We arrived in Wadi Halfa to negotiate Sudanese bureaucracy at lunch time on Wednesday 21st January, one day after our visa extensions ended but luckily they didn’t seem too bothered. It took all day to clear customs and we still had to go to the Police Station to register the next day but the sunrise on our first Sudanese morning was beautiful.

Leaving Wadi Halfa wasn’t difficult but then the roads deteriorated and we were bumped and thrown around for the next two days to Dongola. The dust got into the back of Nelly and covered almost everything. The directions to follow the tracks were easy, keep the Nile on your right, but bump wise the tracks were terrible.

Then, all of a sudden, we saw a war memorial for British Officers and Men.

We ended up going through lots of small villages. The villagers were great in showing us the way out of their village to Dongola but one old man sent us the route he walks with his donkey and we just about fitted between the field edges. The scenery was very flat, and stayed that way most of the way through the Sudan.

There wasn’t much to see in the city. The supermarkets sold Kellogg’s cornflakes and all the Heinz varieties but they were very expensive. Fruit and vegetables were more expensive than Egypt but available. Nigel and Simon got their Ethiopian visas and we set off out of the city only to be stopped 25km out of town and sent back. We hadn’t registered with the Immigration office in Khartoum, no one had told us we had to. Paperwork over, we tried again the next day and made it to near to the Ethiopian border. Along the road from Khartoum to El Gedaref we saw more crashed vehicles that in all the other countries put together. Most accidents involved the trucks driving in to Khartoum from Port Sudan or buses which were all very heavily loaded and driven very fast. After a night in the bush we drove to the border at Qallabat. We had spent only a week in Sudan and been bounced and bothered by paperwork enough.