Home » Egypt » Cycle to the Summit Part 11 - from Dongola to Khartoum

Most advice says to take a bus from Dongola to Debba - the sand is too deep to cycle through. In this instalment, the intrepid team give it their best shot, get ill, tired, rejoice at the sight of tarmac, and do some moonlit night-riding before making it to Khartoum and the excellent hospitality of a senior french diplomat.

Cycle to the Summit Part 11 - from Dongola to Khartoum

Toby Hammond
2006-06-25 19:24:18

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was a road on the horizon where we had seen trucks passing. It turned out that there is no road at all- they just career across the sand wherever they please, so I failed to flag down any of the occasional vehicles I saw. Two hours later I felt better, and realising it could be a very long wait, I pushed the bike on after the others, and to my amazement found a smooth tarmac road less than a km from where I'd been sitting in the desert.
Spurned on by the excitement of finding tarmac (the stuff of fantasy when you're dragging a laden bike through sand in the heat of the day), I nearly caught up with the others before the road ended as suddenly as it began. I was back in the desert with a cloud of flies buzzing around me - misled by some very inaccurate estimates of distance and 'road' quality from some locals. I was just wondering what to do next, when a gas truck got stuck in the sand nearby, and agreed to take me on to Debba (once they were dug out). As the sun got low on the horizon, me, my bicycle and about 150 gas bottles jumped up and down as the lorry hit the ruts in the road, and I found a hotel to install myself in and rest my dicky stomach.

Meanwhile the others had stayed with a family near to where I caught the truck, and came and found Toby scoffing falafel the following morning in Debba. It was stiflingly hot, so we loafed about until late afternoon, when Ruth discovered her watch had been pinched from her bicycle. Talk of retrieving it by the local police came to nothing, and we set off to get in a few exhausting kilometres in deep sand before sundown.

21st February - nr Debba to the Tarmac Road (Abu Dom) 32km

Having thought that the hallowed tarmac began at Debba, it turned out to be another hard day in the desert before we reached it at the end of the day. Having seen nothing so much as rocks and thorn bushes all morning, we arrived at a building site around lunchtime. Sheltering from the ...