Hi again,

Well I can say that I'm a few stories richer once again. I'm writing this at the blue nile sailing club in Khartoum where we've pitched our tent for the next two days.

After organizing all the paper work in Aswan it was time to get the car on the barge on Monday morning. We thought that this would take an hour or two but we were mistaken. Not the first time and surely not the last! We arrived at the port at 9:30 am and quickly got the car and ourselves through customs being helped by the local fixer Mohammed. Then we waited and waited and you guessed it waited and finally at 4 pm we could drive the car on our barge. At this point we thought that the barge would be traveling with us to Sudan but I'll get back to that later.

After loading the car it was time for us to go on board. If you look at the pictures you can see that this was no easy task. The boat had over 580 passengers and normally only carried 250! 300 Lybian refugees were coming along as well! After pushing and shoving we finally made it on board and preceeded to our second class airline Seats. I'm not sure what airline they were refering to as wooden benches have never been used on aeroplanes! Needless to say all the benches were taken up either by people sleeping on them or filled with every imaginable item ie. Blenders, tv's, speakers, blankets etc.

So we decided that we would have to find another place to sit out our voyage. We eventually found a quiet place and that happened to be one of the lifeboats. We figured that this was probably also the safest! Unfortunately every hour or so someone demanded that we get out. I decided to go and ask the 'cabin manager'if a first class cabin was still available as this would at least get us some privacy and hopefully some sleep.

Luck was on our side and he had two beds in two seperate cabins. I then persuaded one of the 'tenants'with the help of some $$ to move and Maurice and I had our very own first class cabin. Not exactly the QE2 I might add... I must tell you as well that this was probably the filthiest place that I have ever stayed in overnight. But Judge for yourself.

After our cruise down the nile. Ha Ha. We arrived in Sudan in Wadi Halfa, a small border town. We were marched into customs and our new 'fixer'led us through the paperwork. We enquired when our car was arriving and were now told a day later. The barge would not be getting any speeding tickets! Ok well off to a hotel then. Wadi Halfa has seven hotels and all are the same price, 7 Sudanese pounds pp. That is equivelent to about 2euros. Nice and cheap we thought. The reason was that all the hotels have mud brick rooms with sand floors, long drop toilets and literally Bucket showers. I don't think there is a star clissification for this type of acomodation.

But we made the best of it and survived the night. The next day we went off exploring at 8 am and were back by 8:30am having seen all the sights. The next hours were passed drinking the local tea and coffee as alcahol is a big nono in sudan. At 4 in the afternoon our fixer arrived and told us that the barge would only be arriving a day later! Just what we wanted to hear, another day in paradise. NOT.

We did however move hotels and our new hotel had tiles instead of sand floors but the rest was pretty much the same.

The next morning we went to the port and waited for our barge witch we saw comming down the nile. After a 2 hour wait we were allowed to drive our car off. We had survived the dreaded Egypt-Sudan crossing!

As quickly as possible we headed off towards Khartoum. We decided on the shortcut which took us straight through the nubian desert. Our only guide being a disused train track. Our road was the desert and... after 250 km's we decided to pitch camp. This would be the very first time that we would be using our rooftop tent on our landrover. We chose a little rock outcrop to be our camp.

After opening the tent we made one of the meals that we had with us from Holland. Swiss cheese fondue in the desert!! Superb! We had a view to kill for and later on the only sound was the wind and when you looked up the entire sky was lit up by stars. I slept very well and at sunrise we stood up and continued on our desert road. Eventually we hit some civilization and we drove on down to our next stop the Pyramids of Meroe just out of Khartoum. Here we also pitched out tent in the desert, only this time we were not behind a hill and the whole evening we had the wind howling through our tent. A good lesson for the next time.

In the morning we went and took a look at the piramids and were not dissapointed. Extremely old but well preserved and of course plenty of pictures to take home. After this we headed to Khartoum and our next camp, the blue nile sailing club. We arrived and the first people I spoke to were two Dutch couples also doiung the same trip but they started in Cape town. And as the World is a very small place one of the ladies happened to recognise me? She was a flight attendent who worked for KLM cityhopper six monthes ago!

We pitched tent and went for a swim in the Blue nile. While we were at the waterfront we started talking to two guys sitting in a speedboat. They offered to take us out for a trip down the nile and to see where the blue and white niles come together.

A few hours ago we were in the desert and now we were heading down the nile in a speedboat... Things do change quickly!

We had some dinner and have been talking to our neighbours who have given us lots of usefull tips for the way down to Cape town.

Tomorrow we'll be going into Khartoum to organise some paperwork at the Embassy for our border crossing into Ethiopia.

We've made it to sudan in record time and now we can really start to take it easy, from now on we'll be on African time.