What does it cost to enter Sudan? Besides a long fight to get a visa, it cost us 1,5 l of semi-warm water, 40 cigarettes, 1 Jetalliance T-shirt and 50 USD given to the customs broker. This has been the end of an exciting and adventurous day. First, we got an escort with at highest count 4 cars, but one security guard with his driver was following us during the whole trip. This guy should have stepped out of an east-european action movie – every time we passed hundreds of soldiers and policemen that recognized him, we did not have to show any ID or documents, we just kept going through at least 50 control posts.
We crossed a bridge over Nile river and after that we were taken by a ferry from Egypt to Sudan over the Nile river once again. Everything was organized by our local hero Anis, who made amazing things happen. The Egypt-Sudan border was supposed to be closed when we would reach it, so what to do? You call your friend that is working at the border and ask him to keep the border open for 5 more hours.
Due to our very good timing, we are ahead of schedule. The highlight of today was a ferry trip over the Nile river. During this voyage our team came to a conclusion that we have made halfway through our expedition, both – time-wise and mileage-wise. With 37 degrees outside, it has been a very warm day for the car, but it is driving fine.
Now we are in Sudan, nice empty roads and nearly 10.000 km driven, so we slowly, but surely can feel that in our bodies. We are just talking about how unreal it feels to drive in Sudan, but we have 1.500 km to get used to that. We decided to switch off the tracker for the next 24 hours, as we are not too fancy about becoming a target for anybody that wants to do harm. As soon as we are at the equator, we will bring the live map back again and there we will tell the full story of our trip.