The Worst Day in Africa... Ever! (Part 2)

According to their website, the good people at the Libya Tourist Board are hoping to attract over 1.5 million tourists in 2010. Or something along these lines – I’m not really one for fact checking. This is all very well, there’s some good stuff to see in Libya, but 1.5 million tourists is a rather ambitious target considering that it is such a pain in the scrotum to get into the damn country.

Back in Aswan, other than eating inhuman quantities of McDonald’s, we managed to get in touch with the Libya fixer recommended to us by the snappily dressed Belgian chaps we met at the Sudan border. Mr Hamid (whitepens@yahoo.com) is a good sort and assured us that there would be no problem getting a visa. This, however, was the easy part.

Visitors to Libya are obliged by law to be accompanied at all times by a guide (read: minder). As a consequence of us breaking down earlier that day, we arrived at the Libyan border four hours late to find our guide, Mr Fathi (pronounced ‘fatty’ – chortle), patiently waiting for us.

After introducing himself, Mr Fathi (chortle) and Giles set about visiting various offices to attain various pieces of paper that would then be stamped and traded for various certificates that would, in theory, grant us passage through the country.

We came to the conclusion that customs officials from Sudan upwards must have a running wager as to who could delay us for the longest: seven hours elapsed from the moment we met Mr Fathi (chortle) to the moment we extracted our car from customs. On the bright side, we did manage to get the car out that evening; there was a danger that we’d have to sleep at the border and complete the rigmarole the next day. This meant that we were able to get on the road first thing, rather than endure another half day of eye-bleeding bureaucratic nonsense.

Just as we did in Egypt, we would have driven through the night were it not for the fact that it’s illegal for foreigners to travel after sunset. When asked why this was, Mr Fathi (chortle) simply replied: ‘It is to avoid troubles.’

Reading between the lines: there are lots of vampires in Libya.

The Worst Day in Africa... Ever! (Part 1)

We’d made Cape to Cairo without having to change a tyre, so we were due a puncture. It came at the end of an 804-mile day, just as we were pulling into Matruh. Little did we know this would be the first of many setbacks that we would endure over the next 24 hours. We refuelled and then, tired as we were, had a small boy change the tyre for us. Whoever said that child labour is a bad thing hasn’t had a flat in the middle of the desert at 11.30pm. Once we were able, we headed into town and found a hotel, which we once again checked out of after four hours sleep.

Our fatigue, combined with the freezing, pitch black morning had dulled our senses and we duly missed the turning for the border town of Salum. It took us over an hour to find the road again, during which time we witnessed a truck ahead of us veer off the road. It was dark and we were moving quickly, so much so we passed it before really realising what had happened. Initially I thought it had rolled, but it appeared to be upright when we passed it. It only occurred to me that I should have stopped a mile on. We couldn’t turn back and I was gripped by guilt – I should have stopped, but it was too late now. Was it? We alerted a policeman at a nearby checkpoint. He seemed to understand and my torment was partially alleviated. Partially.

Karma caught up with us 20 minutes later when the car began to lose power. Within 30 minutes we could only just muster 20mph. Things had started to go wrong just as time had got tight.

Giles volunteered himself to hitch ahead and find help, leaving Davy and I to crawl along towards the miniature buildings we could just about make out on the horizon. Thirty minutes later we arrived at a garage where Giles had long been trying to convey our troubles by way of wild gesticulation to a man in dirty overalls. Despite the gentleman’s functional attire, he claimed he knew nothing of mechanics. Join the club. He did, however, point us to a garage further down the road. We started up our faltering engine and proceeded onward.

There were no mechanics at the next garage either. We would have to solve the problem for ourselves. Oh dear.

We dusted off our Haynes manual and began thumbing through its pages in search of a solution to our predicament. After much speculation, Giles guessed that the problem lay with the fuel filter. Davy and I were inclined to agree since it was due for a change (every 12,000 miles, apparently), plus the fact it was one of many possible causes for our problems that we could fix for ourselves.

Previously, we’d only ventured under the bonnet to clean the air filter and to check water and oil levels – and even then we weren’t entirely sure what we were doing, we’d just make a point to do it when girls were around. Two of us prodded aimlessly around, while the other dictated from the manual. If we hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere, freezing and increasingly falling behind schedule, we’d have appreciated the comedy value of the scene. As it stood, the humour was lost on us.

At least we had managed to locate the fuel filter and thanks to Mr Haynes, wherever and whoever he is, had a vague idea of how to change it. But we couldn’t get the damn thing to budge and since our combined mechanical experience is tantamount to that of a dead cat we were reluctant to apply our trademark brute force (ahem).

We began to despair. We were in the middle of a freezing, sand-swept desert and there wasn’t a mechanic in sight. Christmas had never seemed so far away.

We took a break from our fool’s errand, each responding to the stress of the sitiation in our own different way. Giles, ever the pragmatist, went off in search of help; Davy went to find a cigarette (having ‘given up’ he didn’t have any on his person); and I went for a poo.

I returned to find the car surrounded by a colourful array of headscarves and football shirts. A minibus had stopped to refuel, prompting Davy to approach its driver for a cigarette (rather than for help, such were his priorities). At this, the driver and his passengers alighted to offer advice in shouts of incomprehensible broken English. The driver took control of the situation by retrieving his tool box and setting about the fuel filter and its related components.

As he worked, I did my best to field questions I couldn’t really understand about Allah. After a lot of pointing to the sky, to which I gave an enthusiastic thumbs up – I tried to change the subject to football; a sure bet in any country.

‘Arsenal!’ I cried.

‘Allah!’ Came the reply.

The football stadium might be the new place of worship in England, but it was clear where people’s loyalties lay in Egypt.

Seeing the driver was almost done replacing the fuel filter, I extracted myself from this increasingly awkward conversation and sat behind the wheel to rev the engine a little. Once the air had been pushed out of the system (again, excuse the terminology, I have no idea of what I’m talking about), I took our ailing mare out for a test drive and, much to my relief, she seemed to have recovered.

We thanked the minibus driver – who did not ask for money, regardless of the opportunist entreaties of some of his passengers – and set our sights on Libya.

The morning’s adversity may have tested our patience, but it was nothing in comparison to the ordeal we were to suffer at the border. After all, mechanical problems tend to have logical solutions, but logic does not come into play at Egyptian border crossings. Though not as painful as the 21 different procedures Giles endured to extract our car from the port at Aswan, we still had to deal with two and a half hours’ worth of idiocy to escape a country that we were becoming increasingly fed up with.

Three US dollars departure tax to the ‘official’ wearing a full AC Milan tracksuit. Ten Egyptian pounds to have our car ‘checked’, and another ten to a fat man in an office (for no other apparent reason that he was fat and had an office all to himself...)

Considering that Egypt has more other tourists per annum than any other African nation, they do go out of their way to make the life of overland visitors utter misery. The three of us agreed that if we were ever to come back to Egypt we’d fly.

The Cape to Cairo Club

Hitherto we had no need to travel at night, but if we were going to be home for Christmas, we would be required to drive after the sun went down. Though we had commissioned German Chris (paying him in cartons of cigarettes since he wouldn’t accept money) to fix our faulty headlights in Wadi Halfa, driving on Egyptian roads alongside Egyptian drivers at night was still a new and somewhat intimidating experience.

Nevertheless, we made good time and were in Luxor by 8pm that evening. But new frustration lay in wait for us at the police checkpoint. Egypt’s love of petty laws and bureaucracy dictates that foreigners aren’t allowed to drive from Luxor onwards after 6pm. Even in daylight hours tourists are technically required to travel with a police escort. But perhaps I’m being overly cynical: acts of terrorism have been a huge detriment to Egypt's tourism industry, so it’s understandable that the government have taken such precautions.

Despite this setback, an officer told us in broken English that it would be possible to buy a permit for night travel from the police station in town.

What was a glimmer of hope deteriorated into a wild goose chase, with us bouncing from police station to police station only to be told at 11.30pm that there was no chance of continuing that night. Disheartened, we took modest lodgings at an innocuous, unmemorable hotel, which we left four hours later to continue our journey.

It was a new day, but the same obstacles remained. We arrived back at the checkpoint at 5.30am, only to be told we could not proceed until 6am. We sat and waited in stewed silence, taunted by the steady stream of local traffic that passed by unhindered.

After receiving crackled confirmation that we could proceed, an apologetic police officer sent us on our way. It was 6.10am and the sun had begun to rise. Not for the first time on our journey were we treated to a sky set ablaze in pinks, purples and reds – a sunrise that only served to remind us of all that we were missing in northern Africa. The Valley of the Kings was minutes away, but we had no time to see it.

A number of overlanders we’d met heading south had advised not to bother stopping at the minor checkpoints. It wasn’t a legal requirement and we’d only be hindered by bored policemen looking for something to do. As such, we agreed only to stop at checkpoints where the guns were big enough to scare us. Happily, there were none and we laughingly sped through three, followed only by the shouts of the sleepy-eyed policemen that we’d caught off guard.

Rather than take the more direct inland route to Cairo, we opted for the coastal road, which gave us three lanes of motorway to play with. With the Red Sea to our right and the open road ahead, we soon outran worry and fatigue.

As we approached the capital, the three-lane motorway bottlenecked into a single carriageway and we were sucked into Cairo’s clogged arteries. It was chaos, and it was just my luck to be driving. Davy has long established himself as our ‘city specialist’, but he had clocked up a hefty mileage that morning and so it was down to me to nervously navigate the city’s notoriously hazardous roads.


With no visibility in the rear view mirror, our Land Rover isn’t the most city-friendly of vehicles. However, its hulking size does count for something, namely the fact that we will win most collisions and thus it’s in the best interest for even the most reckless drivers to give us a wide berth (more so when my peripheral vision and I are behind the wheel). As such, we navigated our way towards the pyramids, which soon revealed themselves: alien silhouettes among Cairo’s modern tower blocks. The site was surreal and magnificent to equal measure, which is just as well since our 5.30pm arrival meant we were too late to visit them. We didn’t care. The exhilaration of finally completing the fabled Cape to Cairo had taken hold of the four of us. We celebrated by bribing our way onto the golf course next to the pyramids and taking photos. If anything, this absurd scenario will remain more memorable than if we had visited the pyramids properly.

We didn’t dwell on our achievement for long. We wanted to escape Cairo before 6pm in case the same road rules applied as in Luxor. We bid Marcus, the honorary gentleman explorer, farewell and set off into the night. We’d come a long way, but our journey was far from over.

Go Hard, Get Home

One minute more, and the wager would be won. Andrew Stuart and his partners suspended their game. They left their cards, and counted the seconds.

At the fortieth second, nothing. At the fiftieth, still nothing.

At the fifty-fifth, a loud cry was heard in the street, followed by hurrahs, and some fierce growls.

The players rose from their seats.

At the fifty-seventh second the door of the saloon opened; and the pendulum had not beat the sixtieth second when Phileas Fogg appeared, followed by an excited crowd who had forced their way through the club doors, and in his calm voice, said, “Here I am, gentlemen!”

The battle of elbows didn’t come until we docked in Aswan. We arrived at 9.30am as opposed to the initial ETA of 1pm. There was a chance we could get our car through customs that same day and be on the road by Friday. Excellent.

But there’s no place for optimism in Aswan. Nor for common sense. We were kept on the boat for five hours for no particular reason. Customs officials and unkempt, smoking police officers loitered apathetically on the shore, while we waited... and waited. The sun climbed higher, heating tempers as it did. Reading Tim Butcher’s antics in the Congo could only keep my frustrations at bay for so long. We had cheerfully tolerated nine days in the Nubian Desert simply because we had no other choice, but to be in spitting distance from Egypt and be kept waiting for this long was unbearable.

At last there came a call for foreigners with vehicles to disembark. We hurriedly collected our bags and headed downstairs. We descended into carnage. Other than the overlanders (there were nine other vehicles) who had stayed on deck, every man, woman and child had crammed themselves in the hull on arrival, assuming (understandably) that they’d be able to disembark now the boat had docked. Men were yelling angrily, children were crying and women were shrieking; all under the ‘watchful’ eye of the police, whose crowd control (or lack thereof) had been the cause of the chaos.

Nevertheless, we were ordered to make for the door and were left no other choice but to force our way through the already volatile crowd. Weeks earlier a ferry had capsized in Bangladesh because everyone had rushed at once to the exit, causing the boat to topple over. Images of the ship springing a leak and the ensuing stampede haunted my thoughts, giving me extra incentive to get out as soon as possible. I took a deep breath, dropped my shoulder and dived into the heaving sea of humanity.

We’d made it.

Well, not quite.

We were led into the decrepit customs hall (aptly misspelled on signs as ‘Customs Hole’) and led into a small office dominated by a corpulent, self-important official who proceeded to waste our time for another two hours. At least by this stage, the woeful inefficiency and downright stupidity of whole situation had become comical.

Since Friday is the start of the weekend in Egypt, we were told that the earliest we could retrieve our car was Saturday. We were expecting this, but the delay didn’t help our plans. At best, we’d be on the road by the December 12, giving us just 11 days (from the beginning, we had always intended to arrive in the UK on Dec 23) to make it back for Christmas.

Frustrated, but resigned to our fate, we took a taxi into town and straight to McDonald’s. Twenty seven chicken nuggets, three Big Mac meals and three McFlurries later, we went to the pub. Being stranded in Aswan for an extra day perhaps wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Giles, to his credit, took one for the team and went to sort out the car the next morning. Davy and I offered (half-heartedly) to assist him, but we were told that only one person per vehicle could go. We waved Giles off, and went to McDonald’s.

Giles reported back at 3pm (he’d left at 8am). The cars wouldn’t be ready until Sunday. Sunday December 13. We’d lost yet another day. We went to the pub.
We now had just ten days to get back for Christmas. One car, two ferries, five countries, 6,000 kilometres, and ten days... Technically, we could do it, but it was going to be tight.

When we told people that we still planned to be home before December 25, they’d laugh, scoff, or shake their head. ‘Why don’t you just enjoy the rest of your journey and miss Christmas?’ They’d ask.

They had a point. Why the rush? Well, for one, there’s only so much money I can borrow off Giles before breaking into heavy sobs every time I look in the mirror. More importantly, perhaps, Christmas is the only thing Davy and I can look forward to in the near future, other than being unemployed and watching copious amounts of daytime TV.

And, of course, we want to be home by Christmas so we get lots of presents. I’m kidding. We want to be home for Christmas because we said we would be. Simple as that. It’s the principle. It’s our very own gentleman’s wager – not with the patrons of the Reform Club, but with ourselves.

Obviously, the dynamic of the journey will change – it’ll be a race against time rather than a road trip – but ultimately driving, getting from point A to B has always been the essence of this adventure.

December 13 – lucky for some, we hoped. Giles left for the port at the slightly more leisurely time of 10am, while Davy and I busied ourselves buying supplies for what was set to be an epic journey. We would be accompanied as far as Cairo by Marcus (www.blogabond.com/MarucsInAfrica), an honorary gentleman explorer who we met in Wadi Halfa. Though the spare passenger seat had previously been reserved for attractive European women and Masai warriors, we were happy for Marcus’ company. He was a personable and vociferous character, just the kind of person we needed to help keep the driver awake.

Around 3.30pm, Giles arrived back with the car. It was an emotional reunion, but we didn’t dwell for long – we packed and refuelled and set course for Cairo.

Sudan by Numbers

Day 64 21.11.09
Gonder (Ethiopia)-Geradef
Accommodation: Again, I can’t remember...
Distance: 217 miles (though this can’t be verified since we reset the odometer some way into the journey)

Day 65 22.11.09
Geradef-Wad Medani
Accommodation: The Continental (SDG 90)
Distance travelled: 115 miles

Day 66 23.11.09
Wad Medani-Khartoum
Accommodation: Friends
Distance travelled: 125 miles

Day 67-71 24.11.09-28.11.09
Rest day

Day 72 29.11.09
Khartoum-Abu Dom
Accommodation: The desert
Distance travelled: 217 miles

Day 72-Day 81 30.11.09-09.12.09
Abu Dom-Wadi Halfa
Accommodation: The desert (apart from nights of Dec 7&8 – Nile Hotel SDG 9 per person)
Distance travelled: 365 miles

Total distance travelled: 1,039 miles (approx)

Surviving Wadi Halfa

The sun rose from underneath its dune-dimpled blanket to illuminate our first morning in the desert in pink and red hues. Such sunrises should stay with a man for the rest of his days, but I could only think how rubbish I’d be in prison. Nine days in the desert isn’t a life sentence by any stretch of the imagination, but the thought of keeping ourselves entertained until the ferry came was daunting to say the least. Circumstance had trapped us in a sandy Shawshank (without the unremitting threat of buggery) and I was the fat man who breaks down on the first night.

We had no other choice but to make the best of our situation, so we set about devising a daily routine that would ensure we left Wadi Halfa with our sanity partially intact. The first thing we had to do was slow down – from the way we talked to the pace at which we walked. At its fastest, life in Wadi Halfa was no more than a crawl and we had to act accordingly: we stayed in bed for as long as we could (no later than 8am on account of the cold), a slow drive into town, and then coffee or tea at one of the town’s ubiquitous sitchai stands.


Here, ladies wrapped in colourful cotton shawls prepare anything from hibiscus tea to mint tea to spiced coffee; the ingredients for each are nimbly plucked from the glass jars that line their tin-chest work counter. Not a drop is spilled as leaves are mixed with spices and piping hot water, which is then strained into a dainty glass presented on a similarly styled tea tray. One coffee would be followed in quick succession by another – an antidote to the cold sleeplessness of the previous night.

The sun might slow Wadi Halfa to a near standstill, but it fuels its friendliness. As we sat sipping coffee, ‘Salaam Alaikum’ rings in our ears and hands are offered to be shaken. Curiosity or small talk never ends in a sales pitch, just good wishes or an insistence to pay for our drinks.

Morning coffee is followed by breakfast. After the disappointment of not finding falafel on our first evening in Wadi Halfa, it is abundant come morning: hot and freshly fried. We wolf it down with bread, beans, aubergine, rocket (seriously) and chilli paste. A far cry from soggy cereal, but a million times the meal.

By now we’ve broken the back of the morning and proceed to walk off our breakfast. In Africa you only walk to get somewhere, so walking for the fun of it doubtless seems strange to the locals – not least because our aimless rambles often had us unwittingly stumble across landfills, military bases and, on one occasion, a man taking a dump by the lake.

Only our first morning saunter proved to be productive, in that we chanced across Mr Mahir (overlanders take note: mashansharti@yahoo.com), our celebrity ferry fixer. In hindsight, chance probably had nothing to do with it – he doubtless spotted us from afar (we weren’t hard to miss) and came over to introduce himself. Without a second thought we handed him our passports. In any other town, in any other part of the world, this would have been the height of stupidity. But even if Mr Mahir was a smooth-talking con artist, it wouldn’t have been difficult to track him down in a town of 12 people*. Also, we were reassured by the fact he invited us to his house that afternoon.


Indeed, visiting Mr Mahir’s house became another aspect of our routine. Not only did we pop over to talk business (read: make sure we got the hell out of Wadi Halfa as soon as possible), but with Sudanese hospitality being what it is, we were also fed and invited to lounge in the shade of his walled garden. Here we were introduced to an Italian lady and her rather unique German boyfriend. The two of them had been in Wadi Halfa a week already (it turns out that the November 25 ferry had been cancelled too), but considering that they had been travelling for 12 years, what’s another week?

Once our urban activities had been exhausted we’d return to the desert. Here we’d wander listlessly wearing only our underwear until nightfall, whereupon we went to bed.

The repetition of our routine soon familiarised us with the townspeople: the policemen at the checkpoint, the ladies at the coffee stands, the market vendors hawking their wares, and anyone selling falafel: ‘Ah, the Gentleman Explorers!’ They’d say with a laugh and a wave. ‘Their exploits through eastern Africa are the stuff of legend. And now they’re here in our own little town – who would believe it?!’

Admittedly our Arabic is in its formative stages, but it certainly looked as though they were saying this.

The days wore on. And while we were buoyed by the friendliness of Wadi Halfa’s, how we longed for Egypt – how we longed for Egypt and its tolerance of vice, of alcohol, of Big Macs and all the other culturally progressive exports of Western society...

For our last two nights in Wadi Halfa, we treated ourselves to a stay at the Nile Hotel. The only indication that the Nile Hotel is indeed a hotel is the sign reading ‘Nile Hotel’ above the door. Otherwise it is much the same as every other building in town: it has walls, it has a roof and it has beds. But after seven nights in the desert, this was all we needed.


Our stay at the Nile afforded us the luxury of exploring the little town by night.

Of course, there wasn’t a great deal to explore, but we passed time sitting in cafes and smoking shisha, reminiscing about nights of near insanity in the desert and our heroic falafel consumption.

But something had changed. The sleepy little town that we’d become so fond of (I think it’s called Stockholm Syndrome) had a different air to it. Its pace had quickened. A sense of purpose pervaded. Wadi Halfa was preparing for a storm. But windows weren’t being shuttered nor hatchets locked down – this storm would take shape in clouds of North Face fleeces, sunburned faces, SLR cameras and questionable facial hair.

Previously the toast of the town, the Gentleman Explorers found themselves lost amidst two cancelled ferries’ worth of travellers, tourists and local traders. A week of patience would count for nothing and we prepared ourselves for a battle of elbows to secure best deck space. The hardest part of our escape from Wadi Halfa, it seemed, had yet to come.

*There are more than 12 people in Wadi Halfa. But only just.

The End of the Earth

After travelling lightyears through the Nubian moonscape we arrived at Moon Base Wadi Halfa only to find it devoid of human life. We had the end of the earth all to ourselves. If we had been in space we could at least have put an end to it all by taking off our space suits and happily exploding. But we were very much on earth – the end of the earth, maybe – but earth nonetheless. And we were here to stay.

We drove to the port. There might be one boat, just one, that could take us to Egypt before December 9.

There was a boat. We negotiated a fee with the captain, a one-armed seadog who made a name for himself ferrying crooks from Miami to Cuba, and were soon sailing into the sunset.

No, this didn’t happen. There was no boat. No boat. No people. No money. No beer. And nine days.

Only one thing could save us now – falafel.

No falafel either.

Our sanity was saved by the one open restaurant in town. A restaurant run by cats. Well, perhaps not run by cats per se, but certainly overrun by cats. The manager was actually a friendly moustached human man with a big loud voice, which he utilised to instruct his three beautiful daughters (and his toothless mother) to prepare us dinner. Three beautiful daughters, you say? Yes, three fine young fillies that could well have made our nine-day stay in Wadi Halfa infinitely more interesting if it wasn’t for a technicality in Sharia Law that states that the busy hands of sweaty foreigners will be unequivocally lopped off if they were to be found in the vicinity of local talent. And that’s word for word from the Koran.

The flickering flames of our loins had been doused, but at least our bellies were full with an eclectic meal of macaroni, hummus and bread. And with this, we peeled off the cats and headed out to the desert.

We hadn’t camped since the dust storm in Amboseli in Kenya and it’s fair to say we were out of practice. Not so much out of practice in regards to putting up tents, but out of practice in the sense we’d lost the feel of camping – the feel of being separated from the elements by a thin piece of material. Ultimately, camping is just a real pain in the arse.


But being on a tight budget meant that we had no other choice than to reconnect with our inner Ray Mears. I would do this by sleeping in the open on the roof of the car while Davy and Giles shared the roof tent. This was a noble gesture, but it’s really not as romantic as it sounds. For one, I was with two other flatulent men, not a woman of loose morals. Secondly, it was freezing – another inconvenience considering my company for the evening. And last of all, it’s rather disconcerting waking up in a bedroom the size of – wait – that is the Nubian Desert.

I’m hoping that by night number nine I’ll have gotten used to it...