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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 Hammond2006-06-25 19:24:18
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the heat of the day in a civil engineer's tent, we learnt that the development was to re-house people who are shortly to be displaced by a massive dam building project to rival Egypt's Aswan High Dam. The dam will provide reliable electricity and irrigation for Northern Sudan - an objective hard to criticise, despite what we can only assume is a controversial project.
Ruth, who by now had been struck by the bug too, was in a bad way by the afternoon. Toby's bike suffered a serious blow-out that he couldn't repair with the tools he had, that is ten fingers.
Owy:
"Somehow Toby had managed to get a flat through two tires as his slick was inside his knobbie. After successfully managing this he somehow arranged for the tube to work its way out of two sets of tires and wind its way around the axle. Toby appeared out of the desert with a pair of trousers on his head and in high spirits despite the tire problems, the story and the remains of a tube put the rest of the team into hysterics"
As it got dark, the others guided the ailing pair in to the safety of the start of the tarmac road with their flashing bike lights as beacons, winking across the sand. An encouraging whiff of tar and tarmac, and we were there. Never before have I appreciated the value of a hard road. The road from Khartoum to Abu Dom has been built in the last 2 years through the combined efforts of the local communities, and the arrival of the tarmac can transform the way of life in these remote and very poor villages, bringing trade and goods never previously available.
22nd Abu Dom (tarmac) to some desert (tarmac) 116km
An early start, and an impressive mileage, though it turned out that the northern end of the road wasn't quite finished. The frustration of having to unexpectedly deal with patches of rough sand and ruts for a few hours soon evaporated when the road became properly smooth, and we whizzed along with
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See photographs from:
Egypt Gallery
