Back To Civilisation

As quoted by a KL colleague of mine when he found out that I was leaving the project site at the desert back to Khartoum city - "Back To Civilisation".

While putting our bags into the pick-up truck (yeah, no 4WD for us today as it was arranged last minute), the driver tried toput our bags as closed or on top of other luggages. My M'sian colleague heard that the driver wanted to bring 1 lamb back to Khartoum. Goodness me!

I'm not going to let that happen. Anyway, the driver was shocked to see 3 guys having so many stuff to be brought back. Sorry, no space for your lamb (in my mind only). Left the project site at 11.30am. The local Sudanese driver stopped for a moment at a nearby town along the way to have his breakfast. Sudanese people have their breakfast around 11am, their lunch around 3-4pm and dinner at 9pm. We stuck to our usual time of course. We had our breakfast earlier.

On our way, our car has to stop on the road to allow the cows, donkeys, lambs and a camel to cross the road. No pictures as my camera was behind in my luggage, what a waste! And, I almost didn't have the chance to write this blog tonight if not for our driver's fast reaction. When we were travelling at the speed of 100km/h, a stupid no sense kind of a local driver on the opposite lane, who saw us coming, made a u-turn when we were about 50metres away.

Our driver braked excessively, I braked too. My hands were grabbing anything, my colleagues behind too.

40m ....... 30m ........ 20m ........ 10m ........ ?????? (our legs were also braking on the tar road like the Flinstones cartoon). I'm not joking. I really meant it.


Thank God! The side road was not steep and the driver has to drive off the road. The car went straight down to the real small bushes and onto the desert, about 50m off. If this happened few kilometres earlier, the side road would have been steeper and our driver would have to choose, overturn at the side or crash head-on.

Our driver went down to scold the driver who just smiled and they spoke in arabic. 3 of us were just telling each other how close it was and if it did hit, we believed our pick-up truck would have spun off the road too. As I have told you previously in my earlier posting, the local drivers have a bad attitude towards driving. Lots of accidents caused were due to this following thinking "that car will stop". And we were very sure that was in that guy's mind when he did that u-turn even though he saw us coming real fast.

After that, I was awake throughout. We arrived at our house cum office in Khartoum about 5pm. Long journey. Went out for our dinner around 8pm and relaxing in front of the tv which is showing Negotiator now.
Tags: Car Accident, Desert, Khartoum, Pick-Up Truck, Civilisation, Negotiator