TRAVEL FEATURE - S u d a n
MATT BISHOP
I POOED
MYSELF
Three months after setting off
from London’s Ace Café, in the
hope of being the first people to
circumnavigate the globe on a
scooter and a sidecar, we’d found our
feet a little as ‘overlanders’.
We’d fought off wolves while
wild camping in Albania although,
they’d turned out to be a few very
small, stray dogs. We’d survived a
breakdown in the Sahara and had
almost worked out how to handle
a scooter and sidecar. But we were
still new to the game and we were
heading into what we thought would
be our biggest challenge yet – Sudan.
We had no idea what Sudan would
bring. Having done little to no
research, we only knew what we had
seen in the news – and all you see on
the news is the trouble in the south.
We knew we wouldn’t run in to that
but, surely the rest of the country
wouldn’t be all plain sailing?
Well, our completely brilliant
entrance to Sudan turned out to be
exactly that – plain sailing. Most
people enter Sudan by boarding
one of the boats from Aswan and
spending a couple of nights on the
ferry down to Wadi Halfa. We opted
for the second option which was
to drive down to the Abu Simbel
Temples and take a local ferry from
there. We slept on a bench in the
carpark of the temples and woke to
watch the sunrise over the massive
monuments that line the shore of
Lake Nasser.
After visiting the temples, we
went down to the local ferry port
and boarded a boat to cross the lake.
Only a few overlanders take this
route so the guys on the boat were
excited to see us. So much so that
the captain invited us up to the deck
to sip tea with him on the journey.
It was an incredible experience.
There we were, sailing across this
lake, sipping sweet Egyptian tea with
the crew, while looking back over
the incredible Abu Simbel temples
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