Our luck had seemingly run out, and it looked like we would be spending our first night in Sudan sleeping on the streets of Khartoum.  If I was more of a religious person this might have been the time to send up a quiet prayer for guidance; instead I decided to employ the tried and tested combination of chronic optimism and the genuine belief that the universe has a way of ensuring that everything will work out in the end…

We knew that today’s journey was going to be a lengthy one; not only did we need to cross a potentially tricky international border, but we also knew that in order to get our visas fully validated we would need to get to Khartoum which was over 750km away from where we currently were, we weren’t even sure if it was going to be possible, but if nothing is ventured, then nothing is gained, so with bleary eyes we headed out into the dark streets to look for the first of many of today’s transport types...

We clambered into the rugged Toyota, and headed for the park gates along the now familiar bumpy, dusty roads.  It took an hour or so to reach the park gates, and as soon as we entered the park we weren’t disappointed.  Almost immediately we drove past the endemic Gelada baboons, only found in the Ethiopian highlands.  These hilariously fluffy species of Old World monkeys were beautiful, but paled in insignificance to the scene which had appeared before us... 

Embracing the unexpected is one of the best things about travel and adventure.  Accepting that even the best laid plans will often not work out exactly as expected can be difficult, but the resultant experiences are often some of most interesting and most memorable, like the time I became a pool shark in rural Ethiopia...

If you were woken up and told that today, was the day you would be heading to the Gateway to Hell, what would your choice of breakfast be?  A Full English perhaps? Or maybe a giant stack of pancakes complete with all the toppings?  I tell you what it probably wouldn’t be: a packet of banana cream biscuits!  Yes, remarkably someone has actually created this monstrosity, and they are, as you can imagine, absolutely terrible!  This was the reality we faced as we waited outside a small police check point, deep in the Ethiopian desert, for our paperwork to be signed, before we could continue our journey; fortunately, we had been given some excellent coffee to offset the taste of the biscuits, and we both agreed that this was a journey well worth enduring any number of banana creams for.

In the truest sense of the word this was an alien landscape: well below sea level, a landscape of green and yellow hues and weird shapes, with day time temperatures reaching 50°C, and geothermal activity rife throughout the area, my rudimentary understanding of geology was struggling to interpret what was going on.  If NASA ever send a mission to Venus, this is where I suggest they test their equipment, as there was very little left to suggest we were actually still on the little ball of green and blue we call earth...