We Wander — Mark & Meghan’s World Travels

Here’s a photo of the wording on the photography permits we had to obtain in the Sudan. They don’t mind if you take pictures of the sand, but pretty much everything else is off limits. Oh, and you’d better only photograph sand that makes the country look good. Or else.

After a couple of relaxed days in Khartoum (and one ridiculous Nile River cruise) we headed out of the city and into the desert. Our destination was Wadi Halfa on Lake Nasser, where we’d be catching a ferry to Egypt. Between us lay over 900 km of Sahara and Nubian desert, 300 km of which has no roads at all. We were in for four days of sweat, dust, dehydration and heat exhaustion, of beautiful nights under the stars and scorching afternoons under the sun.

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We drove the 11.5 hours to Khartoum in one day, mostly to make up for lost time spent waiting at the border. We were camping at the Blue Nile Sailing Club, which was much less posh than it sounds. We spent a couple of days there, mostly trying to adjust to the heat. Since leaving the mountains of Ethiopia, we’d dropped from 11,500 feet to barely over 1,500 feet, and it was hot. Afternoon temperatures were regularly above 40°C. It was hard to believe that less than a week earlier we’d been huddled together in sleeping bags and long underwear to try and stay warm. Water was the drink of choice, followed closely by Coca-Cola. It’s actually ridiculous how much Coke we’ve found ourselves drinking, but it’s just so refreshing in such scorching heat. It’s also an easy way to get some sugar into our systems, which can be a good thing.

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We’ve arrived in Egypt — and rediscovered fast internet. The result: 12 new photo albums for your viewing pleasure. So grab a snack and a drink, click over to the photos page, and enjoy.

Crossing through the Sudan is a leg of our journey that we have anxiously and apprehensively anticipated since booking our African overland trip; our path was to take us through the north-east corner of the country, and it is a stretch that has ever been on our minds. Anyone that has ever watched international news or read anything about the Sudan’s recent history will know that “the Sudan” and “danger” are nearly synonymous terms in many parts of the world. The Canadian Travel Advisory webpage says “Avoid all travel” to the Sudan, and advice from friends and parents is the same. Nevertheless, our truck was bound north through Khartoum and into Nubian Desert on our way to Egypt, a route which is happily distant from the much more volatile and dangerous regions of Darfur and the south. We were headed into the Sudan, and we where about to learn a few things about a country we seemingly weren’t supposed to visit.

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We’re in Wadi Halfa right now, on the border of the Sudan and Egypt. We’ve spent the last week driving through the Nubian Desert from Khartoum, with people dropping like flies from heat stroke. Since we’ve arrived in this small, dry town, we’ve spent three days sitting in the heat waiting for our ferry to depart. The temperature yesterday peaked at a cool 47 degrees Celsius, in the shade. We’ve never had to drink this much water in our lives. Someone told us that it hasn’t rained here since 1991, and then only for half an hour. It’s another world.

Today we get on a 30 hour ferry that will take us to Aswan in Egypt. Our budget ferry tickets get us luxurious placement on the ship: we will spend all 30 hours laying on the top deck, on the floor, competing for space under the lifeboats for some hint of shade. We will be in Egypt with the Oasis truck for another two weeks, and after that we’ll be back on our own, just two wanderers with a lot of distance left to cover. We’ve decided to take 6 weeks or so to travel up through the Middle East and through Eastern Europe on our way to the UK, where we’ll be catching another ship across the Atlantic. This time we’ll be stopping in Norway, the Faroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, and Iceland, before disembarking in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

We’ll be treated to some A/C and some internet in Aswan, so we’ll share more details then. Also watch for some new posts about our time in Sudan, as long as we don’t melt before we get out of here!

The last stop on our little tour of northern Ethiopia was the Simien Mountains National Park. We arrived in the small city of Debark the night before our scheduled trek, and took advantage of the hot showers and fresh coffee available there. The following morning we piled into our bus and began the slow, winding drive into the park itself. The roads were something else: being the rainy season, we were often driving axle-deep through puddles of mud and water, and we even pulled a couple of semi-controlled slide/drifts around some of the muddy switchback corners. That’s a little unnerving when the valley below you drops away a thousand feet sheer. Luckily we had a very good driver, and he successfully negotiated all of the dangers without incident.

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We left the Oasis truck in Bahir Dar for a 6-night tour of Northern Ethiopia by bus. Although we left the truck, 20 of the 23 people on board opted to do the same tour, so it was the same crowd (mostly), but a different vehicle. We were in for a driving marathon, spending 43 hours on the bus and covering nearly 1200km in 7 days. We were on a mission to visit three significant destinations: Lalibela, home of the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia, Axum, the ancient centre of the Axumite Dynasty, and the Simien Mountains National Park. Lalibela was our first stop on the loop, and the one that I was looking forward to the most. We would be visiting 11 churches there, each one carved by hand into the solid rock of the surrounding landscape. According to one of the guidebooks we read, these rock-hewn churches would be one of the 7 Wonders of the World, if only they weren’t in Ethiopia. I suppose what they mean by this is that the churches simply aren’t that well known outside of the country, and had they been in, say, Egypt (perhaps alongside the pyramids), they would likely have attracted much more attention, along with much larger crowds of tourists. The hidden advantage of the situation is that the churches are not yet overrun with outsiders and sightseers, and many of the churches are still functioning as they always have. We felt like an extremely large and unwieldly group as we made our way through the small underground passageways that connected the buildings, but we felt (perhaps paradoxically) fortunate not to have to share the sites with any other large and unwieldly groups. Such is the joy of visiting a tourist attraction not yet discovered by tourists!

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One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days. From this end of it, it seems to have flown by, but when we think back on how much we’ve seen and done, I realize how long a year can be. It’s been without a doubt the best year of our lives. Check out the Breadcrumb page to see our latest routes. Here are a few of our latest stats:

Average speed over land: 44.2 km/h
Distance covered in Africa alone: 17,569 km
Number of hours spent in transit (excluding flight): 1581
Total distance covered (excluding flight): 62,678 km (1.57x around the equator)
Average time driving in the Oasis truck per day: 4.5 hrs.

After much delay, here’s the long-ago promised video of us sandboarding in Namibia! You can check out the original post here for all the details on our day on the dunes.