Forging forward Jim puts down the phone. An unspoken moment of silence hangs...
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I’ll Meet You at the Border: Part 2. & the Moyale-Isiolo stretch
Forging forward Jim puts down the phone. An unspoken moment of silence hangs over the three of us; Bust, Jim and myself are sitting at the border waiting for Tom and the roar of his Frank-enstein accomplice. “He’s run out of fuel. He’s only about 20km away, but Frank has run out of petrol.” The [...]
I’ll meet you at the Border…{part .1.}
This time I was spared the deserved embarrassment of complete personal ineptitude. Unfortunately it wasn’t simply a case of the fuel switch being in the wrong position. I had checked the fuel pump and both tanks had run dry. Completely out. This was just a bad combination of avoidable person misjudgement and unfortunate fuel spillages. [...]
Ethiopia – Life in Technicolour – {NEW PHOTOBLOG}
“Challenging experiences need time to ferment. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquillity. – Tim Cahill ***** You know that a country promises to hold a special spectrum of unpredictable experiences when your are woken abruptly on your first morning by a rodent sitting on your face. That’s right; a fucking [...]
The Ethiopian Pendulum
Captain Tom getting the first taste of Ethiopians curiosity: they watched him fix the bike for 2 hours Forget tea, drink coffee Ethiopia is not every one’s cup of tea. Think instead coffee, intense and strong here in its birthplace, spiced up with a few additions: the proudness and cheeky rubdubbery of Scottish and [...]
The Great Escape – Sudan to Ethiopia
‘ah, no problems at all. The bike is partially perfect.’ – Sudanese one-legged mechanic. A phrase which is beyond partial in its suitable summation of how things stand. The real challenge is in figuring out what parts are the perfect ones. ***** It was somewhere around 10km until the border that the decision [...]
The Great Khartoum Treasure Hunt
There lies an innate and wholly unexpected sense of pleasure and hum-harring when you get a little piece of nuggeted wisdom from the most unlikely of sources. Deep in the bowls of one of Khartoum busiest and baked Friday markets, in an equally recessed coffee tent, I found said nugget. Brother Mohammed Yousuf and brother [...]
My Northern Sudan
“A Sacred Solitude lay before me, deadly and fascinating, like the desert” – Zorba the Greek The people in Northern Sudan contain a powerful spirit. I don’t mean this in their eking out a life in the harsh desert environment – although they do – I mean this in their extraordinary commitment to their [...]
Sudan for Me and You – {NEW PHOTO-BLOG}
Sudan is a quite extraordinary place. A place that pushed and challenged our weary soles both physically and mentally more than I think we first anticipated. A proud people. Respectful. Gentle. Engagingly beautiful. Beyond hospitable. While our time here as a team has been somewhat fractured – due to now frustratingly boring injuries, baked Saharan desert [...]
Living the Interruptions – Chapter .2. {NEW VIDEO}
“…yes, you may have studied humanity – but that’s not enough. Now you are living it, and sharing with it first hand. This is a big difference, you’know. And something that I am very jealous of you for!” **** The moment that literally tens of you have been waiting for, has now arrived; here is [...]
Africa? – The Broad Strokes of Misrepresentation
‘Wow…that’s a really long way; so many countries. You really do this?’, comes the well versed acclaim to our frequently voiced travel synopsis. ‘And which way you go? Africa very dangerous! I think, not safe. Many wars; too tough. Sudan; BAD. Uganda; BAD. Africa; BAD. I think, NO.’ The stock response is so painfully self-certain, [...]
