Before I lose the overview, also provide a few overview comments on Sudan and how it was different from both Egypt preceding and Ethiopia following:

• We spent a total of thirteen cycling days and two rest days in Sudan.
• Sudan is difficult to get into (at least for westerners) and also don’t have sense of many tourists. That is nice in many ways as locals haven’t quite built up much dependency on tourists (e.g. in Egypt when tourist industry is down, those dependent on it were pretty aggressive on drumming up business). In Ethiopia it seems like they see enough tourists so they will “charge what the market will bear”, whether it is 8 birr for a coke or 40 birr. In contrast it was consistently 2 or 3.
• It felt a bit like we saw three different slices of Sudan:
  • The northern seven days of cycling were deserts with much sand and rock. Houses were square with low mud walls. There wasn’t much agriculture. Many more mosques here and even smallest towns would have a minaret tower and even in some of the desert camps we could hear call to prayer. Dongola in center of this area also was very Muslim and shut down on Friday.
  • Khartoum was the big city. We were in middle of ministry and central business district. Many more passenger cars crowding in and buildings were several stories
  • The Southern parts were more agricultural. Buildings were still mud/adobe but more likely round. There were more people than in north and they did some farming and herding. The three days of off road cycling brought us through these smallest places – very few other tourists here. We saw some mosques but nighttime noises were more likely animals than calls to prayer.
• Overall, Sudanese people were friendly but just a bit reserved. This made it easy to travel and stop. There were also less of them and less aggressive kids than Ethiopia (so far) and Egypt. Overall enjoyed my travels through Sudan and glad to have seen this.

We stopped briefly at lunch truck and then went to the border town: Gallabat (in Sudan) and Metema (in Ethiopia). Sudan had an exit form to complete and then we walked the bridge to Ethiopia where they checked our passports against large paper books. Mine passed the test, though this all took a while and both we and truck had cleared customs. After this we drove to camp on edge of town. I was slowly feeling stronger and even good enough to eat seconds.
[See image gallery at bike2013.com]
Diesel costs 2 Sudanese pounds per liter here or approximately $1.30 per gallon.

Sudan is an Islamic Republic and we were there 30 minutes before normal visa processing. However it looked like the office might be closed today as well. Fortunately the three armed guards standing outside took up our cause and kept knocking until someone came out. We explained the situation and embassy official found stack of completed passports, looked to find mine and handed it back. Most importantly it has new visa attached. Yeah!

This errand completed left us plenty of time for a day trip to Alexandria. I’ll describe in separate post.