Off the Road and Into Rural Sudan

Even though there is a paved road which runs from Khartoum to Ethiopia, cycling the length of Africa apparently isn’t challenging enough so the route which we took looped round the south of this onto a dirt track, skirting Dinder National Park; this gave us three days of off road riding and the chance to pass through some of Sudan’s more rural villages.

It may look like Elysium from Gladiator but
it's not fun to cycle on...

The off road riding was a very different challenge. Each year the roads are flooded, effectively resetting them, and are then reformed by passing cars, trucks and donkey carts, passing through all the villages. As the year progresses, the road becomes increasingly corrugated as each vehicle going up and down a bump increases its size, eventually creating an incessantly uneven track. This leads to a relentless jarring as you bounce along.  Much more concentration is needed as you are constantly working to pick out the least bad bit of road.  Holding on to the handle bars tighter and focusing on balance as you are thrown about also makes drinking much more difficult – we sometimes found ourselves having to stop just to be able to take on fluids.  The tougher terrain also led to a number of falls by Ali (Lizzie is clearly a better bike handler), as his wheels stopped dead when he hit a patch of looser dirt. At the end of each day, the line for the nurse was extensive due to the large number of falls and crashes.  A vast number of thorn bushes by the side of the road, also took their toll – Ali got four punctures and Lizzie got two on the first day alone.

Ali's elbow after an off-road 'incident'

Despite the shorter distances, on these days the kilometres took what felt like forever to tick by, keeping us out much later in the heat of the day, which on two days hit 50 degrees. This was exacerbated by the inability to drink whilst riding due to the corrugations. Below is a picture of Lizzie after the third off-road day, shortly before she was taken ill by some serious heat stroke, which took its toll for the next few days. The dirt all over her is standard from a day’s riding, but the vacant expression was unusual!

A Victorian Chimney Sweep

In these three days we got a look into rural Sudanese life.  Pedaling along paths lined with head high crops, we would pass through tiny villages of mud huts where classrooms of children would come out to cheer us on.  Having not seen any one for miles, we’d come across a herder with his goats, moving them on to find water, or a bunch of camels eating from some roadside trees.  We rode for 100km along a railway line where the tracks were broken and rutted, clearly unused for years, but which still formed a clear highway for the passing traffic of bikes, pedestrians and donkey carts.

If British Rail hadn't been privatised....

One of our fellow riders missed a turn and ended up 30km away from where he should have been, with no water and no idea where he had gone wrong. He stopped in one of these small villages, where he managed to find someone who spoke English, and who knew of the village where we were camping that night. Incredibly, the villager even knew that there were cyclists in the area, through the grapevine. They helped him to eventually make contact with our group, and whilst he awaited ‘evac’, he ate freshly baked bread and local coffee with the village chief – that’s hospitality.