparently complex blog site, harder yet. I’ve been trying to post it everywhere I’ve stopped for the last 10 nights!
Maybe I’ll try to buy a “good enough” camera now that I don’t have Chris sharing all the pictures she takes along the way. There are lots of pyramids to snap between here and the Mediterranean Sea.
