About 30 minutes North of Shendi, the bus pulled over at a very indistinct patch of sand, and we realised that we really were in the middle of nowhere, at least it very much felt like that in the dark. The only feature of note was a sad looking petrol station, which one of our fellow passengers pointed at and indicated we should sleep there for the night, and with that the bus drive off into the starry night, leaving us to our own devices in the middle of the Sudanese desert…
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…
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...
After asking around, we discovered that there were no direct buses from Lalibela to Mek’ele. In addition, the route was over 400km, on roads of varying quality. We knew it was going to be a bit of an ask to make it to Mek’ele in a day; still, it would be an experience if nothing else, and when some people laughed at our enquiries, and told us that it would be almost impossible to make it in a day, we had no other option but to accept this as a challenge, and commit ourselves to spending several hours crammed into the back of various buses, with no other plan than relying on chronic optimism to get us where we wanted to go.
Just outside town we turned on to the road heading east, and pulled over to the side; there weren’t any obvious passengers waiting to board the already packed bus, and surprisingly based on our experience so far, there weren’t any donkeys, carts, or young children threatening to leap out in front of us, in fact, there appeared to be no reason for us to have stopped at all. I looked at the driver, and he looked back with a cheeky grin, and asked if I was able to drive...
explore v. (ɛkˈsplɔː) 1. The action of travelling through an unfamiliar area in order to learn more about it
