Long and quite self-satisfied email below - 15 February 2007 – Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Helllllllllllllllllllllllllllo all

Year of Caroline update time for you all. 3 o'clock this morning saw me dancing in a tin shed "bar" in Ethiopia with a group of overlanders and teenage prositutes (the whole ladies of the night concept being an accepted form of supplementing the pocket money here...) to a random remix of John Denver's Country Road and trying to keep track of where my beer was, shortly before the bar fight started and we wandered home. So obviously a little tired but makes it the perfect day for emailing.

Having left London safely on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, I celebrated the new year in the obligatory chaos of Cairo traffic. I met up with the group I'd be travelling with for the next few months and we spent a few days in Cairo doing the sights and sizing each other up - even after a couple of days it's amazing how a group organises itself, on this trip it seemed to be mainly along the early-to-bed-early-to-rise contingent versus the doona-over-head-denial-of-6am-starts group, and no prizes for guessing where I was on that split. Of course at that stage we hadn't launched into that true demonstration of character and bastion of the ultimately unhinged, the multiple consecutive nights of bush camping, but more on that later.

[Slight segue, the lady looking after the email here has just popped her head in to see if I need lunch or coffee. At $1 an hour of mail and 15 cents a coffee, I now love this country and may never leave :)]

OK, so before you all stop reading, the trip has been wonderful. We've moved through the more muslim, middle-eastern influenced regions of Egypt and Sudan, through into Ethiopia, where the various christian religions are more predominant, you can wear tanks tops and skirts without starting a street riot, and I have high hopes of crispy pork-related products in the near future to go on my avocado and chicken sandwiches.

[Coffee has just arrived, one thing I didn't realise until we got to Ethiopia was the depth of the Italian influence here, in a country where there's no ATMs and the email works sproadically, the mobiles rarely connect and buildings remain unfinished for decades, every 5 feet there seems to be another Italian espresso machine whooshing away.]

Egypt was a mix of those ubiquitous sights that make you think you've wandered directly into the set of Death on the Nile (Giza, Luxor, Abu Simbel) and less-known western desert routes (where some of the antiquities sites looked suspiciously like they'd been touched up with the Dulux the previous week, and culminating in being at the celebrations of a Bedouin wedding where the girls were asked to sing a song as a present and the only one we all knew the words to were "I Will Survive"... Hopefully the bride never needs it translated). We stayed at a Bob Marley hotel in Luxor and caught a felucca to Aswan, rode donkeys to the Valley of the Kings, and caught a plane to Abu Simbel from Aswan's truly optimistically titled International Airport.

Sudan was like moving into a different world. We all bundled onto the once-a-week ferry from Aswan that allows you to cross the border, and preceeded to spent the rest of that day sitting in port no doubt waiting for the last shipment of chickens or twinkies or consumer durables to arrive. We were in the "first" class cabins for the trip, easily distinguished from second class which was more of a grab-a-space-on-the-floor-or-deck, which had the feel of arriving in the New World from potato famine Ireland, clinging to all earthly belongings and wrapped in blankets. Then the customs control in Sudan itself was another adventure, and then our truck was late coming in on its own ferry.... and dealing with all this whilst realising Sudan is a totally dry country.

But the time in Sudan was amazing. We drove through the northern desert for 8 days and met some of the friendliest and most generous people I have ever come across. People with next to nothing who want nothing more than to share it with you. An area of basically no water which led to 8 days of not washing my hair and having rivers of mud run off me when we finally got to a shower at Khartoum. Sadly that shower also took about 80% of what I had thought was quite a fetching tan. Historical sites that rival Egypt's (the pyramids at Meroe being the most extraordinary), but where we were generally the only people there, and could wander up, down, in and out of places at will. The Sufi whirling dervishes in Khartoum [Kath, Jens, Tash and Sarah - they really did whirl.]. The first modern shopping centre we'd seen, where in one late-night visit I took out 2 out of 3 ten pin bowling matches with my friends on the truck (Justin would claim he had the highest single score but I won the most games, so....).

Crossing over from Sudan to Ethiopia was another experience. We drove over a little rickety bridge and all of a sudden people were selling beer (having a drink before 12 was the only right and proper thing to do in such circumstances), children were selling gum by the stick and asking for pens, and trees appeared out of nowhere. And Ethiopia has been a constant surprise. We have seen wonderful sites - the St Georges Church at Lalibela moved Joop and I to jump up and down in a slightly hysterical fashion, as if we were the first ones to ever stumble across it :) We've been in beautiful places - the Simien Mountains were as dramatic as a place as I ever seen and the walk straight up to over 4300m was literally breathtaking (in fact I hadn't had any breath for quite a while by the time I got to the top). We've been to local football games, hung out in the town pool halls, found the "Starbucks" in Mekele, and gone out dancing in tin shed clubs where the only English language music seems to be Shania Twain and Shakira is on every second song. And where they play John Denver remixes.

So I hope you're all well and apologise for the group email, but hope to hear back with any news you have. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with those of you in London before I head off to Turkey in early April, and for everyone else, it's only a matter of time before I track you down to inflict my trip photos.

All my love xxx C