Arriving in Wadi Halfa on the southern shore of lake Nassar, in sudan, felt like huge weight had had been lifted off our shoulders. Immediately you could feel that the atmosphere was so much more relaxed and the people were also much more subdued. Straight away you could also see that we were one step closer to “real Africa”, as the skin colour around ranged from the lighter tones of North Africa to rich black of central Africa. There was still the slight inability to queue at the customs door but once inside the officials were super friendly and did the half arsed checking of our bags in no time at all. Once outside we needed to change some us dollars and euro’s into Sudanese pounds as there are no ATM that accept foreign cards in the whole of Sudan. We Jump onto our minibus and pay the fixed price of 5 Sudanese pounds to get the few kilometers into the town and our new hotel or “Locanda,” which will be our home for the next few days. At 1.50 euro’s it’s a bit of a bargain, the shower is a bucket but it’s clean and it has a bed.

I’m staying with our new French friend Ben and Susi and Marc share a room. Quite often when we are having dinner at our amazingly good local restaurant we talk about the hierarchy of overland travel. At the bottom rung of the ladder you have the tramps like Ben who is walking a good chunk of the Nubian Desert. Then you have the cyclists, who are the working class heroes who can take very few creature comforts. We are the boring middle class, superseded by the 4x4 upper class with their AC, fridges, more than 3 pairs of pants and roof tents. The real aristocracy of the whole system are the over land trucks kitted out with showers, hot running water and all the creature comforts of a house. So whilst waiting in Wadi Halfa for the motorbikes to arrive, we mix with most of the spectrum from the class system, as it’s the only crossing point into Egypt and the NE of Africa. One group is a sponsored South African team driving 3 brand new VW Amarok 4x4 which I have never seen before. They fill us in on the 300km route through the Nubian Desert following a disused railway and tell us that its easy riding and we should manage at least 80km per hour. We are sold and decide to go for it and we will fit our desert tires when the bikes arrive. Lesson learned, never trust advice from the upper class!

Four days after arriving we are getting a little concerned as the bikes still haven’t turned up and the next two days (Fri and Sat) would be the Sudanese weekend. Mr Mezir, our mandatory paper work fixer, called us late on Thurs telling us to get ourselves to the port, pronto, so we can unload our bikes and get through customs with no expensive overtime. Mission accomplished, bikes came off with no bribes to pay and customs were a doddle. Next day the 1 hour job of swapping our tires around turned into a 3 hour epic, as ours are extremely stiff and are notoriously difficult to fit. Prepped with 500km of fuel for normal riding, lots of water and food, it was time to take on our first bike offroad challenge.

The road into the desert starts pretty firm but in not too long it deteriorates and becomes deep rutted sand. Our path ahead cuts straight through the desert with nothing but 8 derelict train stations, some gold and a shit load of sand. The first day we travel 110 km in 7 hours of riding with an hour lost for changing a flat tire on chardonnay. This was a bit of a school boy error on my part as I had dropped the pressure in my tires to get a bigger footprint in the soft sand but had done it a bit too much. What occurs is a phenomenon known as tire creep were the tire spins on the rim but the inner tube stays were it is, snapping the valve off! I had another spare one with me but had trashed the one in the wheel (although I know now valves can be bodged up, sorry Susi).

That was the hardest day of riding with most of the way being in deep rutted sand that had a tendency to chuck you off or more to the point me, 6 times! I blame chardonnay for having such a fat arse but the other may disagree and blame it on my ropey technique, sketchy counts. When we did look for another route away from the dreaded ruts, we just crawled along spewing out a huge plume of sand from the spinning rear wheel. On one occasion Susi went on a recci for an easier root looking for a firmer path and hit a particular soft patch and buried Luzifer up to her swing arm. That night we camped next to one of the old train stations, thoroughly exhausted we watched another amazing sunset, cooked dinner and sat around a little camp fire with a sky full of stars. I’m sure we were all thinking the same and this was the exactly reason we had come away and this was exactly the little scenario you dream about in your head.

The next day we got up early and struggled to pull off in the deep powdery sand. Before long the desert changed and became deep with no ruts. This stuff was amazing and it reminded me of the amazing feeling of floating in deep powder snow on skis. You could point the bike with plenty of throttle and it literally just floated along. Keeping nice and loose with weight slightly back we could cruise up to 70km. I knew the bike was working hard as the engine ran consistently at the highest temperature it runs at and you had to give it lots of throttle every now and then when you could feel a particularly soft patch of sand suddenly suck the power from the rear wheel. We were starting to worry as our 500km of normal fuel range was getting drunk by the bikes at an alarming rate. We were very relieved when one of the deserted train stations was actually a restocking center with petrol, food and a bore hole with fresh water. After sharing some of our dates with the locals and topping up with fuel we established that it was to service the gold miner in the area, all trying to make it rich and break out of poverty. After an amazing beef kebab stew and bean foul it was back into the saddle for another 100km until we set our tents up in one of the disused railway buildings.

Next morning we set off blasting through miles of soft flat sand, riding three abreast, all with our own trail of dust billowing from our knobbly rear tires. All was great until chardonnay started to feel a bit more loose and squirmy than normal. I very quickly realized I had another flat tire. So we went through the normal rig moral of getting the tire off and were quite relieved to find that it was only a puncture and the valve in my remaining tube was intact. It turns out that the young fella who had repaired the pinch puncture (he had put in the tube whilst fitting the tire) had only just covered it with the patch. At an agreed rate of 1 Sudanese pound per hour Susi had the unenviable job of picking the old patch away. With the tube fixed we made good progress to Abu Hamad and refueled and ate a nice chunky lunch of the Sudanese staple, foul (mushed up beans and oil) and bread.

That night it started to get dark and we had another 70km to go before the next village with a locanda. As a democracy the other two voted to pull off the road and see if we could stay in the small village. I wasn’t that keen as I thought it would be headwork and the whole village would turn out and we’d be in one of those really knackering situations. As it turns out it was an amazing and our host were a pair of legends. We were shown to our own private mud house where we all had a bed, somewhere to park the bikes, water to wash with and lots of sweet chai. We were woken before sunrise by the door being shoved open and our host lighting an open fire in the middle of the room. Pretty quick way of getting 3 westerners out of bed is to smoke em out! He then proceeded to roast fresh coffee beans, grind them buy hand and brew the coffee on a charcoal fire. After a shed load of coffee we all speedily packed up our bikes and headed off down the road feeling properly wired and a bit sketchy.

We arrived at Atbara and spent a night and afternoon just relaxing and looking to make our way south to Khartoum rested. Next morning the unthinkable happened, my last tube lost the valve when the tire deflated. Out of pure luck this happened right outside of one of the many tire shacks dotted all over Sudan and the rest of Africa, I suspect. I had sworn to Sus that a valve snapping off was terminal for the tube but to my surprise the guy simply sandwiched a new valve in the hole and repaired the hole in the tube with some old inner tube and rubber glue. Bam job done and all in all, it cost 1 euro! We carried on south to Shendi and spent a couple of days doing routine maintenance on the bikes. This included cleaning chains, washing our foam air filter in petrol and re oiling them after the severe clogging they had taken in the desert and general tweaks usually involving duct tape, zips ties or jubilee clips.