Tour d'Afrique - Cairo to Cape Town by Bike

• The Sudanese people really are amazing.  The whole time in the country I always felt welcome.  The only exception...see below
• It seems to be in their culture to offer to strangers/travellers what you can.  While travelling along I lost count of the number of times I was offered tea and/or food.\
• The most stunning example of their generous tendencies is that on multiple occasions I was offered Sudanese currency (the Dinar) by children less than 10 years old.  These are people that really don't have that much in the way of money, and they wanted to give it to a complete stranger.  (aside: yes, the joke was made later that they wanted to give me money so I could buy some clothes, my bike shorts not hiding much)
• After being accustomed to haggling in Egypt, I quickly found that it is not done as much in the Sudan.  People set their prices and that is where they stood.  I like it.
• On the side of the road there were many who went nuts when we went by.  This time it was not because they wanted money or sweets, but rather they ran out to greet us because they were just really curious!
• People seemed generally curteous to each other; not just us weird looking tourists.
• Though there were times when there was a great deal of traffic passing us by, the drivers were extremely curteous.  Large trucks in the midst of long journeys (we were cycling along the road from Khartoum to Port Sudan) would wait patiently until they had plenty of room to pass our entire group.  We were often honked at, but it was generally accompanied by a big smile and a wave from the vehicle's window.
• Great people, great people

• Unfortunately, I cannot paint as rosy of a picture under this subsection.  To summarize, the rich are rich and the poor are happy.
• At check points of various types (border crossings, police check points, etc.) we were made to perform trivial tasks for questionable reason.  We had to make sure that every single piece of luggage including our bikes got a sticker on them and were subjected to a 5 minute speech about how important this was (no exaggeration) and they were never looked at again.  We were all asked to pay a $50USD fee per person at the border to "register with the police."  Other travellers were asked to pay $35USD.  Our tour organizers were asked for our passports numerous times throughout our journey for police registrations and occasionally asked for fees, but we got away with just showing our passports.  Our gear truck was stopped at police checkpoints and asked for passports and money, but the driver is used to this and always talked his way out of it.
• Throughout the country, we generally had to keep our cameras concealed.  Pictures of anything remotely government related (bridges, airports, large buildings, even roads) was not permitted.  A few riders almost lost their cameras.
• From Khartoum to the border, we were joined by some riders from the Sudanese Cycling team; this was very cool!  This also meant that some politicians followed us and took every possible opportunity to make a long speech saying anything from "thanks for coming through the Sudan" to "we are peaceful people" to "spend more money in the Sudan" to "here are a bunch of charities that you should tell your home countries about" to "tell the media in your home countries that we are peaceful people" with emphasis on us going back to our home countries and setting our media straight on what sort of people we saw in the country.
• Apparently the magazine "The Economist" ranked the Sudan as the 3rd most corrupt country in the world.  From my position I cannot really judge this, but it is unfortunate that a nation of such friendly people is under such leadership.

Overall, travelling through this country was amazing!  Thanks Sudan!

# posted by Andrew @ 2/14/2007 07:08:00 a.m.