10th May Khartoum

Welcome to Khartoum. We have just had a notice slipped under our door alerting us there is a 24 hour curfew in Khartoum due to the imminent arrival of a military rebel force from Darfur.
After 12 days in our van in the heat or sleeping in unsavoury alternatives we had decided to appreciate A/C for a couple of days. Now this happens.
Yesterday was another eventful day. We broke camp early as we wanted to at least get to Karima before nightfall. The track led across a small desert the surface of which was fairly firm. The problem was that it was very difficult knowing which way we should be heading, there were so many tracks. We passed a couple of women who signalled us for a lift, I though that would be a good way of staying on the right track. That proved the case as Mark, who had gone on, got lost even with a GPS that gave his position pretty well. He had to go cross country to get out. After the desert he missed the new road being built and reached Dongola, where we were to meet, after us. He had travelled along the old road that passed through all the villages and was thick sand in places. He had one nasty spill and was trapped under his bike until a group of women helped lift the bike.
From Dongola there is a new asphalt road across the Nubian Desert to Karima. We though of spending the night there but temps were still in the 50s, a good excuse to travel on to Atbara, a further 280kms on. Atbara is on the eastern side of the Nile, there are no bridges across at that point, just 2 ferries. I don’t know what the problem was but they refused to take us across. We decided to camp there the night and go across in the morning. After a 2 hour wait we got the gist that there may not be a ferry for quite some time, two of the trucks that were waiting took off, beckoning us to follow. I knew there was another ferry some 20kms upstream from where we were and guessed that that was where they were heading. But boy what a drive. They went cross country along dry river beds, around irrigation canals, through sections of bull dust. I would never have found our way there on our own.
This ferry was working and we were able to cross on the second crossing along with donkey carts, a couple of trucks and many locals. After a further ½ hour trying to find the asphalt road we finally made it and had an uneventful drive to Khartoum. On the way we passed a group of funerary pyramids built a few kilometres from the Nile. Very impressive.