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Published: February 22nd 2012
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The first night sleep in Sudan was better than expected. Jack and I, who were about the only two not travelling with their own vehicle, so didn't have to wait for the second ship with the vehicles to arrive, decided to get a bus to Abri.
We found a minibus going in that direction and after about half an hour of waiting for it to fill up were on our way. The journey took only 2 and half hours. While it wasn't the most comfortable I am sure there will be worse ahead. We arrived at a petrol station, not realising we were in Abri and a taxi - pimped out to the nines, but with the doors barely hanging on - took us to the only hotel in town.
El Fagr hotel provided us with a room with 2 beds and a/c. It even had a t.v. We never got around to checking if it worked. It was also a place where I first got acquainted with the charms of the Sudanese squat-toilet-come-shower....no further details are necessary.
We went for a little walk around Abri. It didn't take us long to complete this. We walked down by
the Nile and saw some kids jumping in. We presumed this meant that there were no crocodiles there. It would have been beautiful to jump in as it was getting ridiculously hot (for me the Paddy, not so much the Aussie) but the flies were incessant and we had no gear with us.
We decided to check out Sai Island, which was about 10km away. It's an island in the Nile, where there are some ruins as well as some village. We managed to pull over a pick up truck who took us all the way down, on to the ferry and to the remains of the Ottoman fort on the island. The fort itself was fairly underwhelming, but the ride there on the pick up and then the ferry was great.
We then went for a bit of a walk on the island before trying to get back to the ferry. After a quick check with the guidebook, there was a bit of panic as it said the last ferry went at 4 o'clock. This was at 4.30. We got to the ferry and there was no one there. I tried to gesture with a local that
we were trying to get back to the otherside and he told me to go back to the boat. I wasn't entirely sure if that meant we would be leaving before tomorrow night, until some guy arrived in a speedboat and took us back over to the other side. We were still 10 kms away from Abri and had to walk along the main road for about 20 minutes before a car passed going in our direction. They stopped and took us back to Abri.
Nowhere in Abri looked like it was very appetizing, so a dinner of bread and tinned tuna was had, before we had some shisha and went to bed.
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