The voice of the very long Arabic registration which I do not seem to recognize among the many heard in this stretch through Sudan surprises me, it is followed by a very short ‘the number dialed is out of coverage area’. It is about 5,30 in the afternoon in Zambia, at the last phone call around 5 the ferry had not left yet, there was a terrible noise on the background, I could not hear much only the ‘call me later’ … I assume the ferry has left and that Matteo with his bamboo bike is in the middle of Lake Nasser next stop Aswan in Egypt. Shame! The children and I had prepared a support phone call to celebrate the end of Sudan, Chimba too was practicing on the phone and kept repeating ‘Matteo, how are you?’, the phone call will be postponed to tomorrow for the arrival in Egypt.
At the beginning of Sudan I was really very worried, both google map and bing made me fear for the worse: hundreds of kilometers of desert without a town or a village … and the blogs of others Africa travelers were not very reassuring … and then the names of the few villages were not matching, every town was known by at least 4 or 5 different names and so thousands of trials, add an A, or an H, change a K with a QH … and the comments of the many telling me with Ramadan during the day he will find nothing to eat or drink … and the ferry from Wadi Halfa leaving in less than 13 days when the route done by all the others cyclists through Sudan was more than 1600 km, I had to find an alternative road, a shortcut … I passed a night making sure that the road between Al Dabbah and Dongola was completely tarred, it would have reduced the kilometers by about 200, it seemed that nobody had done it recently, I could not find any positive information, and so with the maximum scaling on google map and the satellite option I ‘covered’ the all road ensuring to see the tar and the alternate yellow line along the all 154 kilometers! I read a message sent to Matteo at the border between Ethiopia and Sudan ‘Try to eat and drink every time you find something, always keep a reserve of water!’.
And instead this Sudan was fantastic, and Matteo too! Each article was the discovery of wonderful people from the home of the sheppards in the village which for us will only be a X to the teachers of the school in Akashah, a celebration of this ride through Africa which is a journey of people and encounters, of roads and villages with that message printed on the back ‘Sport can change your life’!