Leaving Egypt

So there we were in a city we didn’t know dragged to a place where we would be able to fix our badly injured car. After half an hour cruisin’ in the mostly industrial town of Suez we indeed found the place. It was like nothing we’ve seen before; a small village alongside the actual town, that consisted only of little shacks that fixed cars, or parts of it. The first second after we placed Doutzen of the tow-truck on the not-paved road, a load of Arabs ran to our car and started to work on it. We felt comfortable immediately among the hardworking people and although we hardly understood each other, we could communicate using big gestures and pointing towards the part of the car we wanted tot talk about. Thanks to the busy Arabs and our own dedication to our transport, we prepared Doutzen for a few new miles within three days. Will she make it to South Africa? Ah, we’ll manage!

Now we found ourself back on the road again, we had to go to Cairo to fetch our Visa to Sudan and Ethiopia. By posting some messages on the Couchsurfing Project, we easily found a place to sleep for a few days; two friendly Egyptian students, Ibrahim and Salami had no problem with giving some shelter to three traveling bums and we quickly adapted to their student rhythm, which means that the next few days we slept at 5 o’ clock in the morning and got up from bed twelve hours later. Thats fun, but its to bad that the Sudanese embassy was not eager to adapt to our new biological clock, that made it possible to live in the night, which is actually quite handy in Cairo; the crazy traffic cools down a bit and you get to places much faster. Instead, we constantly found ourself to late at the embassy. Sometimes because traffic took us an hour, sometimes because we were just plane late and sometimes because there was an Islamic or Sudanese holiday that we hadn’t heard about.

But after a few weeks we finally came in time and managed to arrange our Sudanese visa for tremendous prices. After this, the Ethiopian visa was easy; A peaceful embassy provided us the needed papers within a day. It took a month, but we are ready to leave Egypt! This month was not totally spend by living agreat the student life, though. We found some new projects to support in Uganda and South Africa, about which we’ll inform you as soon as we get more details. In the Cairo market we also bought a dog we named Noflik, which means comfortable in Frysian language. When she’s full grown she has to protect us through Africa and guard the car against local people that want claim our car for themselves.

Unfortunately, just before we left some madman tried to rob Doutzen, with a broken window as a result. Or Noflik did her job right, or there was just nothing to take, luckily nothing got stolen! After having a great time, we left Cairo at the moment a kind of peace was established in Israel and we headed south towards Sudan. On our way we found ourselves stamped with the label tourist again. Somehow we were able to drive from Holland to Egypt, but are not allowed to drive there at night alone. A crazy police escort of 400 km was handy to avoid the speedbumbs and a nice officer helped to kill a good chicken for dinner.

To avoid expenses we first took the coast road to enter Sudan, but after a detour of thousand kilometer, talking to a couple of generals and loads of tea with officers later, we couldn’t get through the military area thats between Egypt and Sudan. Driving back, we asked everybody if it was possible to enter Sudan by road and everybody replied different. There’s supposed to be a road ready in April or there is a road all ready, but we mostly heard a negative answer. We drove a few days back and forth, but in the end we had to get on the incredibly overpriced boat.

After a third class seventeen hour tour on the deck of a crowded boat down the Nile we now drive in the middle of nowhere in Sudan to the next village, which is supposed to be another three hundred kilometer. After that it will be a few days drive to Khartoum, where we hope to post this blog…

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Tags: cairo, doutzen, egypt, noflik, robbery