Day 114
Sleeping location: Semi desert 16.12N 31.92E, Sudan
Distance (km today/total): 116 / 9150
Estimated climb (m today/total): 200 / 61100
Melons available: 1,000 (est)
Day in three words: Oh my gourd
During the night the wind picked up and it got so cold that I had to erect a little shield of panniers. As a result of this disturbance we didn’t wake up until 6.30 and got away slowly. We noticed some mystery tracks all around our stuff, clearly not from a mammal or lizard, but quite wide apart. Perhaps a snake? A scorpion? We were sure to check our shoes and panniers thoroughly. As we were about to leave Rebecca spotted a quite big beetle with wide apart legs, and after watching it we saw that it was the mystery track marker. Bit of an anticlimax.
The morning’s terrain was sandy desert with sparse vegetation, but it was livened up by one of the most surreal experiences of the trip (or my life?) so far. In the middle of nowhere a rickety old biplane suddenly zoomed across the road maybe 100m ahead of me, no more than 2 or 3 metres off the ground. As I was staring in bafflement it banked round and came back directly towards me, still at the same height. I was envisaging some kind of North by Northwest type situation but it banked a little and crossed the road no more than 10m ahead of me. I could see it was fitted with some kind of crop dusting machinery and there was an immediate chemical smell so I put my buff on as a rudimentary filter. Immediately afterwards was a huge herd of camels, with riders on a couple, so I stopped to take a picture. As I was standing there a car came past and the passenger yelled and gestured for me to leave the area, so I figured there must be something nasty in the air and got a move on*.
In the next town we stopped for coffee across from a big truck with maybe 30 camels all squished in; they obviously didn’t like this and kept bashing each other and making weird noises. Upon asking for the third round of coffees Rebecca was taken into the kitchen and shown how to do it, which might help with getting our coffee requirements registered in future, albeit in quite a direct way. There were a couple of piles of watermelons for sale in the town and one melon vendor came to our table to try and sell one to us. He misunderstood our repeated “chopping” gesture, meant to mean that we only wanted half, and kept chopping the entire melon into some kind of bizarre configuration. We gave in and accepted the whole thing, but there was so much that we took half away even after gorging ourselves on it.
It turned out that this was not the only place to buy melons around here. For the entire afternoon there were green patches scattered all over the desert, butterflies everywhere, goats nibbling on the greenery, and melons for sale - lots and lots of melons for sale, plus these strange knobbly cucumber things which I am going to assume are the snozzcumbers mentioned in the BFG. I think there was some heavy rainfall here quite recently, which has created this temporary ecosystem and temporary gourd-based economy. The melon sellers were numerous and frequent, and always very insistent that we stop and check out their wares, despite the fact that: 1) Gourds are about the worst possible food to carry on a bike, being both heavy and nutritionally quite empty, 2) Having passed multiple melon vendors already, surely our gourd-based needs would already be fulfilled, and 3) Maybe I just don’t like melons, OK? Sadly this didn’t occur to most people and they seemed borderline offended that we didn’t stop. I suppose they are desperate to exchange the mostly useless thing that they have loads of for hard cash.
We had a late lunch at a very average cafe that did at least give us a couple of snozzcumbers for free. After some more cycling through the same kind of scrubland/green patch/melon vendor we found a big dune and stopped to camp behind it. It was absolutely riddled with snake tracks so the tent was a must. Dinner was an ersatz carbonara with “feta” and snozzcumber, which was actually surprisingly tasty.
*We saw a few locusts in the next town, so they might have been spraying for them. They are big things, maybe the size of my thumb excluding the wings.
Distance (km today/total): 116 / 9150
Estimated climb (m today/total): 200 / 61100
Melons available: 1,000 (est)
Day in three words: Oh my gourd
During the night the wind picked up and it got so cold that I had to erect a little shield of panniers. As a result of this disturbance we didn’t wake up until 6.30 and got away slowly. We noticed some mystery tracks all around our stuff, clearly not from a mammal or lizard, but quite wide apart. Perhaps a snake? A scorpion? We were sure to check our shoes and panniers thoroughly. As we were about to leave Rebecca spotted a quite big beetle with wide apart legs, and after watching it we saw that it was the mystery track marker. Bit of an anticlimax.
The morning’s terrain was sandy desert with sparse vegetation, but it was livened up by one of the most surreal experiences of the trip (or my life?) so far. In the middle of nowhere a rickety old biplane suddenly zoomed across the road maybe 100m ahead of me, no more than 2 or 3 metres off the ground. As I was staring in bafflement it banked round and came back directly towards me, still at the same height. I was envisaging some kind of North by Northwest type situation but it banked a little and crossed the road no more than 10m ahead of me. I could see it was fitted with some kind of crop dusting machinery and there was an immediate chemical smell so I put my buff on as a rudimentary filter. Immediately afterwards was a huge herd of camels, with riders on a couple, so I stopped to take a picture. As I was standing there a car came past and the passenger yelled and gestured for me to leave the area, so I figured there must be something nasty in the air and got a move on*.
In the next town we stopped for coffee across from a big truck with maybe 30 camels all squished in; they obviously didn’t like this and kept bashing each other and making weird noises. Upon asking for the third round of coffees Rebecca was taken into the kitchen and shown how to do it, which might help with getting our coffee requirements registered in future, albeit in quite a direct way. There were a couple of piles of watermelons for sale in the town and one melon vendor came to our table to try and sell one to us. He misunderstood our repeated “chopping” gesture, meant to mean that we only wanted half, and kept chopping the entire melon into some kind of bizarre configuration. We gave in and accepted the whole thing, but there was so much that we took half away even after gorging ourselves on it.
It turned out that this was not the only place to buy melons around here. For the entire afternoon there were green patches scattered all over the desert, butterflies everywhere, goats nibbling on the greenery, and melons for sale - lots and lots of melons for sale, plus these strange knobbly cucumber things which I am going to assume are the snozzcumbers mentioned in the BFG. I think there was some heavy rainfall here quite recently, which has created this temporary ecosystem and temporary gourd-based economy. The melon sellers were numerous and frequent, and always very insistent that we stop and check out their wares, despite the fact that: 1) Gourds are about the worst possible food to carry on a bike, being both heavy and nutritionally quite empty, 2) Having passed multiple melon vendors already, surely our gourd-based needs would already be fulfilled, and 3) Maybe I just don’t like melons, OK? Sadly this didn’t occur to most people and they seemed borderline offended that we didn’t stop. I suppose they are desperate to exchange the mostly useless thing that they have loads of for hard cash.
We had a late lunch at a very average cafe that did at least give us a couple of snozzcumbers for free. After some more cycling through the same kind of scrubland/green patch/melon vendor we found a big dune and stopped to camp behind it. It was absolutely riddled with snake tracks so the tent was a must. Dinner was an ersatz carbonara with “feta” and snozzcumber, which was actually surprisingly tasty.
*We saw a few locusts in the next town, so they might have been spraying for them. They are big things, maybe the size of my thumb excluding the wings.
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