It’s been a crazy week in which we’ve made it from Sudan and into Ethiopia!
We started the week in Khartoum and wanted to be on the road straight away. Unfortunately, the Ethiopian embassy was declining all visas until Thursday so that did gave us the opportunity to see some more of Khartoum and even attend a Sudanese wedding which was particularly interesting. It’s illegal to drink alcohol in Sudan so there was some very awkward dancing from Reece that really stood out against the huge moves that the locals (and matt) were cutting.
Having received our visas we headed south to Ethiopia. This was not without it’s struggles. We spent a few nights camping on the way down and by the time it had reach 7pm on the first night we were both in the tent with food poisoning. Food poisoning is not pleasant at the best times but when you’re in the middle of nowhere, with only chocolate spread sandwiches in supply, and roughly 10 hours of driving to do the following day (in 40 degrees) it really tests you.
The next test was the ‘Death Stalker’ scorpion, neither of us have ever seen a scorpion before and so when Matt found one crawling half way up Reece’s leg it was quite a shock. Somehow he kept his cool as Matt flicked it away. Only later did we found out that this kind of scorpion is reasonably well known in Northern Africa and considered one of the deadliest scorpions you can come across…
Despite all this we finally made it to Ethiopia. We we’re 40 kilometres from Gondar (our first stop), and surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of people celebrating Timkat festival, when disaster struck and the Sidecar had a catastrophic breakdown. This development further riled up an already very excited crowd that actually proved very useful when we had to lift the vehicle on to a little pick up truck. So now we’re stuck here for the foreseeable future. We’ve found the source of the problem though and essentially the clutch went into complete self destruct mode… Which leaves it down to us, with not a single mechanical braincell between us whatsoever, to rebuild our clutch and somehow get Kuishi na Kuishi back on the road…
Watch this weeks weekly update to see how it all unraveled and stay tuned to see if we can get it going.
Post on the board