Round the World by bike - Al Humphries

Khartoum to Addis Ababa

It is hot. My head pounds and my thermometer has a fit, races off the top of the scale (50°C) and refuses to come back down. As I cycle my face is fixed in a grimace (a combination of pain, heat, misery and genetic ugliness). Exposed to the air my teeth become painfully hot. The ground is too hot to sit on, my handlebars almost too hot to hold, the water in my drinking bottle better suited for brewing tea. But I must go on: I have a rendezvous with a friend in a dilapidated Ethiopian town. I pause for food at sunset at a truckers’ stop. Perhaps it was the heat but the conversation seemed rather surreal: “What tribe are you from?”, “Ermm… Yorkshire, I guess”, then a complicated discussion about why farmers in England do not use camels.

I drag my heels in Gallabat: the far side of the village is Ethiopia and I am reluctant to leave Sudan. My passport is stamped in a thatched mud hut, I don’t have to clear customs (the man is asleep and it would be a shame to wake him) and the border policeman takes me for a final breakfast. Sudan has amazed me. Arriving awestruck and nervous, my head had been laden with preconceptions. Now I have crossed Africa’s largest nation and have learned so much.

Sudan has huge problems, amongst them an absurdly bad government, a horrific civil war, hunger, drought and terrible poverty. However, Sudan has still been my favourite country on this journey. The Sudanese people I met were the kindest, most cheerful, hospitable and welcoming people ever. Sudan needs the West to open its eyes to the horrors of the conflict, to rid itself of unhelpful preconceptions caused by ignorance. It needs our awareness.

Giggling and shielding their faces behind freshly scrubbed hands, six small boys stand in a group and sing. The boys are a family; hence the clean faces, enforced best behaviour and uncomfortable Sunday clothes. Their singing welcomes me to their home.

A year ago each of these children was alone. surviving on cruel streets or in government camps for children orphaned by the endless war in south Sudan. Their parents among the two million people who have disappeared or been killed in the brutal conflict. Alone in the world, the children have received scant education, inadequate food and shelter and little love or personal attention for most of their short lives.

Hope and Homes for Children works in Sudan to rehabilitate children from the camps into homes in the Khartoum community where they can then live in a simple home, attend school and youth groups where they learn useful trades. The home I visited had six orphans, now happily living together as brothers in the care of their parents.

Northern Ethiopia to Addis Ababa

Say Ethiopia and I used to think of Bob Geldof and speedy runners. After two weeks in the country, those thoughts are still prominent. Cycling through Ethiopia involves a crowd of up to forty children running alongside and shouting: “YOU! YOU! MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY!”

Decades of foreign aid have produced a knee-jerk reaction in this nation: if you are white you are rich, therefore give me money. As I pass by, they express their disappointment by hurling stones at me. I am no longer a person, I am a mobile cash point. Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere?

Poverty and money hang in the air. Larger towns are busy with beggars suffering from every form of physical disability imaginable. Most could be treated with basic medical attention. There are a lot of issues I am struggling to get my head round here, and it is all very difficult.

I spend the night with a kind teacher whose English is excellent. He teaches Grades 1 to 4, has 150 students in each class with no textbooks or blackboard. The students range from 8 to 30 years old. And the government has not paid his $90 salary for the past 3 months either.

After a hard slog I make it to Gondar in time to meet my friend, Rob. Gondar is high in the mountains, cool and green. There are trees and lush pastures and herds of cattle. Behind the obnoxious, rude, greedy, stone-throwing children is a beautiful, lush nation. There is no need to go hungry here.

Abandoned tanks litter the roadside, testimony to a hasty military advance on Addis Ababa during the recent civil war.

The ride through the north of Ethiopia has been spectacular, irritating, exhausting and confusing. I have been forced to challenge many opinions about poverty, begging, the role of foreign aid, the purpose and justification of my journey....

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