Forty-ninth stage

‘Now you cannot go ahead! You are welcome to the house of the teachers …’ told me my guardian angel, an old teacher at the school in Akashah.

I do not fight it.

As soon as I laid down on the bed with a Nile view, in the shade of a big thatched shelter, I fell asleep, on the bed net to mine the Head Teacher was sleeping deeply covered by a blancket good enough for an Italian winter … it was three in the afternoon … I slept about one hour and I woke up only because I had a crazy thirst … I could have stayed there but I had done only sixty kilometers … and I would like to be in Wadi Halfa tomorrow evening …

In the twenty-five kilometers before Akashah there are no water container, there are no cafeteria, there is the usual Saharan heat and the strongest and most constant adverse wind I have ever experimented … the only refreshment I found it, as if it was, in a Chinese camp, who are building a mine, the houses and the offices are obtained from 40 feet containers, equipped by huge air conditioners, the Chinese walk around in bathing suits, they are not in shape as Mao would have wanted, the maximum they could be is sumo fighters … they do not speak English and when I ask for some water, my interlocutor in a green bathing suit, with socks the color of the desert, the moccasin with a silver buckle, and the sunglasses , rushes to the container and comes out with a 2 liter bottle of water … boiling hot more than mine … but the air con is not working? … in any case this water which I will ration will allow me to reach Akashah without the worst possible consequences … I am exhausted … I orient myself by sight I leave the main road and enter a town … I do not find water … I sit in the shade of a school wall … and try to recover … then I sight the water containers … there I meet my guardian angel …

When I wake up a doctor arrives, the uncle of the Head Teacher, who tells me that I cannot leave because the teachers went to get me some food … in the meanwhile the speaker from the next door mosque … gives a couple of messages which Head Teacher and uncle consider useless and tell the imam to go fly a kite … I take advantage to sleep another quarter of an hour … like I saw doing in the Raid Across America, where the cyclists challenging one another on a route coast to coast, without set stages and stops, take short snaps in trailers along the road … Arabic bread jam and some kind of peanut butter bought new for me reinvigorate my body and spirit … going back to the main road is not easy … two women tell me I am on the wrong road … a complete family decide that they have to supply me with water … and they are right because without it I would not have reached here …

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Yesterday and today the quality controls of the water I drank got fucked, the brownish water of the Nile is as thirst drenching as the transparent ozonated one of the plastic bottles … the Chinese are ahead on this too they recycle the green Sprite bottles to avoid freaking out …

In this part of the desert there are no animals, but at the beginning of Sudan what stroke me was the fast decomposition of donkeys, camels, and cows dead along the road … only the bones remain and the skin does not rot like in Ethiopia … but it stays there dry … the cows in particular look like those carpets very fashionable in the seventies …

The Head Teacher’s uncle told me that after 21 kilometers there was Birr … and there I decided to go … but after 27 I found Melik el Nasir, … and Birr I am told is further ahead … but if he had told me it is after 40 km, maybe I would not have moved … it was getting dark and I stopped in a cafeteria, where we laughed a lot with the truck drivers because the manager who does not speak English, was pretending he could understand, and when I asked for a spoon for the ful, a beans and vegetables soup, first he brought me a lemon, then the oil … …

You do a uphill with the big rapport at 12 km/h when you reach the top and go down you have to pedal just as much as when you were going up … if you do not pedal the hot wind throws you back … I will not forget it easily …

In the evening it is slightly cooler the sun goes down fast behind these lunar mountains, the throat dries so much, that when I answer a call from Giorgia it hurts to speak … I manage to do about thirty kilometers … I am missing 95 to Wadi Halfa and if tomorrow I will manage to start off at sunrise tomorrow evening I could be at the end of Sudan … otherwise Tuesday morning …

Not for my credit, but this stage which had become real bad transformed itself in a small masterpiece which leaves me more serene for tomorrow and the day after.

Abri N 20° 78.580’ E 30° 33.668’ – Melik el Nasir N 21° 25’ E 30° 75’ 

87 km