Sudan and Ethiopia

The Aqaba – Port Sudan project went very smoothly. We are currently driving from Debre Markos to Addis Abeba. The road is horrible, but the surroundings are stunning. We just passed a beautiful gorge, which cuts through thick packages of red sandstones covered by thin-layered white and grey limestones which are capped by the massive black and darkgreen basalts that dominate the landscape of the elevated Ethiopian plateau. Driving here, it is hard to imagine that barely two weeks ago we were still in Jordan without any idea about our near future. Since we left Jordan we spent our time either running like madness or standing absolutely still. After an early morning arrival in Khartoum, we had an entire day ahead of us of registrations and an Ethiopian visa application. This all went relatively well (the embassy was on the correct address for a change) and we managed to complete almost all the points on the to-do list. The next day consisted of a leisure stroll through Khartoum center, where an alarming number of people somehow thought we were Chinese. Sudan’s capital is truly enormous, housing some 8 million people within a 30 km radius, which means that a tuk-tuk ride to the bus station and back took us about 3 hours. The city is remarkably clean, as is the rest of the Sudan. This is in contrast with other Arab countries where the sides of the road often breathe strong resemblance to a garbage belt.

In Port Sudan we had three days of waiting before our car got released, but here in Africa that’s no problem, since time does not exist when you’re waiting. African people are no slaves of time, as we Dutch people are. A train suffering a 10-minutes delay feels like the end of the world to us. Imagine when time does not exist… It is hard to explain, but here in Africa it works just fine. However, how hard we try to feel this rhythm, it is not entirely working for us because we are bounded by these six months away from home. Fortunately in Africa, one can buy time. So here we are spending a vast amount of money on shipping our car from Jordan to Port Sudan instead of waiting until the trouble in Egypt is over.

From Port Sudan we have to take a security guy to the Ethiopian border, because officially our car is not in Sudan but ‘in transit to Ethiopia’. Déjà-vu? We will spare you the details, but it was impossible to get our car into Sudan ‘for tourist purposes’, and it almost ended up in Djibouti as a result.

We leave on Wednesday the 4th in the afternoon, drive the Saharan outback by night, sleep 4 hours in our car in front of the police office in El Gedarif and get ready at 07.00 AM for our last 200 km drive in Sudan. Eventually we start around noon and reach safe haven Tim and Kim village in Gorgora (Ethiopia) half an hour before midnight on pakjesavond. It even feels like St Nicolas thought about us and sent a very welcome present: plenty of delicious cold beers.

Ethiopia really is a world of difference from Sudan. The latter mainly consists of wide, hot, dusty semi-arid plains, which are sometimes cut by quite imposing rock formations. The rural Sudanese are very friendly people, living in make-shift sheds composed of whatever they can find in the area (which occasionally involves body-parts of wrecked trucks), trying to get by from what little the country has to offer. Within some tens of kilometers from the border crossing the surroundings are entirely different.

Driving steadily uphill towards the East African Rift the temperature drops from high 30’s into the 20’s, the plains become gentle sloping basalt hills covered with lush meadows and abundant vegetation, while the sheds make way for mud-and-straw huts. This is diametrically opposite to the barren, starvation-plagued country that springs onto mind (at least of ours) when hearing the word ‘Ethiopia’. All of a sudden the roads through the villages are packed with cattle and people; even in the more remote areas it is hard to even take a pee without somebody approaching you. Primary school English appears to consist of only two words, being ‘you’ and ‘money’, but smile-and-wave proofs to be an adequate way of dealing with the kids.

Initially we thought about driving north to Aksum, then east and south, avoiding Addis Abeba, as it is possible to get a Kenyan visa at the Moyale border-crossing. However, as political stability is not Africans strongest side, this border is temporarily closed due to two local tribes causing havoc in northern Kenya. Because of this we now find ourselves in Ethiopia’s capital, again reviewing our options. We will drive to Moyale and check the situation there, but might be forced to take the western crossing at Lake Turkana, which will be an adventurous one to say the least.