We’re back home now, after three months on the road doing just that; followed by a 24 hour trip from Cape Town via Johannesburg to Dubai. Back to work, back to the cold, back to our house and our habits and our friends. It feels a bit unreal, and we think that’s because we’ve experienced so much in this valuable time.

Trying to process it all, it’s hard to make comparisons or pick favourites. We saw and did things and met people we’ll never forget.

But some highlights do come to mind.

Meeting my sister in Cairo was pretty fantastic. We loved traveling together with her and exploring Egypt’s amazing history:

She and I have always been interested in ancient Egypt. Dad was too, and there were a couple of books on the subject lying around our house. I really love that we got to visit the Valley of the Kings and King Tut’s tomb, together.

Then there was the long trip by bus and boat to finally arrive in Sudan, not at all sure what to expect but excited to find out what awaited us in this unknown country.

We keep talking about all the friendly and kind people living along the Nile Valley, who we met as we travelled the length of Sudan. Which, despite there being almost no infrastructure for travelers, was possible to do partly because the locals were so helpful.

Especially Magzoub.

I loved trekking and camping in Ethiopia’s cold and beautiful mountains. Oyv would have loved it more if he hadn’t been suffering from food poisoning at the time…

There were peaceful moments, like these ones at Ethiopia’s rock-hewn churches:

And these, drifting on the Nile or on the Indian Ocean:

There were some not-so-peaceful moments too. Frenetic crowds in stations and streets. Some crazy bus trips; some scary bus trips; some insanely overcrowded vehicles; some weird incidents; and yes – even one or two fights. Not just fights between the two of us but on one memorable occasion, with a bus driver as well.

And let’s not forget the trains, taxis, boats, tuk tuks – or Noor, the friendly, talkative guy who picked us up hitchhiking in Sudan, in his transport truck.

There were some nights so hot we could hardly sleep, stifling under our mosquito net. And some chilly nights too.

We had some really lovely rooms…

…but mostly a lot of…more basic ones.

We saw the sheer magnitude of Victoria Falls, from two country’s perspectives. It’s unforgettable.

We lived the laid-back life on Mozambique’s stunning beaches:

And we finished it up with a road trip in South Africa. Astonishingly beautiful landscapes, wild animals, gorgeous vineyards:

We even swung by Swaziland:

And finally, those few days we spent enjoying the best of both worlds – nature and city life – in Cape Town.

Thanks for reading! I hope you saw a bit of Africa through our eyes. Next trip: Cape Town and all the way back up the other side…

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When we finally came rattling over the border from Mozambique into South Africa in a crappy old minibus as usual, we hadn’t thought much about what we would find in this next country. We climbed out and struggled, as usual, to extricate our backpacks from the cramped vehicle and wrestle them onto our shoulders. Brushing sand and biscuit crumbs off of our sweaty, disheveled clothes and absent-mindedly scratching our bug bites, we looked up and realised we were back in ‘The West’. To be precise, we were standing in a shopping mall parking lot. We shivered as a blast of cold air from KFC ruffled Oyv’s overgrown hair which has turned into a long curly mullet. I glanced down at my dirty feet and then looked around for a day spa. Shoppers strolled by pushing trolleys piled with grocery bags. People went about their lives in a way that looked totally familiar to us.

At first it felt like we weren’t in Africa anymore. People who’ve been to South Africa – even people from South Africa – had all referred to this country as a ‘fake’ version of Africa. An easy introduction to the continent for novices. But we came here for two reasons: to finish our journey down through Africa from north to south, and to finish it in style at the end of three months on the road. We knew all about the picturesque small towns, fantastic food, sophisticated Cape Town and of course – the world-famous wine lands.

So in a way, we started to feel like we’d gone home and come back again on another separate holiday – a trip within a trip.

But as it turns out, we weren’t out of Africa just yet.

We decided to drive all the way down to Cape Town, stopping along the way wherever we felt like it.

So we hired a car and off we went, windows rolled up and doors locked. This is South Africa, after all, and we’ve heard one too many carjacking stories.

We’ve all heard a lot about crime in South Africa, of course. Everybody has fences and gates and alarms and dogs. Back in Inhambane, we had dinner with a couple from Jo’burg who were so disgusted with the situation in South Africa that they retreated to the remote Mozambican bush and took up farming, only emerging into civilisation once every six months or so.

Anyway, first we went on safari in Kruger National Park. This wildlife reserve is bigger than some entire countries in Europe. We spent three days game driving in this enormous park, both of us spotting rampant wildlife out the windows.

Along with all the usual suspects (giraffes, zebras, bushbuck, impalas, warthogs….) we also saw plenty of four of the ‘Big Five’: rhinos, buffalos, elephants and lions.

We didn’t see the fifth and very elusive member of this elite group, the leopard.

We camped in safari tents at night, and did all our cooking on the braai (barbeque).

Early one morning we went on a bush walk with two armed rangers. On foot like this, you don’t see the big game you’ll see when driving. But instead you see the park’s perhaps even more terrifying inhabitants:

Leaving the wilds, we carried on to St. Lucia, a touristy town of beaches and cafes. We drove out to the beach at Cape Vidal.

Although we will now zip right past a herd of zebras (Sar: ‘They’re just like fat ponies.’) or impalas (Oyv: ‘I’m sick of impalas’) a group of rhinos snorting in the grass will always bring us to a dead halt.

Then we inch forward, turn off the engine and watch them. We’re lucky to see them at all: the Black Rhino has been poached nearly to extinction by trophy hunters and others in pursuit of the animal’s valuable horn.

The St. Lucia estuary is home to about two dozen crocodiles and a thousand hippos.

We went hippo-spotting on the river:

As it turns out, the tales of hippos roaming the streets of town are actually true. We’d heard about this but assumed it was one of those stories for foreigners like polar bears wondering freely in urban areas in more wintery countries.

We were walking home in the dark after dinner when Oyv suddenly grabbed my arm and whispered ‘there’s a hippo straight ahead.’ He had already done this twice and in both cases the hippo had turned out to be a person carrying a large basket so I wasn’t very worried. But then we saw them: three hippos grazing on the manicured lawn of a B&B.

We froze, then walked backwards and had a whispered argument about what to do next. Our guesthouse owner had mentioned in passing that a hippo had bitten off a local’s leg. As always happens on safari when you spot game: vehicles appear. A man driving a 4×4 pickup stopped beside the hippos so we decided to creep forward quietly and put the truck between ourselves and these second-most dangerous animals in Africa, who were noisily chomping on the hedges and didn’t seem interested in any of our legs at all.

And let’s not forget the Boers: a group descended from German, French and Dutch settlers and speaking their own language, Afrikaans. Living in the Cape Colony, they grew tried of both the European colonial powers and the local people so in the 1830s they famously trekked right off into the interior. There they established their own autonomous republic and engaged the British twice in the Anglo-Boer wars. Losing the second war, the Boer’s Free State ended up as a British colony after all and today is just another part of the united South Africa.

We stayed in a cabin on a farm in Boer country.

The farm has been in the same family for 5 generations – in other words, ever since the Boers first arrived here.

Apparently the original founder fought for this land and although he never actually paid any money for it, it was ‘paid for in blood’ as his great great nephew shared with us over breakfast.

We wanted to learn some more about life in South Africa first-hand. Mom had given us the contact details for some of the missionaries connected to her work. Two of them live with their kids in Amanzimtoti, near Durban. We drove down the coast and met Kerry there at her house.

Kerry works for an NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) called Seed of Hope. She and her colleague Nicole showed us around the Township they work in. Today the inhabitants of these apartheid-era remnants are free to come and go, but those who live in a Township have few prospects and are dependent on government grants.

Unemployment in this one hovers at around 80%. Infrastructure and public services are almost non-existent – most homes don’t even have indoor plumbing. HIV is a serious problem and yet still a taboo subject – Kerry told us of a vice principal at the local school who wasted away and died, quite obviously of AIDS, rather than admit to having the disease and take the free, life-saving drugs. Struggling with limited funds and empty pantries, some families can only manage to feed their kids one meal a day.

As the focus of their community development program, Seed of Hope teaches sustainable, productive farming techniques to anyone who wants to learn.

The idea is to build and encourage food self-reliance and so lift families out of poverty. Together with this they offer counselling and support to individuals and families in crisis. Their office building houses an after-school activity program for local kids. They believe that education, rather than more donations and quick fixes, is the key to a permanent change.

We ate dinner at a lovely restaurant on Durban’s beautiful waterfront with Kerry, Nicole and Kerry’s teenage son. Kerry reminded us that although things look good on the surface here and we can be lulled into complacency, life in South Africa is not always quite as comfortable and ‘ordinary’ as it might seem when you first arrive on a crappy minibus from Mozambique and look around at the fancy restaurants and familiar shopping malls.

And now, 3809 kilometers of perfect highways and bumpy country lanes and twisting mountain roads later, we’re closing in on Cape Town.

We’re 81 kilometers away and we aren’t ready to end this trip-within-a-trip yet, so we’re taking a hiatus in Franschhoek at the heart of South Africa’s beautiful wine lands.

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We’d read and heard some bad stuff. Other travelers we’d met along the way (even including a couple we met last year in Myanmar) regaled us with tales of robberies and theft, unsafe beaches and at the very least a lot of dodgy attempts at all sorts of sneaky scams. There was the story we heard about a man riding in the back of a cab with his computer on his lap and the window down. Perhaps not a smart move. Sure enough someone yanked his PC out the window and when he instinctively reached out after it the thief chopped at his forearms with a machete. Or the father and son who arrived at their guesthouse, got out of their taxi, and were mugged in the driveway before they could reach the front door.

Maybe we felt a bit like this guy we saw in an advert back in Harare:

But we went ahead and crossed the border from Zimbabwe, figuring we’d just stay inside at night, split up our valuables and watch each other’s back constantly.

Twelve days in, and we still can’t figure out where these reports are coming from. Maybe we’re just lucky or really really savvy but we’ve not had even the slightest problem and neither has anyone else we’ve met in Mozambique. Maybe everyone just wants to keep this chilled out, Portugal-meets-Africa beach front country a fabulous secret. And so they should. The scenery is divine, the atmosphere is relaxed and easygoing. Locals, expats and travelers mingle together on the beach and in the bars and restaurants. It’s a Mecca for surfers and divers. There are no package tours and the long, serene beaches are as yet mostly undeveloped and unspoilt.

Ready for some relaxation, we lost no time in heading for the coastline.

Of course, we did some hard travel to get here. A very drunk man ‘assisted’ us in organising our bus tickets, which didn’t do much to inspire our confidence in the public transport. We set off early in the morning, leaving the heavy rains behind in Chimoio, the first major town after the border with Zimbabwe. Chimoio doesn’t seem to have any paved roads and the rains had turned the streets into a mudbath. I don’t know if my feet have ever been so dirty, my legs were coated in muck after a short walk down the street.

But as we travelled towards the Indian Ocean, the skies cleared into a magnificent blue, and the sun beat down on the palm fringed red dirt road ahead. At the top of every hill another stunning tropical vista unfolded in front of us. The bus stopped abruptly at a junction and the driver, together with most of the passengers around us, announced that we should get off here. We were still 22 kilometers from our destination, Vilankulo. We climbed down and stood in the hot dust as the bus pulled away. Soon enough a small boy befriended us and pointed us to the back of a pickup heading to the town.

So we lost no time settling into life in this beach bungalow in Vilankulo:

In the mornings we’d swing in the hammock or lounge on the verandah with coffee.

At night, the peace and quiet was interrupted only by drumming and singing on the beach, and the crashing waves.

We spent the next two days exploring the Bazaruto Archipelago. First, we took a dhow – that’s a traditional wooden African sailing boat – to Margaruque island.

The archipelago is a protected national park and it’s absolutely stunning.

We explored the long empty beaches, stopping to swim whenever it got too hot to walk. The skipper made us a lunch of fresh barracuda and calamari before we sailed back:

The next day we took a speedboat, first to Bazaruto itself and then to Benguera. In case you’re wondering, Africans drive speedboats the same way they drive any other vehicle (recklessly).

We climbed up a huge sand dune on Bazaruto for the view and then burned our feet on the run back down.

The boat dropped us off in the ocean and circled while we snorkeled Two Mile Reef.

After five days of this we tore ourselves away to travel on to the next beach.

First we caught a minibus to Maxixe. Like most other countries around here, Mozambique should consider placing a sign at its borders saying ‘Leave any notion of personal space here.’ When a van meant to hold 12 or 14 people is packed with 25 passengers, you find yourself getting cosy with your seat mates. The ones who actually have a seat, anyway. You can just barely see Oyv here, under this guy’s arm:

The bus inevitably broke down a couple of times; but not to worry, the conductor fixed it by removing the first row of seats, opening up the floor, and banging the engine really hard with a wrench.

Next we took a ferry (let’s be honest, it was a suffocatingly overcrowded fishing boat) to Inhambane and then, a bus on to Tofo.

In Tofo, pretty guesthouses and bungalow operations back the long white beach.

We moved into a seafront room with a big terrace and proceeded to while away the days with early morning runs on the beach, browsing in the markets, and conversations with other travelers.

I had a capulana dress made at a local tailor. We ate as much squid, prawns and fish as we could fit. We went regularly to a little place where the menu consisted of marinated squid or beef that you grill up yourself on a sizzling hot rock at the table.

Enroute to Tofo we’d stopped overnight in Inhambane. It’s a sleepy little town and both pretty and peaceful. We liked it, so we went there again for another night on our way to the capital, Maputo.

In towns like Inhambane, it’s easy to see that the Portugese have been here.

For better or worse, the Europeans have left their mark all over this continent. In Mozambique’s case, it all started when the Portugese explorer Vasco de Gama arrived in 1498.

In Zambia and Zimbabwe we saw reminders of the UK in every day things like the food and shops, and even in colloquial expressions. Here in Mozambique it occurred to us that if you’re going be colonized you might at least hope for southern European invaders. You’ll get good food and wine, and siestas. Along with the enslavement, exploitation, and decades of conflict, that is.

We met an expat here who called Mozambique ‘The Brazil of Africa’ and it was easy to see what he meant. Then again, he also characterised the beach we were on as ‘The Koh Phagnan of the ’90s’ so maybe he’s just looking for that hippie vibe. It’s got that, too. But whether you compare it to Brazil or Thailand, or just admire it for its own unique self, it’s easy to love Mozambique.

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Great Zimbabwe is the most important and best preserved example of a medieval city (11th to 14th century) in sub-Saharan Africa. Colonial governments spent almost 100 years trying to ascribe the origins of the ruined city to anyone else at all besides the local Bantu people, unwilling to accept that an ancient civilization in Africa reached such a level of sophistication on its own.

Similar cities were built all over the realm. They are all called ‘Zimbabwes’ and vary in size and significance. The word zimbabwe means ‘Great Stone House’ and this one is the biggest and greatest of them all.

As the capital of a large region stretching into modern-day Botswana and Mozambique, the city rose steadily in power but its population eventually outgrew it and by the time the first wave of Europeans arrived the 1500s, it was already abandoned.

In 1980, when the country-formerly-known-as-Rhodesia finally achieved independence from Britain, it was these ‘Great Stone Houses’ which inspired their brand new name. Bet you didn’t know that. We sure didn’t, till we spent a morning scrambling all over these old ruins high up on a steep hillside.

But we learn something new every day.

Almost ever since the country gained its independence, the evidently immortal (he’s 92 and going strong) and definitely immoral Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe by force, stealing elections, confiscating land and relentlessly persecuting his own people with unsustainable taxation and violent suppression.

Here in Zimbabwe is where we first started to meet white Africans, but today there don’t seem to be many left living here; we didn’t see any white kids on their way to school or even really any white person who didn’t look as though they had personally helped Cecil Rhodes to establish the colony in the late 1800s. We asked about this at one of the guest houses we stayed at. The owner told us there are no more opportunities in Zimbabwe and so the people who can afford it, or who have a British passport handed down from their parents, have packed up and left. Many people left behind are without future prospects under Mugabe’s corrupt leadership, nothing to do about it and no chance for escape.

At one point Zimbabwe was in such dire financial straits that Mr. Mugabe addressed the situation by printing money wildly, inflating the currency until it collapsed completely and now they use the USD instead. The old worthless money printed in denominations of millions is just a souvenir to flog to travellers. Things are pretty expensive here and life is hard for a lot of locals. The police like to stop vehicles for made-up infractions and so ‘fundraise’ to supplement their salaries. A few days ago when we were out walking in the mountains, we hitched a ride in the back of a truck with 5 police officers, also hitching. A police force that has to hitchhike probably does not pay its officers well.

Maybe the great stone house is in need of some repairs.

To make matters worse, together with the rest of Southern Africa, Zimbabwe is in the grip of a severe drought which will hit the farmers badly. This is the rainy season, but we’ve hardly seen any rain at all.

Until Mutare, that is, in the eastern highlands, where we learned the hard way not to leave home without our ponchos. Swathed past the knee in camouflage and olive green, rain covers stretched over our backpacks, we look like walking military tents but this is not overkill.

The first time we were caught in the rain some friendly guys working nearby opened the back door on their truck and called for us to jump in. We huddled in there all together, watching the rain pour down and flood the streets like a dam had burst. The rains break the heat though, and unlike the monsoon season in parts of Southeast Asia, showers usually come in short heavy bursts – it doesn’t rain all day.

At some point we realized that neither one of us liked Zimbabwe very much. We were surprised, as we’d expected to like it a lot. Don’t get me wrong, the people are lovely and kind. We stayed at some really great guesthouses and I did a lot of our own cooking in their kitchens (this may not sound like a holiday highlight but we’ve been on the road for a while and a home cooked meal is now officially a treat).

We met some interesting travellers, like a group of American missionaries who’d recently been in Greece helping with the current refugee crisis. And Oyv made this adorable friend:

But the places we visited felt a bit soulless, semi-deserted, and often bore resemblance to a rundown strip mall with fast food joints and supermarkets.

So I don’t know if it was the timing or maybe it was just us. Maybe it was sadza – a maize porridge that makes an appearance at every meal, as a runny gruel at breakfast and thickening up to the point where you can eat it with your hands, at lunch and dinner. But we just didn’t click with Zim.

As I sat partially in the driver’s lap in a hilariously overcrowded ‘share taxi’, Oyv hunched in the back seat with three other adults and a child, all of us sweating profusely, it occurred to us that a break would be nice.

We were starting to develop some weird habits – eating with our hands even when cutlery was available; always trying to share the same seat; getting into a vehicle and automatically cramming ourselves into the furthest corner like two little rabbits, even if it was still empty. I found myself looking jealously at a woman ahead of me in a minibus and wondering how she’d gotten ‘her own seat’, even just for a few minutes. Not her own row, just a seat to herself.

So we picked up our pace, and got our visas for Mozambique.

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We’d decided it was time to leave Ethiopia and carry on. But the question was, where to? If you look at a map of Africa, you’ll see Ethiopia’s somewhat hostile neighbours: South Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea to name a few. The border with Kenya is fraught with tension and we’d heard the north of that country itself is plagued by bandits making it potentially dangerous for independent travellers to cross it by bus. So we studied the map again and reviewed our options. Having already criss-crossed Kenya by bus on our last trip to Africa – not to mention Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda – we decided we’d fly right over Kenya and Tanzania and pick up our overland trail in Lusaka, Zambia.

So we booked a flight, but gave ourselves one last day in Addis Ababa first.

Despite my being horrified by it when I first arrived, Ethiopia’s capital had really started to grow on us both. Like many African cities Addis is a few pockets of modern urban sophistication linked together by a huge, sprawling conglomerate of neighbourhoods that seem more like villages grown wildly out of control and fused together.

We stayed at a B&B run by an Ethiopian-Canadian couple who moved back to Addis after 25 years in Canada – they served proper pancakes for breakfast and I can tell you, that was a fantastic break from injera – Ethiopian bread that has the appearance and texture of a tire.

Addis is surprisingly safe to move around, even at night (using common sense) and we never ran into any trouble other than a group of teenage boys who tried to pickpocket us. They weren’t very good at it and it was quite apparent what they were up to. They rushed us, crowded closely around us both, blocking the sidewalk and jostling us. One tried to hand me a bundle of rags he was carrying – they want to distract you away from your pockets and bag, basically. Oyv flung his arms out to both sides in front of us and bellowed at them to get lost in his ‘screaming voice’ which very few people ever get to hear…

One really great thing we did on our last day in Addis was attend a service at the International Evangelical Church. The congregation was a mix of locals and people from all over the world, and we felt right at home.

We can thank Mom for that experience, as it was her work contacts she put me in touch with in Ethiopia who suggested it to us.

And then, after a movie at the multiplex (The Revenant), we went to the airport for a middle-of-the-night flight.

Arriving in Zambia from the chilly Ethiopian highlands, we felt the heat and humidity the instant we stepped off the plane. According to our latest plan (they change all the time) we went straight to Livingstone, on the edge of Victoria Falls. The town is of course named for the first European ever to lay eyes on the Falls in 1855. That was David Livingstone, famed as much for his disappearance in Tanzania and subsequent discovery 6 years later by Henry Stanley (‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’), as for his attempts at missionary work here. Apparently he succeeded in only one convert, who later reverted anyway. Livingstone coined the name Victoria Falls: their local name is Mosi Oa Tunya, ‘The Smoke that Thunders’.

Livingstone is a lovely little town, full of cafes and restaurants and colonial-style architecture. In fact together with the red dirt roads and beautiful tropical jungly vegetation it reminded us both of Australia’s Northern Territory.

Excited to finally reach the intense heat and sunshine we stayed at a little guesthouse with a pool.

We were equally excited about the fact that the guesthouse let me use the kitchen to make us lunches with fresh produce we bought in the markets.

The national food in Zambia is not up to much: they really, really like fried chicken and soggy chips (fries).

And so, we saw the Falls for the first time from Zambia’s side.

Here’s a view from the top:

And another, from the footbridge:

The park is teeming with baboons so we got in some free wildlife viewing on the way. Not a small achievement in southern Africa where they’d charge you for looking out the corner of your eye at an earthworm, if possible.

We walked out onto the bridge spanning the gorge:

To do this you need to get a little note from immigration on the Zambian side that will allow you back in, because the bridge also connects Zambia with its neighbour Zimbabwe and so once you’re in the middle of the bridge, you’ve actually left the country – and entered what the locals called ‘ZimZam.’

While we were still in Zambia on a walking trail in the park, we realized just how fluid and small the crossing point is. We reached a high fence and two Zimbabwean guys raced up on the other side of it and tried to exchange currency and sell us Zimbabwean souvenirs through the bars. Also, somewhat worryingly, around the same point from where we could see vehicles at immigration, we heard a man shouting ‘I will shoot you! If you don’t get out now, I will shoot!’ Which gave us something to keep in mind for our own border crossing later on, at least.

The next day we went back and crossed the bridge without the note (or any shooting incidents) and processed immigration on Zimbabwe’s side. Then we went to the Falls again, from the town on that side which shares their name.

We looked back at Zambia, to the place we’d stood the previous day. While on the Zambian side there is a nice little path and little wooden railings, on the Zimbabwean side you can just stroll right up to the edge of the cliff in places. It is not anything like Niagara; but in Africa there is very little worry about things like people plunging to their deaths, and so on.

There are many great viewing points – here you can see me in the middle right side of the photo:

Because you can get so close on Zimbabwe’s side, and the volume of water is greater, the spray is unbelievable and we got soaked to the skin. By April, at the end of the rainy season, the spray will be heavy enough to completely obscure the falls from view.

Basically, the Falls are absolutely spectacular wherever you view them from.

We saw a crossroads sign at our backpackers’ lodge in Vic Falls. It showed the distance from Cairo, where we started out (it feels so long ago!):

And it showed the distance left to Cape Town, at the bottom of South Africa, our projected ending point:

And we hit the road again, in ZimZam.

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For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Zimbabwe, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or, how about this trip later on, where we spent three days on the Tazara train from Zambia to Tanzania. Not a shortcut, in that case.

The post A Shortcut Through ZimZam appeared first on WhirledAway.

…Then don’t try it here.

Ethiopia is a big country. The north in particular, is rugged and mountainous. The roads are poor, and distances between towns are long. That’s why most visitors to Ethiopia fly between places like Lalibela and Bahir Dar. But not us. We try to stay on the ground wherever possible. If you could see our methods of travel – for example, this rattletrap bus I’m sitting on where three seats are crammed into the space for just two, and I’m attempting to type on my iPad as we crash into an endless series of potholes – you’d honestly think we woke up in the morning and said to each other:

Sar: “What do you suppose is the single most agonizing way we could get from point A to point B today?”
Oyv: “I’m glad you brought that up. I was thinking we should take the bus.”
Sar: “Great idea. I heard it’s a 6 hour journey so that means it should take at least 10 hours. But the driver will make time by driving like a lunatic on any stretch of paved road.”
Oyv: “Definitely. The road is mostly a disaster and the suspension will be totally shot. We’re in for a long bumpy ride!”
Sar: “That’s fine. I’ll be gripping the seat back ahead of me and bracing for impact most of the trip anyway.”
Oyv: “And chances are high the other passengers will throw up in the aisle on the bends in the road.”
Sar: “Sure thing, but we’ll pass plastic bags around, no big deal.”

Actually we’ve just pulled over to clean up the aisle. The driver’s friends sprinkled dirt and leaves over the mess.

I was happy; I got to straighten out my limbs for a bit. We’re both too long-leggy for these seats.

But I wondered if some of this sudden flurry of activity was a ruse to distract us from the fact that the driver himself was currently crawling around under the front of the bus with a wrench.

Our oddessys always begin with a visit to the local bus station where we are mobbed by touts, much like a scene from The Walking Dead (I really miss watching that show). Touts are after a commission on us, and we have to ignore them all and find the ticket office. Even so, it usually takes around 8 guys to sell us two tickets or organise any single aspect of a bus trip.

Next, we need to determine when the bus will actually hit the road. Ethiopia runs on a different system of time. I’m not referring to ‘Africa Time’ – the colloquial concept that things start when they start – that’s just a given. No, I mean that Ethiopia actually measures time on a different clock. Our 24 hour day is divided into two 12 hour cycles, starting at what we would call 6 am and again at our 6 pm. Basically you need to count 6 hours ahead of or back from any given time. So if a local says the bus leaves at 10:30 he means 4:30 am – unless of course, he has converted to ‘western’ time for us, and actually means 10:30 am, or he’s got his English numbers mixed up and means 11:30 on the Ethiopian clock (so….5:30 am). Or maybe he meant 11:30 our time. The best bet is to just get up really early, earlier than any number he may have mentioned, and go to the bus station.

I should also say that Ethiopia follows the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian one used in most of the world. So it’s only 2008 here and we’re all 8 years younger. That alone is reason to visit if you ask me.

Before we depart, let me set the stage for our dramatic and scenic journey: winding cliff-edge roads and freely roaming livestock. Bus travel in Ethiopia is not for the faint hearted.

Then a tout hurls our backpacks onto the roof of the bus, demands a tip for this service, and we’re off! The adventure continues onboard, mainly via the driver’s usual antics. In every town, he slows to a crawl and attempts to coerce any passing villager to join us. Generally the rest of the villagers then try to fight their way onboard.

When the driver realizes he’s gone too far and the bus is overcrowded with people who don’t appear to have had any intention of travelling cross-country in the first place, arguments erupt and he starts slamming the doors in the face of would-be passengers.

On one memorable occasion, our driver leapt from his seat (kudos to him for stopping the bus first) and forcibly evicted an unwanted passenger by the scruff of the neck.

Another time, I saw man try to board with a live goat around his shoulders.

I think it’s possible the Ministry of Transport may be running an awareness campaign called ‘Faranji Hate and Fear Our Driving Skills’ because on two separate occasions now I’ve had a bus driver take me aside and courteously enquire how I find his driving to be. And in that case the campaign is working because both of us have been favorably impressed so far; the drivers do generally take it pretty easy and they know the roads.

Just to slow our progress a little bit more, the police tend to pull the buses over from time to time. They either make the men get off and search them, or make us all get off and search our bags. I’m often exempted from this and just waved back to my seat. What they are looking for is anybody’s guess. It’s no secret that people carry guns here. We see them everywhere in the countryside, although not on the bus. Or in ambulances:

But really – there is no better way to experience a country than to see it roll by in slow motion or fast forward, depending on the state of the bus, the road, and the driver’s mental health. Remote villages flash by outside and inside a microcosm of daily life plays out around us. We stop for lunch, coffee and a much needed stretch in little market towns that the fly-by tourists will never see. Getting on a bus early in the morning, we wonder what the day will bring and what awaits us in the next town, and the one after that. And after all…getting there is half the fun.

At any rate, we made it to Addis Ababa.

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Tout (racing over from across the road, 5 friends in tow): “Hey, Faranji (foreigner)! Welcome to Gondar.”
Us (in chorus): “Thank you.”
Tout (sizing Oyv up, squeezing his bicep): “I like your posture. You need bus? Where are you go?”
Sar (testily): “We just got here. You saw us get off that bus.”
Tout: “You need Hotel?”
Oyv (patiently): “No, we have one in mind.”
Tout (shaking head regretfully): “It burned down.”
Sar (through gritted teeth): “Go away.”
Tout (mournfully, with deeply wounded expression): “But I have a nice hotel, you come look? Looking is free.”
Sar: (screams wordlessly and storms off)

Anyway, we asked around and although our first quote was for 700 USD per person for a 3 day and 2 night trek, we eventually ended up agreeing on a more reasonable 180 each.

And so we trekked into Simien National Park the next day with some other travelers, a local guide, an armed scout, two cooks, two mules carrying all our gear, and a mule man.

The park is 400 km/sq of mountains and home to about 7000 people in small scattered villages, bushbuck, wolves, endemic bird life and racist baboons. According to our guide, the baboons apparently only like white people.

We could get as close as we wanted to huge groups of them, but they run fast from locals who have a long history of throwing stones at them.

I was horrified to find myself huffing and puffing at first. Then I remembered the altitude: Gondar lies at 2400 m above sea level. We started our trek at 3100 m and climbed from there.

We camped in the park for two nights; at 3260 m the first night and 3600 m the second. It was pretty cold up there – we woke up to ice on the tent.

And then our luck ran out: something or other Oyv ate along the way disagreed with him and he spent the first night crawling in and out of the tent to throw up. He was a champ in the morning though and carried on, even refusing to ride the mule. He only stopped once to throw up on the path.

The third day we climbed to one of the peaks, at 3926 m. What a view! They call this park the Roof of Africa, because it contains the highest peaks on the continent, after Kilimanjaro.

Coffee is a big thing in Ethiopia. We stopped in a small village in the park for some in a family’s home. A family of 6 live in this circular mud hut, with a fireplace in the floor. There’s no vent, smoke just trickles out the cracks between twigs and branches in the walls. The whole family sleeps on a wooden platform which was also the only piece of furniture.

The mother made coffee: first she washed the beans in a skillet, then roasted them. Then she smashed them in a mortar and pestle and eventually boiled the coffee on the fire. She poured the coffee into our small cups, in three rounds, reboiling the grounds in between. Her 4 year old son happily participated in all three rounds. He took at least a tablespoon of sugar in his coffee.

Since returning from the mountains we’ve travelled slowly but steadily south in Ethiopia, stopping in Bahir Dar and Lalibela on our way towards Addis Ababa, the capital.

Other than the occasional muslim village the north of Ethiopia is predominantly Orthodox Christian. Lalibela, a remote town in the mountains, is one place where the roots of this religion are highly visible.

This small but famous town takes its name from the King who excavated at least 11 churches out of solid rock over a span of 23 years during his reign around 1200 AD. The most famous is this one, dedicated to Saint George:

The churches altogether form a huge complex connected by underground tunnels and narrow passageways.

There are two theories regarding their construction. Ethiopians like to believe the churches were miraculously scooped out of the rock by angels. The rest of us are under the impression that the work was carried out by around 40 000 slaves.

Each church contains a curtained-off Holy of Holies, like King Solomon’s temple in ancient Jerusalem. One of the reasons King Lalibela carved these churches out of the countryside was to give his people a pilgrimage site a bit closer than the long trek to the Holy Land. A replica Ark of the Covenant resides behind the curtain in each church, hidden from the sight of everyone but the priests.

It is said that the real Ark is not lost at all – it’s in a church in Axum, up north – but no one is allowed to see it. Only two people have allegedly laid eyes on it in the last 200 years or so.

And that is the Ethiopia of long ago.

Today, Ethiopia is one of the economically fastest growing countries in Africa, though still one of the very poorest. Drought leading to famine in parts of the country is a real threat. Not very long ago at all, life expectancy was as low as 45 years (although now it has climbed to around 60) due to any number of factors including poor healthcare and high HIV infection rates. But health care is improving and becoming widely available even in remote areas, and school is both free and compulsory.

If you’ll excuse this overused cliche – Ethiopia really is a ‘land of contrasts.’

In the capital city Addis Ababa, street side shoe-shiners offer to clean our trainers or sandals on the pavement; a 30-something professional walks by, dressed exactly as I would be back home, in skinny trousers, flats and a scarf, clutching her designer purse. A beggar displays the stump of his missing leg outside of a shop selling overpriced goatskin bags and other souvenirs. A brand new tram glides silently between glistening skyscrapers going up fast on one side, and a slum constructed of tin and cardboard on the other. Some men kick a suspected thief in the stomach and face right in front of us; a pedestrian steps into the busy street and holds traffic for us to cross. To the casual observer, drinking a macchiato and watching from the coffee stall – even the simplest of every day activities seems plagued by unbelievable disorder.

At the same time, Ethiopia offers the traveler some of the richest cultural heritage on this continent. It’s the one country in Africa which emerged uncolonised from the 19th century ‘Scramble for Africa’ and still today it’s independent, unique and proud. Besides this, the natural beauty of this country is astonishing.

A few days ago, we caught the eye of a fellow passenger fighting to keep his footing in a surging crowd of people all trying to board the bus simultaneously. He must have read our minds. Sandwiched between a sweaty shepherd and a nun with a tattooed-on beard, he shrugged, grinned, and said ‘T.I.A. You know: This is Africa.’

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We had mixed feelings. Despite looking forward to a new country and the next stage of our journey, we were pretty sorry to leave Sudan, where we’d had such a good time.

We took a last look around Omdurman Souk (market) near Khartoum:

And we were lucky enough to see Sufis – adherents to a sort of mystical branch of Islam – gather to dance and pray outside the tomb of their leader, Sheikh Hamed al-Nil. The worshippers march across a cemetery to the front of the tomb, chanting, clapping and drumming. The chanting and drumming becomes more frenzied and the whirling dervishes dance and twirl. The idea is that through the hypnotic music and dancing, the dervish’s heart can communicate directly with God. It is a powerful sight.

Of course, because this is Sudan we’re talking about, on the way back from Omdurman a friendly local found the right bus for us in a confusing crush of people and vehicles, helpfully elbowed several people out of the way and pushed me on board in the wrestling match that ensued when the door slid open – and paid for our fare.

And then it was time to pack up and move on.

After one last stop for tea and a photo-op, of course.

We took a minibus from Gedaref to Gallabat. I’ve learned so much random geography in these past few weeks. Gallabat is the frontier town bordering Ethiopia so it boasts the usual border-town-assortment of scams and scammers; money changers; idle looking soldiers; and people who seem to spend the day in a continual flux between two countries, roaming back and forth in no man’s land.

We ran the gauntlet, starting the moment we stepped off the bus. A tout who tried hard to send us in the wrong direction to what was very obviously a fake customs and immigration office where we knew ‘officers’ waited to shake us down. Several persistent money changers out after the rest of our Sudanese pounds at rip-off rates. A man masquerading as some kind of border-crossing assistant who insisted he had valuable ‘information’ for us. We managed to locate the actual customs office no thanks to the real officers who do nothing to deflect all the fraudsters.

An immigration officer quickly stamped us out of Sudan. Leaving the country seems to be the one instance in which we’re processed quickly and painlessly. I love crossing by foot from one country to the next. There is no better way to arrive in a new land: disembarking a plane in a generic airport just isn’t the same. This was a pretty casual border, marked by a concrete hut painted with the Sudanese flag. A few uniformed guards waved us past and we ran ahead of the money changers who could no longer follow us.

We joined the stream of migrants crossing no man’s land. And then ducking under the rope strung across the road that separates two countries, we strolled into Ethiopia.

It was like walking into a different world. Or at least, into a nightclub. Beer! Loud, happy, exotic music! Girls, out in the streets, and in short sleeves and skirts! Beer! Men holding hands with women instead of other men! And beer. The extent of Sudan’s restrained austerity really hit us.

We waited interminably for a minibus to fill up – that is, to reach or even better, exceed, capacity – so we could leave for Gondar.

Careening high into the mountains in the cramped and sweaty bus, we watched from the front seat as one country rapidly blurred into the next. After wandering in the scrubby deserts of Sudan the lush green mountains, trees, pretty little farms and colorful villages of Ethiopia were literally a breath of fresh air.

Arriving in Gondar we saw familiar looking teastalls and little streetside eateries jostling for space on the crumbling pavement next to bars and cafes. There was the occasional shack looking very suspiciously like a brothel, and the obligatory guys fighting in the street. We found ourselves a room at a popular hotel. It had soap, toilet paper, clean sheets, and actual pillows instead of what feels like a sack stuffed with rags. We had a private bathroom and a hot shower. All this for just 14 USD – the luxury! Actually just the fact that a ‘popular hotel’ even existed felt rather extravagant.

But there are tourists here and Ethiopia is ready for them (and they’ve got the heavily armed guards out in force to prove it). The question is if we are ready for Ethiopia, after the peace and quiet and wild nights out drinking tea in Sudan.

Let me drink this beer and get back to you.

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Traveling by bus from one town to the next we’re struck by how welcome and truly comfortable we feel here. When we walk around town, people smile and wave or come up to us in the street for introductions. They try to start conversations or ask us to take their photo. We stop to chat and small crowds gather.

Sometimes a passing motorist will pull over so all the passengers can shake hands and introduce themselves. Luckily for us mostly everyone is named Mohammed.

Once a man almost hit me with his car in his enthusiastic bid to roll down the passenger side window and give us the thumbs up.

We’ve realised that in this country we aren’t seen as ‘walking wallets’ (kind of ironic since we’ve each got 1000 USD on us). We can always find a kind stranger ready to take us under their wing. There is no hassle, very little haggling, and no shouts of ‘special price for you!’. This is one of the very safest countries in Africa in terms of personal safety, theft or street crime. Don’t get me wrong- we are carrying a lot of cash and some electronics and we don’t leave those things lying around. But I’m pretty sure we could if we wanted to.

Drinking tea is possibly the foundation of this entire society. Teahouses abound in every street and if that’s not enough, there is a teastall on almost every corner. These are nothing more than some plastic chairs grouped around a charcoal fire going in a metal drum next to a large chest with a range of jars and pots and a jumble of cracked glasses.

A woman (or in some parts of the country, a man) sits behind the chest, brewing and filtering, stirring, making change and rinsing glasses in a pail of water between customers (neither one of us has gotten sick yet and hopefully won’t – Insh’allah).

These places are definitely the social scene in any town and we never fail to meet friendly people every time we sit down.

We visit teastalls several times a day and rarely end up paying for our orders because another tea-drinker insists on getting it for us, saying ‘Welcome, welcome’. Our attempts to speak Arabic in these settings, via our phrasebook, are always met with huge encouragement, enthusiasm, patience and a fair bit of hilarity. Our guidebook gets passed around, we take photos, and whenever we meet an English-speaker we ask as many questions as we can think of.

Many Sudanese have explained to us that as visitors to their country they see us as their guests. One polite protest when someone offers us tea, buys our lunch, treats us to icecream or pays our bus fare is enough. After that, we can just smile and happily accept. Actually they have a saying for these situations, which we learned from ‘The Englishman’ a local English teacher in Gederef: ‘If you don’t take this, I’ll divorce my wife.’ As a guest I appreciate the sentiment, if not as a wife.

One of our favorite dinner invitations took place when we walked by the fire-and-police station in Karima. Five or six officers in the courtyard scrambling eggs in a giant wok waved and called to us from a distance – from behind a wall in fact – and signed that we should join them. And so we did, standing in the station yard around the table, all of us digging into the eggs in the pot with pieces of bread. These guys were really friendly too of course, so I was only mildly uncomfortable when one of them pulled an AK-47 out from under the table and casually waved it around.

The reason for all this interest in us is fairly obvious: there isn’t exactly an overwhelming number of travelers here. Word on the street in two different towns is that a Belgian couple and a Frenchman passed through ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of one of them in Dongola when the hotel keeper ran out into the street saying to me ‘I think your husband just went by.’ As it turned out though, it was not Oyv but instead ‘a different white guy.’ We also heard of an 80 year old German woman named Hanna who seems to be taking the country by storm. She’s backpacking in Sudan on her own. I spoke to her on the phone: Magzoub called her. He called her often, to check up on her.

Few travellers means that when we visit tourist sites we have them almost completely to ourselves. Like when we went to the Meroe pyramids (ca. 800 BC), a funerary complex from the ancient Kingdom of Kush:

Or Jebel Barkel, a ‘Holy Mountain’ we climbed up for its panoramic views over Karima:

It also means limited tourist infrastructure, which brings to mind another tip for my Beginners Guide to Sudan:

5. Ad-hoc Transport. We took a bus out to the village near the Meroe pyramids, knowing there was no bus back. So that left hitch-hiking: we hadn’t stood on the side of the road more than 5 minutes before a passing truck picked us up. The driver, Noor, took us 3 hours back to the outskirts of Khartoum. There we caught a crowded minibus and rode standing in the open doorway the rest of the way into the city.

Many people shy away from Sudan. It’s a relatively unknown country struggling to recover from a very long civil war that ended tentatively in 2005 and finally in 2011 with the separation of some southern states to form a second country, South Sudan (which is now having its own civil war). The president is a military dictator. There are ongoing clashes in the area bordering Eritrea in the east. The conflict in Darfur – once declared the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – continues. But these places are far away from the part of the country we’re travelling in, which has been peaceful for several years. It feels a world away from the violence – according to locals themselves, who wonder why the past still keeps Westerners away. And so they’re glad to see the ones who do visit.

And of course, not everything is sunshine and sand and sweet tea. Sudan’s got an almost insurmountable obsession with red tape and bureaucracy. We had to apply for the visa – twice – and pay for it – twice – and wait for an official ‘ok’ from Khartoum which in the first case just never came. We’ve had to register with the police in Dongola which took the better part of a morning; pay a big registration fee; register with the local security in Karima; and have our passports scrutinsed and copied; and just yesterday a security officer tried to extract a payment from us for the stamp on our bus tickets that allows us to leave town. He called it ‘immigration permission’. I pointed out that we weren’t immigrating anywhere at all; we’re travelling between two towns in the same country. He and his two friends tried to squeeze us but we stood firm and refused to pay, til they gave up and waved us out. We’ve heard that plainclothes security like to keep an eye on foreigners. Some of the officials we deal with seem really disgruntled. Others are more relaxed, or maybe just tired out by all the paperwork, like this security officer we met:

We also notice a general absence of women and segregation by gender. Men are always out and about, socialising and working together. But women seem to be largely at home or out of sight – although we do see them together in Khartoum. As a foreign woman I’m given some leeway – and the dubious distinction of an ‘honorary man’. I can go into the teashops, something local women never do.

But I still have to lurk outside mosques in my headscarf while Oyv goes in to look around. And we wonder if the country’s Sharia law is one of the reasons we feel so safe.

But things like these don’t have to stop foreigners from visiting.

The bottom line is we’re so very glad we came now, while we can still experience this wonderful country unspoilt by tourism. We’re certain our time here will be one of the highlights of our overland trip in Africa.

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And I quickly discovered that most of the other passengers could of course read the tickets….but not the numbers written our way (1, 2, 3…) over the seats. So we all jumped around and changed seats a few times. As we pulled onto the road all hell broke loose amongst the passengers still standing in the aisles, who clearly felt somebody was in their rightful spot. A lot of shouting followed – good-natured ribbing or rabid fury, I really couldn’t tell. Arabic confuses me. Eventually the driver pulled over and became embroiled in the fight. He screamed something which I imagine went like this:

“If you all don’t knock it off right now, I’m turning this bus around and we’re going home!” The standing passengers grumbled and we swung back onto the road.

Continuing my Beginner’s Guide to Sudan, allow me to share another tip:

4. Mobile Entertainment. The bus driver always plays recordings of the Koran from the speakers over every seat. If anyone doesn’t want to listen to this, they play a shrieky music video on their phone aloud for us all to enjoy. If their friends on either side want to listen to different music – no problem! They’ll each turn the volume up full.

We were heading for Abri, a small village we’d read about. Our advance preparation extended to checking in our guidebook that there was one hotel here, a ‘grim and grimy establishment’. But never fear, the book went on to say. If we don’t want to stay there, we can simply go to the market and ‘…just ask for Magzoub. He can help you.’

So we got off the bus when the driver shouted ‘Abri!’. We’d made friends during this long trip from Egypt with two local guys who could speak English and they got off with us to make sure we were ok. They looked doubtfully around at the distant mudbrick buildings and the battered minivans waiting by the side of the road.

Concerned Friend: “Do you guys know somebody here?”
Us: “Nope.”
Concerned Friend (growing visibly more concerned): “Is there even a hotel?”
Us (cheerfully): “Oh yeah, but we’ll just find Magzoub.”

Our friends rushed off to buy us tea and then organized us into one of the minivans bound for the village. They got back on their bus and it sped off out of sight, leaving us alone in the dust with the minivans and drivers in quite literally, the middle of nowhere.

The minivan drivers conversed amongst themselves for a while and we heard Magzoub’s name. So I assume the conversation went something like this:

First Driver (puffing on cigarette and drinking tea): “What the hell will we do with these two white idiots?”
Second Driver (smoking and tying bundle of onions onto roof of bus): “I know. Let’s call Magzoub. Allah Ackbar.”

And sure enough, we didn’t have to find Magzoub because he found us. As we banged along into town in the minivan, the driver handed me his phone and I found myself speaking with the famous man, arranging to meet him at a teahouse in the village.

Magzoub starting running a lovely little Nubian-style guesthouse overlooking the Nile a couple of years ago, as travelers started to trickle into Sudan on the overland route.

We took the opportunity to relax there, and also to do laundry again.

Magzoub turned out to be a fabulous and gracious host. He invited us to his home for lunch on the first day.

And the next day, he and wife had us over again – to make pizza.

The best thing about staying with Magzoub was the insight we gained into local life here, by hanging out at his home, drinking tea, and talking about a wide range of topics including religion, marriage and family, our cultural differences, Sudan’s political issues, and a fair bit of local village gossip too.

When we weren’t gossiping and eating pizza with Magzoub, we were out exploring sleepy little Abri, drinking tea and talking to local people who came up to us in the streets to say hello and welcome and in many cases ask us to take their photo.

And wherever we go, we are never far from the Nile, flowing through our trip and threading our destinations together like a beautiful green ribbon.

We hired a motorboat and went to Sai Island.

But we thought better of swimming, although Magzoub had enthusiastically encouraged us to ‘shower in the Nile’.

So if you ever find yourself in Abri, remember: just ask for Magzoub. And don’t go swimming.

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For more of our adventures (and misadventures) in Sudan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

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