Hello AGAIN!

It seems like we are sending a LOT of updates lately...way more than we anticipated. Internet is just way too easy and cheap in the areas we are travelling to, which was a surprise. Right now, we are in Khartoum, Sudan enjoying a rest day before heading into the hardest week of the tour. We spend 3 days getting to the Ethiopian border and then 3 days in Ethiopia climbing up and over a huge mountain range. We are told that day 2 in Ethiopia is the hardest day of the tour. The past 4 days since Dongola have all merged into one long stretch of desert in our minds. We are getting stops and camp sites mixed up in our heads because they all looked pretty much the same. A tent and thousands of square kilometers of Sahara desert. When we crossed the Nile River in Dongola, we went from the Nubian Desert to the Sahara. It is strange thinking that when looking West, there is nothing but sand all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The cycling has become slightly mind-numbing as a result of this very barren landscape. In the Nubian Desert, there were a lot more hills and entertaining terrain, but here, it is nothing but flat, newly paved roads and sand. We kept our sanity on the long rides (142km, 142km, 157km and 105km over the past 4 days) by talking a lot. In fact, in order to ensure we have stuff to talk about, we have made a rule of not having any interesting conversations at camp but instead writing the topic down and discussing it the next day while riding. It worked to get us to Khartoum, though there were some times when we felt like just getting on the truck to make the sand go by faster.

We have noticed people getting slightly less friendly the more we move South, and instead of always being eagerly waved at, we usually have to initiate the wave. It is an interesting spectrum to see change slowly while we go by at our pace. Khartoum is a very big city that reminded us a lot of Delhi, but with slightly less people and traffic congestion. The air is very dry and today was the hottest day of the week, reaching 50 degrees. The heat is actually quite bearable until you start to move but the sun feels like someone is holding a hot plate to your arms.

Last night was a very enjoyable one in Khartoum and it involved bowling and then watching and taking part in a dance-off with some local police cadets that are housed in the same grounds as we are. They played a game where one person stamps their foot to a certain beat, then challented someone else to that beat. Whoever loses the beat first is disqualified. It was a lot of fun and we were not too bad either!!! Today, we took a bus to a YMCA compound which houses some IDP (all children) from the South and the West of Sudan. One of our riders works with the German YMCA which is quite close to the one in Sudan. We were all able to help hand out some mosquito nets to about 300 children (mostly orphans) that were purchased as a result of the fundraising and the joint YMCA efforts. We are still taking in and going over everything that we saw and how it made us feel and we will most likely write more about this in the future. It was quite something...

Lastly, we wish would could get more pictures up, but we are having a hard time getting around the size of the pictures as well as the internet connection speed. If there are any travel savvy or tech savvy people out there who have a suggestion for getting more pictures up, please let us know.

Our next rest day is on February 6 in Gondor, Ethiopia where we hope to update once more!

Ciao!

Judy & Andrew