After s 20 hours cruise over Lake Nasser and a train ride from the port into town, we finally Aswan. Reaching Aswan was then a real culture shock. In the 500 meters we walked from the train station to the hotel, we saw more tourists then in total over the previous 3 months!!!

We changed the mountainous area with his lovely fresh, chilly, and at times, rainy weather of Ethiopia with the hot and dry flats of Sudan. (Sounds like as I preferred Ethiopia, but then if I write it that way) Finally we escaped the rainy hills of Ethiopia with his chilly night temperatures - I even had to wear my fleece trousers at night in Addis Ababa - and are now in Sudan with more pleasant temperatures of around 35-38 Degrees Celsius - sure no fleece trousers at night necessary any more but some ice cubes :-) - sound that I'm glad to be out of Ethiopia, or?

As we arrived at 10 PM in Moyale, the border post was closed and I had to sleep at the Kenyan side. The fact that the accommodation on the Ethiopian side is apparently better was not what bothered me but that I would not be able to get on the 6 AM bus in Ethiopian Moyale and therefore had to stay one day in Moyale - nothing I could do about that though :-).

I left Dar for Kenya with the intention to cross Kenya within a week or so. Along the way though, I decided to go for a few days to Lamu - an island on the north coast of Kenya. From the LP I knew that there would be a festival at the 2th of May but I was sure that by then I would be at least in Nairobi or even already on the way to Ethiopia. Well, it turned out that the Maulidi-Festival (the birthday of Mohammed) was not at the 2th but at the 10th-14th and that I stayed on Lamu for it.

For the last 3 ½ weeks I was in the lucky situation to travel with my sister. Lucky not just because I saw here for the first time since over two years and we could spend a wonderful time together, no, but also lucky because she wrote the report!!!!

Mozambique was a different place then the cities in South Africa - the roads were full of potholes, the most buildings in state of disrepair and the shops not as well stocked - well that was the reason I went to Mozambique, wasn't it???

Malealea 'The gems of the Mountain-Kingdome Lesotho' is a nice place but, for being the 'gem' did not quite stand up to my expectations - but then I'm Swiss and we do have very nice mountains. Nevertheless I had a goodtime and made a pleasant walk through river gorges and local villages.

With leaving Knysna at the Garden Rout of South Africa, I finally started my way north. With a 12 hours overnight bus ride I got at 3:00 AM to Bloemfontein where I unrolled my Terma-Rest and sleeping bag in a corner of the bus station. At 6:00 AM a worker woke me up just to ask me which bus I had to catch since he was concerned that I would oversleep the bus-departure.

Sorry, this report I still have to write and that will probably take some time. For a rough overview of what I did, you can have a look at my 'On the road - Africa' page.

We left the next morning and waved a pickup car down. It felt great to stand in the back of the pickup with all the locals and the bags of cement. We made a small detour to unload all the cement and some of the passenger and then went on our way again. We stopped some times more to pick up other peoples or drop somebody. Finally we made it to the town from where we would start the walk.

Had I good six months ago the feeling that I needed a change in couture, surroundings and way of transportation and that very feeling made me start my bicycling adventure trough Canada and Alaska, now, some 6 months later, I had the same feeling. Once more I was ripe for a change and to say North America goodbye and to start exploring parts of Africa.