It was lucky we’d gone back for the phone: it meant we could call Steve, our mate from BMW in the UK. He was on his way to work and Ewan explained the situation. After a brief discussion he hung up then cut the sensor off completely. He stripped the cabling and exposed the wires. Red, white and brown, he twisted them together.
But the bike still wouldn’t go.
We went back to Steve. He was at work now with another GS1200 in front of him and was trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work. Meanwhile we were at the side of the road in Sudan. Crazy, really; as mad as Russ calling the RAC from Libya. While Steve was mulling it over I suggested to Ewan that maybe the brown wire was an earth and it was only the red and white we needed to twist. He was up for giving that a go but I was worried we might short the computer or something. We waited for Steve to call back and when he did he told us to twist just the red and white wires together. It used to be all three, he said, but now the brown was only there to earth the connection.
Bingo. Wires twisted, the engine went and we were off and running.
EWAN: Thank God for that, I really did have visions of being stuck in the car. Christ, it would’ve been a nightmare.
We were back on the desert road, weaving across the deep ruts, looking for the best line. An hour or so later we closed on the river, the sudden abundance of palm trees indicating its presence. Helmets off we made our way through the bulrushes and there she was, the sun on her back and flowing very fast…the wrong way.
‘I’m serious,’ Charley said. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be going the other way? It flows to Cairo surely, not from it.’
I didn’t know, but it did look as though the current was going the wrong way, but that might have just been the wind gusting.
And then it hit me as sometimes these things just do.
‘Charley,’ I said. ‘Do you realise you’ve ridden your motorbike all the way from John O’Groats to the Nile? What do you think about that?’
‘Fucking stupid. What do we want to do that for?’
He started singing Madness songs and I gazed across the water to where an old fort dominated the headland. With grey stone battlements it looked like something from the time of Christ.
I looked at my feet. ‘Can you see any crocs?’ I said. ‘This river’s supposed to be teeming with them.’
Charley shaded his eyes from the sun. ‘Why don’t you throw yourself in and find out?’
Just love him, don’t you?
We stopped for lunch in a town called Kerma, where kids were unloading melons from a donkey cart and old men sat in the shade drinking water from massive urns placed beneath the trees. We washed our hands using a tap on a barrel and ate rice and vegetables together with a sort of bean curry.
The Swiss couple yesterday weren’t the only people we met – we’d spoken to a Japanese guy on his way north from Cape Town – but the coolest thing had been early yesterday. We were riding along the dirt road in the middle of the desert when up ahead we saw a cyclist approaching, towing a little trailer. Charley was leading and pulled over. The guy just cycled up, nonchalant as you like. ‘Mr McGregor, I presume,’ he said.
Charley told him he’d got us mixed up, but the guy’d been on the road thirteen years so you can hardly blame him. His name was Jason Lewis and he’d left Greenwich in 1994 – just when the Swiss couple were meeting for the first time. He was on his way around the world using human power only. He’d had a mate with him to begin with but he bailed out in Hawaii. They’d crossed the Atlantic in a pedal boat, then the USA on roller blades and another pedal boat to cross the Pacific. Right now Jason was heading for Wozzi hazzer and the lake. If he got permission he planned to kayak all the way to Aswan. It was amazing really, thirteen years – a record among the road-weary we’d met to date.
After lunch we got back on the bikes and headed out of Kerma. We were looking for the way to Dongola and, on the back roads where we’d been directed, we hit deep sand. We were still in the town with kids and donkeys and cars coming at us from all directions. My front wheel took on a life of its own and I could feel myself tensing up badly. My worst fear was hitting a child and here I was sliding everywhere in the middle of a town. Fuck, I hate sand. Really, I fucking hate it.
I managed to make it beyond the buildings without hitting anyone but back on the open road I had two or three falls. I just couldn’t gauge the surface and the wheel would twist and shake me off the bike. I tried to implement all that Charley had told me about leaning back and powering on, but it all felt so alien to my body. I found myself stiffening up and as soon as that happened I was off. Picking up the bike in this heat was strength-sapping and I was becoming very tired very quickly. We rode on and I was OK for a while, my confidence slowly returning and gradually picking up speed. Then I just lost the front and the bike slapped down on its side.
It was a big spill, my foot catching under a pannier, the bike up on its wheels again to crash down on the other side. It really shook me up. It was only recently that I’d broken my leg and until you break something you don’t actually realise that you break, if you see what I mean. Sitting there on the ground I had an ‘I want to go home moment’. Who was I kidding riding through Africa? I just wasn’t good enough, not experienced enough to judge where I could put the bike. Charley was really patient and very encouraging and I thought about Claudio the other day, how he just got back on. So I picked myself up, hauled the bike upright and rode on. If this was the only way to gain experience so be it.
CHARLEY: I really felt for him. Riding on roads like these is hard enough without coming off. Ewan must have fallen five or six times and pretty soon he was exhausted. That’s what saps you, not just your energy but your confidence, your resolve, the will to continue. He looked knackered but he didn’t complain – just carried on regardless. I really admired him for it.
Finally we hit tarmac and oh, did the black stuff feel good. It was nice to use sixth gear for a change, and for a few miles at least we were hauling ass. Of course it was too good to be true and pretty soon we were back on hard sand, sweeping south with the road forking every so often.
We went the wrong way.
We started heading inland and, given there was a car ferry at Dongola, we knew we should be closer to the river. Ewan was ahead, on the pegs and negotiating the corrugated stuff really well. A car came by and I flagged it down, yelled Dongola at the driver whilst pointing the way we were going.
‘No, no. Dongola.’ He pointed back the way we had come.
Ah shit. I set off after Ewan. He was really motoring now and I had to pin it to catch up then get his attention by hitting the horn incessantly.
‘I thought so,’ he told me when we stopped. ‘It didn’t feel right, did it?’
After an eight-mile excursion we finally rode into the sandy town, wide streets and single storey buildings, cars and trucks all over the place. I was following my nose, the smell of the river and finally we came to the quay where cars were lined up waiting for the ferry. The boat was midstream and we parked the bikes alongside old Peugeots and battered pickups to wait. Everyone was dressed in white, most wearing some kind of turban, a couple of drivers squatting side by side at the edge of the water.
The boat docked and the cars backed on and it was only when we were half way across that Ewan pointed out the cars were now facing the right way and us the wrong way.
We met a lad from England, Tom Wilson, who’d been working his way north from Cape Town. His sunglasses were broken, one arm missing, but he wore them anyway. He drank water neat from the Nile, no purifier or anything to kill bugs. He said he was all right on it. He was glad to talk to us because travelling alone could be lonely and he’d not had a decent conversation in weeks. It wasn’t long till he returned to the UK now, though, and he was looking forward to a ham sandwich and packet of ready salted crisps.
He filmed us leaving the boat and riding up to the heaving market where people and cars, donkeys and camels mingled in one monstrous mêlée. We
wished Tom well and hoped he enjoyed his sandwich and then we left him. It was really nice to meet up with other travellers, find out who they were and what they were doing. Generally they were coming the other way and could give us the lowdown on the condition of the roads. According to Tom it was tarmac most of the way to Khartoum.
It was mid-afternoon now and the hottest part of the day. We parked under some palm trees and rested, Ewan really hanging after being on and off the bike for much of the day. He was still there, though, no one was carrying him and he was more worried that he was holding me up.
‘Mate,’ I told him, ‘the pace is irrelevant. We’re going the pace we’re going and we’re seeing the country.’
‘I just can’t deal with the sand.’ He was beating himself up again. ‘I can’t get used to the steering wobble and just powering through. The only thing keeping me upright is the thought of Claudio the other day.’
‘Your crash just now was as bad,’ I told him. ‘You’re doing the same.’
‘But we’ve got deep gravel to come.’
‘Not till Kenya. And it’ll be fine. Remember in Russia, bits of Mongolia; we had that deep stuff. We started out about five or ten miles an hour and in the end we were doing sixty-five.’
EWAN: He was right, but in this heat and being this weary I didn’t feel any better. We’d had our first really strange encounter a little while back. We’d been fixing a loose tank bag when they came up and were yapping away, touching our stuff and one of them had his hand actually in Charley’s bag. Very strange and in your face when up until then everyone had been so friendly.
We were thinking of calling it a day and finding somewhere to camp. We’d seen some open shelters in a couple of the towns and I thought we could throw our sleeping bags down and be close to the bikes. The river was relatively nearby, though (or so we thought), just the other side of a small town, so we headed over that way to see what we could find. The answer was nothing really; the town a bit fleabitten and passing beyond we made for the palms and a spot down by the river. We got to the green stuff and the trail wound on but there was no sign of the water. There were massive thorns everywhere, big enough to puncture tyres. The river was still about half a mile away.
‘Let’s go back to the road,’ I said, ‘bimble on a bit and find a quiet spot.’
Charley agreed and we swung round and headed back the way we had come.
We camped on what looked like moon rock or the ocean bed; a dune of pebbles sheltering us from the road and nothing to break up our horizon but the bikes and setting sun. We were thirty kilometres south of Dongola and we spoke to the others; still on the road and about to stop for the night. We needed petrol and we’d hook up with them in the morning somewhere. We cooked boil-in-the-bag food, and talked about riding in sand and falling off; we talked about our wives and kids and home. I really admired people like Tom, Dave and Amelia; people who took off on their own with no satellite phone or back-up and no one to call when they met trouble.
The following morning we were back on shiny black tarmac. Yee-haw! I loved it, smooth as butter after the trials of yesterday. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the challenge and we’d have plenty more to deal with before we got to Cape Town, but I do my riding on the road and I’m not even bothered about going that fast.
We were heading for Abu Dom and then Khartoum but we needed to get some petrol and intended to turn off the road at Ad Baba. The desert opened again; it was so varied and here it was yellow with a sort of burnt crust. We slowed to a stop as a herd of camels ambled across the scrub, the last one ridden by the herder. I lifted a hand and he came ambling over, an elegant man in a white peakless cap, sitting almost side-saddle with a quirt in his hand. He walked the beast into the middle of the road and sat there looking as if he could have come from any period in history. With nothing beyond him but desert it made for a great picture. We gave him water and tried to explain where we were going and then set off in search of petrol.
We found Ad Baba a little further on, another small Sudanese town with sand roads and square buildings, houses, shops, people milling around and children waving and smiling. The children were incredible. I thought back to the other day when Charley and I stopped for lunch and one little boy came up to me. Taking my hand he held it all the time he spoke to me. I didn’t understand him, but he didn’t realise and he chatted away wide-eyed and all the time kept his wee hand in mine. I managed to get him to tell a man who spoke some English what he was trying to tell me, and the man explained he just wanted me to know his name and where he lived, basically who he was. It was a special moment, the darkened interior of a Sudanese cafe; just me and the child. It reminded me how much I missed my own three girls.
CHARLEY: We’d had three hard days on the dusty stuff; even I was delighted with this delicious tarmac and we started to eat up the miles. Sometimes I think we forget how lucky we are. For the people out here a twenty-nine-hour bus ride at ten miles an hour, sitting on hard metal benches while others squat among your luggage on the roof, is normal.
We saw a few of those big buses crammed to the rafters. We also saw a lorry with a bunch of people sitting on the roof of the cab, their legs dangling down in front of the windscreen. Imagine the driver braking hard: they’d slide off and he’d run right over them; made me shudder just to think about it.
This was a real adventure now. What with all we’d been through since we left the boat, it felt like three weeks, never mind three days. The riding had been tough, the roads pretty nasty and I have to say it was great to be back on asphalt.
We passed a dead camel in the middle of the highway; recent road kill, maybe only moments before. It was stretched out; head tipped back as if its neck had been broken. The way the light was and with the flatness of the land it would have been so easy to come on it at speed and not see it. Fortunately truckers coming the other way waved at us to slow down.
I was looking forward to a shower; we’d not had one since Aswan and that was days ago. It was forty degrees and the dirt clung to me; sand in my hair, my eyes, itchy against my skin.
Past lunchtime and we came to Abu Dom – a sprawling madness, an everlasting town that just seemed to go on and on. We were directed into a market place, where cars and vans and buses were all jammed together. I asked a tuk-tuk driver if it was the right way to go. He indicated another direction so off we went again and still the town went on. In the end we were pulling up at junctions and both of us yelling across at drivers, ‘Khartoum? Khartoum?’
From Abu Dom it was pretty built up all the way, and as we came to the outskirts of Khartoum I noticed much newer cars and decent looking buildings, green spaces and no desert, walled gardens and parks even. There was a lot of construction, demolished buildings leaving sand and rubble and piles of bricks making way for new places to go up. We crossed the Nile on an old iron bridge with a soldier watching from a shelter beside the road. He was just sitting there with his 50-calibre machine gun, cool as you like, chilling out in the shade.
We were both tired now and the deeper we got into the capital the more excited I became. Ewan was full of it; the traffic, the roundabouts, the crazy mad junctions when the world and his wife seemed to be coming at you. Thank God for the traffic cops in white uniforms perched on their little islands.
Ewan yelled across how he loved cities and I knew what he meant – after three days in the desert it was great to be among so many people; the hubbub, the noise, even the smell of diesel. The skyline was dominated by a weird looking white building with mirrored glass. It reminded me of a sail or, as Ewan put it, a twisted egg: the Al-Fatih Hotel. It turned out we were staying in a hotel next door. We pulled up, parked the bikes and hauled our gear off. Ewan said he smelled like a badger’s arse and went off to have a shower.
The following morning we wanted to film the place where the White Nile meets the Blue, so we grabbed Claudio and a camera and headed off to the Hilton Hotel. Apparently the best place to view it was from the hotel roof.
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br /> We arrived in a cab and were met by a guy in a yellow SECURITY vest. We introduced ourselves, told him what we wanted to do and showed him the filming permits. He wasn’t sure if we would be able to, but took us into reception.
We asked again and the two guys there didn’t seem very sure; they were very friendly and had no problem with the camera but again asked to see our permits. They put us in touch with another guy in a yellow vest, complete with walkie-talkie. He inspected the permits then said we’d have to wait, so we sat down and ordered Turkish coffees.
Twenty minutes later he came back with an older man called Sami. He told us that there was a problem because the hotel was packed with government security men as the vice-president of Iraq was staying there.
Now we were beginning to understand.
Sami told us he’d have to speak to the general manager. Off he went and we waited and waited and finally the manager appeared. He explained the situation and said he’d see what he could do. We remained in reception and after a little bit more negotiation he came back and told us we could go up.
A few minutes later we were in the lift with another security man heading for the top floor. We came out and turned left, a large door facing us. Seated on a bench outside were two huge guys in dark suits who immediately got to their feet. Very deliberately they stepped in front of the door. We turned for the stairs with a nod and a smile, but they said nothing, their features blank, bulges under their jackets where their Uzis were slung. We found out that this year alone there have been twenty-seven attempts on the vice-president’s life.
‘Twenty-seven,’ Ewan was aghast. ‘Maybe they need to increase their security. I mean we walk in off the street, three guys they don’t know, one with a camera and backpack. An hour later we’re outside his door and not one of us has been searched.’
We had the roof and the view to ourselves. Although it was spectacular in its own way, it wasn’t quite what we’d expected. There were two rivers, one a little muddier than the other, and there was a massive grassy island between them. I’d been told it was designated for a business suburb, all high rise and mirrored glass. But the confluence wasn’t that special. I suppose we wanted blue water thundering into white. And crocodiles, lots of Nile crocs basking on the sandbanks. A romantic idea I know; this was a city, of course, and the only crocs we came across were the crocodile skin shoes worn by some the guests we’d seen downstairs.
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