Pedaling Panther : SUDAN & ETHIOPIA!...a sizzling and a stoning!

SUDAN!!!

A final stretch of desert road with literally nothing but sand all around brought me to the border of Sudan. 2 enormous intimidating iron gates stood in front of me. Once I’d finally past the Egyptian side and reached Sudanese immigration I was pleasantly surprised to meet the huge beaming smiles of the immigration officers in there bright blue uniforms, who were extremely black in colour, literally black. Apparently these extremely dark people were from the worlds newest country, South Sudan, which is now almost at civil war after its separation from Sudan in 2011. A bag search, a load of paperwork, a 550 Sudanese pound registration certificate and a few videos blue toothed to me from the immigration officer about Islam and I was on my way!

Egypt - Approx 20km from Sudan

Sudan was immediately much poorer than its neighbor Egypt and the wagons pulled by donkeys even more primitive! The other thing I couldn’t help noticing on the sandy desert road were all the dead camels and cattle carcasses rotting by the roadside...a gruesome sight. I was later told this was due to animals that had died on cattle trucks in the heat being dumped by the roadside. A few hours ride saw me to the first town in Sudan, Wadi Halfa, a friendly relaxed town which sold lots of chicken. Outside my guesthouse was a an old beaten up estate car that looked like something from the Sudanese ghost busters.

As I’d carried an Alaskan number plate all the way through the Americas, I wanted to buy one from Northern Africa (My final attempted at doing so in Egypt had ended with a bloke insinuating a knife chopping my hand off!). The bloke, who looked like a black Doc Brown from the Back to the Future movie told me to come back in the morning. The old wreck of a car had been washed and unbelievably he had got the engine running....which looking at that car was nothing short of a miracle! Doc Brown then handed me a bunch of paperwork for the car! I felt pretty guilty he had obviously been up half the night getting the thing running thinking I wanted to buy the whole car!

Back on the bike the next day I was smashing out the Kilometers on the freshly tarmacked road (no doubt build by the Chinese) which was in stark contrast to the mud huts along its edge. Stopping for lunch in what was apparently a gold mining town, It became even more apparent I was no longer in the developed world. As I sat in the makeshift marquee for some food, a couple of blokes were chopping up a camel on the sand in front of me, each limb was then lobbed over the blokes shoulder and hung from a hook on the old school scales a few feet in front of my table! The head was finally chopped off and put on top of the meat counter.

Heading south the temperature went off the scale and hit 40 to 45 degrees Celsius, and this was apparently winter! Unfortunately the trail wind turned to a head on one, and with the dry hot wind my lips felt as though I had drank a pint of sand and put them under the grill for an hour! They were split to pieces. I found myself on the odd occasion drinking 5 bottles of soft drinks in a row!! My body completely depleted of sugar and salts. Outside of the main towns all that could be found along the road were mud huts and the odd metal shack. Literally all you could buy in most of them was black beans and bread!...whilst many had no food at all. I asked one bloke where I could buy food, “Ethiopia” he replied! Considering the huge lack of food people didn’t look so bad. These huts did all however have huge ceramic pots filled with drinking water. Despite the high temperatures the pots kept the water nice and cool. Most of it looked pretty clean, though some looked like it had been pumped out of the River Thames....which was always an awkward moment when a kind person offered you a glass of the stuff! If it looked drinkable I always chucked a purification tablet in for good measure.

The great people of Sudan

"Ful" ... beans in Sudan..often all that was available outside of the towns

A free alfresco bed always available for me to sleep the night

Flag of Sudan

Amazingly I only used my tent twice in Sudan....and barely checked into a hotel either!! These motorway service stations (or mud huts maybe more appropriate!) had no chairs but instead metal frame beds with flat rope weaved between them, and I was always offered to sleep on one. My first night was even better than that...a bed in a mud hut. I couldn’t believe my luck when the bloke showed me to my hut. However, after returning to it an hour later it was bursting at the seems with 6 people now sleeping in there (bed frames touching one another!) I was slightly concerned when the door was bolted shut after I got in my bed...but slept well anyway! The only problem with my mud hut and alfresco sleeping was I was being eaten alive by insects and covered from head to toe in bites. Waking up one morning with a Scorpion next to my bed was also slightly concerning. On the plus, there was something very cool about sleeping outside at the local roadside stops and villages, chatting with the locals drinking tea boiled on an open fire with shishas bubbling away.

One day on the road I remember very vividly was taking the detour to checkout the abandoned city of Old Dongola. I had forgot to download my map but from recollection on my phone it was just off the main road. One bloke reckoned it was down a sand track of the main road. A few miles later I found myself at the bank of the Nile, where a dodgy looking bloke with a boat assured me it was across the Nile. I went with it and jumped into his boat, after dropping some passengers on the other side he took me half a mile downstream and dropped me off at the back of beyond, explaining old Dongola was over the top of the sand dune. After being bitten to shit by a million mosquito's on the river bank I attempted to climb the deep fine sand of the steep dune, slipping 2 steps back for every one gained in 45 degree heat, swearing out loud with every step questioning what the F I was doing!! When I finally made it over the dune, Old Dongola was all to me, and was pretty cool (see pic below). Though even on the flat I could not push my bike in the deep sand and carried my bike for another couple of miles until I reached the relief of the tarmac road.....and a couple of nutters on donkeys pulling bicep poses!

Greetings from the man with the donkey after trekking across the sand dunes of Old Dongola with the bike on my shoulder

Old Dongola

My trusty captain taking me across the Nile to Old Dongola

Motorway Service Station!

Riding into the night I eventually hit the town of Al Dabbah, at the first shop I woofed down every sugary food I could buy. Outside the shop I met a man in specs and a cricket shirt of around my age who spoke near perfect English and invited me home for rice. He turned out to be an Pakistani guy who had took a job in which he was told was in South Africa. That was until his plane landed in the middle of the desert in Sudan! Considering how badly he’d been taken for a ride he seemed pretty cool about the whole thing! He lived in a shared house with a couple of Pakistani and a few Indian guys (also tricked) who all worked at the agricultural factory. They were some of the nicest guys I’ve met all trip, they cooked me a stinking hot beef curry (yes beef!) Told me all about Pakistan, gave me a bed, and at 4:30 the next morning I left in the dark when the factory bus came to take them to work. It made me think how free my life had been over the last year not having to think about the daily grind like everyone else!

The spicy beef curry from the awesome guys from India and Pakistan

Arriving in the capital Khartoum 2 days later I went mental. I still can’t work out if the food was really good or it was just a million times better than Ful (black beans and bread). The 7 million inhabitants of Khartoum lived at huge contrast. In the centre on Nile street there was a huge egg shaped glass hotel built with money from Qaddafi whilst a few blocks away were mud roads littered with donkeys and goats. Sudan is definitely not a country you visit to get laid...and you definitely don’t come for the scenery...its pretty much one big desert!...it does however have the most welcoming and friendly people I have ever met, at least if your a male anyway! Everyone I would pass would wave, clap and shout out to me and I could hardly spend my money If I tried with everyone insisting on paying for me. It felt pretty ironic that in the west we like to portray the Muslim world as being dodgy and full of Taliban who want to cut your head off, the reality could not have been further from the truth. I couldn’t have felt any safer. The strict law of cutting peoples hands off for theft meant I could leave my bicycle anywhere!

Cycling Sudan Style!

Some young bodybuilders

Ironically, it was the Christian world of fast approaching Ethiopia that was starting to haunt me! Ethiopia is seen as the worst country in the world to cycle...and there are numerous horror stories of kids chasing after you trying to rob your belongings, the legendary stone throwing...and worse! Two cyclists coming the other way had confirmed this as more than rumors. An angry Frenchman explained it as the worst country in 5 years on the road (he was armed with a catapult and wooden stick for defense). Even the happy go lucky chap from Morocco had a huge sense of relief as I passed him entering Sudan. There were even accounts of guns to the head, motorcyclist’s pushed off and one cyclist who was stabbed in the back for taking a stone thrower to the village chief. Even as I approached the border I had a stone thrown at the back of my head from someone on top of a lorry, a kid launch one at me (he used a straight arm sideways technique whipping it in like a baseball with a curl at tremendous pace) plus another thrown at my tent! I swear they were from one of the many Ethiopian immigrants!

Suffering in the heat...crossing the Nile to arrive in Khartoum

As if left there strategically for me there was a homemade whip lying in the middle of the road. I attached it to the front of my pannier rack and repeatedly practiced deploying it and snapping it at speed, to the amusements of the passing pickups loaded with people who clapped and cheered. The police checkpoint questioned why I was carrying it, though my honest answer of “for beating thieves in Ethiopia” seemed to suffice. My last night in Sudan was both a high and low one. I camped 30 miles before the border in a small village spending the evening sitting around a fire drinking tea with the locals. A group of kids were hanging around my tent all night peering in so I decided to tie the zips shut from the inside and piss in a plastic bottle to prevent drawing more attention to myself. In the early hours of the morning I reached for my water and took a huge swig feeling extremely dehydrated. It wasn’t water. I had taken a huge swig off my bright yellow dehydrated piss, to top off, for the life off me I couldn’t find my torch and un-do the knot in the zip door! It was rank. If anybody tells you your own piss doesn’t taste too bad they’ve clearly never tried it!!

ETHIOPIA

Arriving at the chaotic border town of Metema I was harassed by Ethiopian money changers who followed me everywhere from immigration to sitting next to me when I went to buy food! It caused a big row with the brutally honest Sudanese waiter who shouted, “leave this man alone, it is my duty to protect him, he is in my country not yours!” Without even crossing into Ethiopia a few hundred metres ahead of me I already realised there was a lot I was going to miss about the people of Sudan!! Expecting the worse I donned my helmet, pumped myself up and ventured into Ethiopia expecting a machine gun spray of stones fired at me!

I had made several preparations to deal with any potential issues:

1) A fake rubber snake costing 2 quid on eBay - Apparently the people are superstitious and terrified of snake charmers.

2) A menacing looking camel / donkey whip which I found on the road in Sudan, which was bungee corded to the front of my bike as a deterrent.

3) A load of cheap pens that I bought in Khartoum which I could throw in the air as a decoy.

4) Some local language (known as Amharic) written on my bag in permanent marker. A good ice breaker.

5) A locally bought Ethiopian football shirt.

A few seconds into Ethiopia! (Note the addition of the helmet!)

To my amazement, my first day in Ethiopia wasn't the horror story I had expected. The flat arid sands of Sudan changed immediately to a 2500 meter steep climb into beautiful green mountains. Apart from the villagers chasing after me shouting "YOU, YOU, YOU, MONEY, MONEY MONEY", and the whole village following me to the little hut where I had lunch, there were no serious issues to deal with and I was left thinking that "Ethiopia, the worst country in the world to cycle", was all a bit of an exaggeration. Even the 20 naked kids which came running out of the river were pretty friendly and only wanted to shake my hand and not rob me...they did however leave me feeling like a creepy Jimmy Saville on his bike! In fact, the worst thing that happened to me that day was when I pitched my tent behind some bushes at the edge of the mountain road. Pitching on a steep slope with a rock under my back, my poor nights sleep was disturbed further still in the middle of the night when I felt some severe itching! I turned my torch on thinking I was just being paranoid, to discover my whole tent infested with ants!! They were in my pants, in my sleeping back....everywhere! The hours of 2:30 - 3:30 am were spent systematically searching my tent and squashing over 100 ants. My second crap nights sleep in a tent.

My following days in Ethiopia were not to be as peaceful and the Ethiopian nightmare was about to unfold!! The next day the rock and stone throwers started warming up and a group of 15 kids chased me up a hill trying to grab stuff from my panniers. I threw 2 pens up and over my head and the kids sprinted for them like 100 dollar bills! My timing was poor and after the pens had be fought for they caught me up again on the steep slope, now knowing I had goods on board. Lesson learnt, the pen throw technique should be delayed until approaching the crest of a hill! These kids can run.....as in 5km uphill at pace without any training!

The most interesting and memorable of those nightmare days was my penultimate day before reaching the capital, Addis Ababa. A 100 mile day in the mountains between Dejen and a place called Muke Turi. I'd only been on the road a mile that morning when an old lady launched her stick at my bike! The road then took a huge 12.5 mile straight decent towards a bridge over the blue Nile which carved a enormous gorge out of the landscape. Huge well behaved monkeys crossed the road on the way down. At the bottom a bloke was mixing up a tomato paste with water to which loads of men circled around dipping bread into the frying pan for a few pence. I gave it a bash. Beginning the climb I was advised the road ahead was closed. A few miles up a lorry smashed to pieces blocked the whole road, 100s of people circled around and the traffic piled up either side. I caused quite a spectacle as always carrying my bike around the lorry slipping on the spilled oil. An older man at the scene explained the lorry driver was probably going to die and had been taken to the hospital at the town at the top of the hill. He asked if I could go there and make a donation.

Scene of lorry crash

Mountains all the way

How could I refuse potentially saving the blokes life for what would be pocket money to me? I decided I would go directly to the hospital and donate the 100 dollar US bill I had in the bottom of my pannier bag. I went first to the private clinic, which was extremely rudimentary..... And then to the government one, overcrowded, basic and unclean would be an extremely generous description, I wouldn’t have fancied his chances there. Unfortunately he wasn’t at either. Maybe he'd be taken to Adis Ababa or had died before he’d arrived in the town. After a few chases and rocks being lobbed at me, the worst from on top of a hill landing like a Grenade at my feet, I came upon a poor horse that had collapsed under his overloaded cart. I stopped immediately and flagged over a lorry driver to lend a hand (being a white guy I have a bit more persuasion with these things!) After unloading a few bags off the cart we eventually got the poor horse to his feet.

Helping the poor horse to his feet

Football shirt and whip at the ready! - I was eventually told, "You are not allowed to wear the traditional shirt!" by a cheeky teen!

Further down then road the onslaught intensified. The cries of “YOU YOU YOU MONEY MONEY MONEY” which had been quite endearing at first, had now changed to a harrowing, “CHINA CHINA...give me MONEY MONEY MONEY!!!” often followed by a rock being launched, occasionally by adults as well as teenagers and children! The worst of these attacks happened when one of the players on a football pitch noticed me approaching early doors, within a split second 22 players were legging it full tilt to the roadside and began launching stones and rocks at me! Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, on approaching a small town a teenage lad throw a punch at me, it missed by a mile.....but then, literally a 100 yards down the road, another teenage, who looked bad to the bone, offered his hand in a high five motion. I cagily offered out my hand as I cruised past, he then peeled back and throw a punch towards my face!! I somehow manager to block it with my hand. Things had suddenly changed in my mind from being slightly stressed but somewhat enjoying the challenges of cycling Ethiopia to simply not wanting to be there! The day culminated with a few sticks being jabbed at me from the roadside to a guy lunging his hand towards my head whilst flying down one of the steep hills! It had been by far my most memorial day in Ethiopia!

I woke the next morning trying to be positive, but I won’t lie, even though it was less than 100km to Addis Ababa, I was dreading getting on my bike that morning. I cant exaggerate enough, cycling Ethiopia is not about the odd stone, its about being hounded, people grabbing your handlebars, shouting, stone throwing, every minute of every day! Thankfully, dropping down into Addis Ababa was a more or less problem free day. (Africa’s 4th largest city, altitude 2355 Meters) I was in need of a break. Instead, I eat some manky fish which left me running for the bathroom of my budget hotel and projectile vomiting all over the shower. The shits that followed were even more grim. I spent the morning clearing up my own mess, not wanting to put the cleaner through the ordeal of sorting it. I decided I needed to sort myself out! I checked into the high end Monarch hotel and treated myself to a hot shower and passed out in the big comfy bed. The area where I was staying, known as Bole, was the new glamorous down town of Addis, despite being located in the south east corner of the city near the airport. It was a contrast of Chinese built shiny high rise hotels and malls erected with wooden branches for scaffolding, yet mixed with huge poverty and crippled homeless people begging on the streets. I probably should have stayed another night as I wasn’t close to being better, but at that point just wanted to escape from Ethiopia! ...and hit the road the following day.

Addis

I was told the south of Ethiopia would not be as problematic as the north. And for a brief while, passing through a Muslim area I was momentarily back to the Africa I loved. This blissful half day was short lived and the normal madness of tormenting me with sticks and stones returned! My skin had grown thicker and it was time to get my own back. I launched the snake at some of the tormentors faces and finally lost my rag with others and went ballistic. It was extremely therapeutic watching them shit themselves for a change! This may not be the lonely planets suggested way to behave in Africa but I couldn’t give a toss! Some people – that have clearly never cycled Ethiopia, have tried to justify this behavior to me with patronising mother Teresa style BS quotes!.... But for me you can’t just give justification because its Africa! And admittedly, for every idiot I’ve come across I’ve had double the amount of warm smiles and kind offers (particularly from the elderly and middle class surprisingly!) I can justify poor people robbing me, pick pocketing me, even kidnapping me!...but for a nation to be full of angry young people that want to throw rocks, try and knock me off my bike and swing punches at me.....well, I’ve cycled enough poor countries in the world to know that’s pretty *untish!

Getting tribal - south east Ethiopia

A way more friendly southern Ethiopia!

But!!! As much as I hated Ethiopia at times, I’m not going to be that pessimistic French hater!! Its been a love hate relationship... And overall the LOVE is way bigger than the hate! Many people who cycle Africa bottle Ethiopia, but I’m too stubborn and sadistic to give in! How could I arrive in Cape Town knowing I’d given in when the going got tough!? And the highlights I'd seen on route had been huge, Gondar in the north on the edge of the stunning Simeon mountains, known as the Camelot of Africa with European style medieval castles, Bahir Dar, which sits on a beautiful Rhino filled lake and is a paradise surrounded by palm trees, the south east and the lower Omo valley, who wouldn’t want to check out the tribe with the ridiculously large stretched bottom lips!?... not to mention the incredible Coffee! ........Gondar once more!...before I forget I must mention what happened to me in Gondar!....As I sat having a coffee, in a little cafe outside the castle, I spoke to an older bloke who was apparently a guide for the castle. I told him that Britain had suffered from a spell of cold weather from Russia and there was snow. I then searched on my phone for any snow pics friends had sent me from home (you know how they pop up automatically in your album). I managed to find a video I hadn't noticed before, pressed play, and passed my phone to the bloke. The video spanned round from an English bedroom window looking down onto the snowy street below, it then spanned to a video of a black tribal guy with the worlds biggest penis hanging out!! Needless to say the bloke did not find it at all funny and definitely did not believe my plea I didn't know about the 2 foot penis!

Without sounding like a complete gimp, I must also mention a little bit about Ethiopia's incredible history and how the Jamaican Rasta man comes from Ethiopia! Firstly, Ethiopia is the only African country never to be colonized by a European power. Which, from the way the people launch rocks at you is hardly surprising! The Italians had a go in 1936 but were beaten back. Ethiopians actually use the word "Ciao" as part of there Amharic language today. The leader at that time (1930 - 1974), Emperor Haile Selassie, visited Jamaica in 1966 when the country was suffering from a huge drought. After Selassie's visit it rained for 2 weeks. Selassie's name as a child was "Tafaria", and when he became the governor or Harar was given the name "Ras" for "head"....hence.... RAS TAFARIA! For Jamaicans, poverty stricken Ethiopia became the promise land and Selassie was a God! Selassie was overthrown in 1974 and power came to the hands of lower ranking officers known as the DERG forming a socialist state. The Derg ordered the execution of 61 ex-officials of the imperial government and were responsible for 50,000 deaths of opposition opponents in what is known as, "Ethiopian Red Terror."

Today, the Derg is still in power! Though at the moment without leadership, this meant as I cycled across Ethiopia the country remained in a state of national emergency. Just before I arrived in Addis there had been a road block in which protestors had attempted to close the road. It had opened a couple of days before I got there after the government soldiers had shot people dead. The same had happened at the border town of Moyale. The new leader will be chosen from the existing party without election, hence the protests.

My last few days to the Kenyan border saw me to the town of Abra Minch before the roads turned to mud and I entered a remote area of south west Ethiopia which was...well...tribal! The main border was directly south at the town of Moyale, though I had taken the decision to head for the tiny little known about border near Omorate. This was a more direct route to head for Uganda, Rwanda (possibly the Congo) and Burundi, which seemed a more interesting route than just Kenya and Tanzania. The only issue was that the monsoon rains had started and I was slipping and sliding everywhere on the mud road, the Kenyan roads ahead were supposed to be unpassable in high rain. However, the huge positive was that with the tribes the stone throwing diminished! Southern Ethiopia was definitely not without its highlights though! I had a grown tribal man with a spear chasing after me (thankfully with a smile on his face!) 5 topless tribe women try to do a roadblock whilst the younger one grabbed at my bag and I got to witness a tribal ceremony where the boy becomes a man, which involved the whipping of women, blood pouring from their backs (unbelievably, the woman were fighting over the privilege of getting whipped!)

I eventually reached the final Ethiopian town of Omorate, which was a shithole and an odd mix of topless tribal women and poor western dressed folk. The immigration bloke tried to ask for paperwork for my bicycle license, "its a piece of metal", I told him, in a voice which suggested I wasn't a complete idiot. Ironically, with the exception of the odd tribe, the last 20km returned to perfect tarmac and almost complete piece and quiet, until, in the distance, I saw an old army barracks and the road just complete disappear. It was Kenya!!! Ethiopia was by far the most incredible country in Africa I've ever visited, though to say I was happy to reach that border, would be the understatement of the century!!!