How to cross the Sahara desert in a police car

Hello! From Sudan this time, I will try to force into a nutshell the unlikely, yet true story of how I crossed the Sahara desert on the back of a motorcycle, swam in the Nile and had dinner at the house of the Italian ambassador to Sudan.

I left you in a hurry last time because I had to get to the Dutch embassy in time to collect a recommendation letter. This letter I needed to get a Sudanese visa that same day from the Sudanese embassy in Cairo. If I got the visa the same day, I would be able to catch the night train that evening and hurry to Aswan to catch the boat there, across lake Nasser into Sudan, that would leave the next day. If I would miss that boat, I would have to wait for a week until the next boat would leave. As I have to arrive in Nairobi the 11th of June at the latest, you may understand that if anything would go wrong in this first part, I would probably not be able to make it to Nairobi overland in time.

Much to my horror, therefore, I arrived at the Dutch embassy only to find it was closed due to one of our many religious holidays (pentecost this time). I saw dark clouds gathering over my fragile plan, and for a moment I had no idea how to proceed. I decided after a bit of thinking to just go to the Sudanese embassy without the letter, and try to get the visa without the letter. I could try, at least.
Arriving at the embassy of Sudan, I was asked to fill in some documents requesting the visa, some photos and proof of yellow fever inoculation, but to my relief not a single mention of the recommendation letter that I had thought I needed. Having handed all the forms over to the cashier and having paid a hundred dollars visa fee, I thought I was out of the woods. Everything was fine, said the cashier, and I could come pick up my passport the next day at 10 am. Wait... didn't I need to catch that train tonight??
'.... 10 am?? But I need it today!! can't I pay an extra fee [read: bribe] so it is ready today?' 'No sir, there are no extra fees.'

So, what do you do in a situation like that? You wait for a small miracle to happen.
Enter: Roger and Obia, a British couple that is traveling from London to Uganda overland, and is there at the embassy for the very same reason as I am. Some friendly conversation quickly reveals, however, that Roger's uncle is good friends with the head of consular affairs at the Sudanese embassy, and they will be able to arrange everything for their visas directly in his office, having them ready at 3 pm the same day!! I recognized my only chance at still getting the visa in time, and asked them to put in a good word for me when they were talking to their contact. To make a long story short: that afternoon I was sitting in the office of the head of consular affairs of the Sudanese embassy in Cairo, watching him sign the visa he had just pasted in my passport. I didn't know how I did it, but I got my visa and I quickly went to the trainstation to get a ticket for the train that night. Finally, after a nice dinner together with Roger, Obia and an Australian girl I had met in the hostel, I got on the train to Aswan, hoping to arrive in time the next morning to jump the final hurdle before reaching Sudan: actually getting on the boat.

I had read online somewhere that the border police would stop letting people on the boat after 12, so I thought I would still be on time with my train scheduled to arrive at 10:30. With a delay of almost 2 hours, however, that little bit of security I had went flying out the window too.
Rushing to the harbor when I finally arrived in Aswan, I found out that my biggest problem would not be to get past the border police: the tickets for the boat were completely sold out, with a cowd of at least 50 people waiting in front of me, desperate to get on that boat like me. I was within sight of the harbor, but this time my plan really seemed set to sink.
Being this close to making it, though, I was not ready to give up until I would see that boat sailing away without me. I saw a group of motor cyclists, who had booked their tickets together in advance and were there to pick them up. They had an Egyptian translator with them (who, as I would later find out, worked for the Egyptian secret service), whom I persuaded to try and convince the manager of the ticket service to let me on the boat, but even he couldn't help me in the end. One of the motor cyclists was from Belgium, and I was able to explain to him what my problem was. Just before they left, he asked the translator one last time to help me, and the translator then asked a local shopowner, Mr. Walid, to help me get on the boat. It was then 1 pm, and I was told the boat would leave at 4 pm. I was, however, constantly reminded of the sheer impossible nature of my task by the 50 people in front of me that were all trying to get that last place on the boat in case someone did not show up.
Now everyone around me was telling me to give up and come back tomorrow to buy a ticket for next week's boat. Mr. Walid seemed confident nonetheless, and I decided I would try until the boat left. After all, I had been extremely lucky before, too.
Making some friendly conversation and trying to learn some Arabic quickly made me a lot of friends around the place, and as it was getting closer to 4 o'clock, I think about half of the people there was lobbying on my behalf to get an extra ticket from the manager. When in the end the director of the harbor came to the ticket office to say that there were 3 places left on the boat, there were about 20 hands that pushed my passport in through the little hole at the cashier's window. About 2 minutes later I walked to the customs house with my passport and a ticket in my hand. Honestly, I couldn't believe it...

Walking to the dock I saw the motor people on the deck as they were cheering for me for having made it onto the boat at the very last moment. Once on the boat I got talking to them, and it turned out they were a convoy of police officers, mainly Italians but also including a Spaniard fire fighter, a Belgian police officer, a Turkish general and a Libyan colonel. They were on a humanitarian mission called 'Moto for Peace', and aside from bringing a lot of sponsor money to a charity in Ethiopia, they were meeting up with officials from the police forces in the countries they passed on their way, all the way to South Africa.
Bert, the Belgian, told me next to 10 motor cycles also a police car and a van were part of the group, and I might be able to get a lift with them to Khartoum.

Now, almost a week later, I am in Khartoum, and in the past week I have crossed the Sahara desert with the Moto for Peace group, mostly in the van but also about 200km through the desert on the back of one of the bikes, I have swum in the Nile near the 6th cataract and I have been able to join the group at all of their official meetings, one of which was a dinner at the house of the Italian ambassador to Sudan. All of the police officers we meet are very eager to help us, and all the bureaucracy that I would have normally had to deal with seems to magically vanish without a trace, while traffic jams in Khartoum quickly become insignificant as we race through the city with the police siren switched on. I have to say it’s all slightly surreal at times…

Now, I will travel with this group until Addis Ababa, before making my own way to Nairobi for the last 1500 km. This is definitely not the easiest part, especially the stretch between Moyale and Isiolo in northern Kenya. This road is notoriously horrible, and banditry in this area is not uncommon. I'll let you know how (if...) I survive this last part once I get to Nairobi, something I hope to do rather quickly as I found out that my bank card is not accepted at any bank on the way until Nairobi, leaving me slightly uncomfortably short on cash for the next 10 days.

Ciao ragazzi!!