Now here is something we understand; As a symbol for Kosovo’s declaration of independence a nine ton newborn was revealed, and signed by the people of Kosovo as a memento of their presence on 17 Februari 2008. Cool.

osprey eclipse 32 + 5 litre backpack / lungi / yellow singlet / ici blouse from javed / t-shirt from yemen / t-shirt from ethiopia / 2 denihouse boxershorts / green trousers from ahmad / green 8 years old quiksilver trousers / green 8 years old o’neill trousers / leather socks / green hand made vest / blue vest / sjawl from ethiopia / sjawl from golden silk / 2 toothbrushes oral b + suitcase, colgate / blend-a-med toothpaste / kansai alarm clock from varanasi / candle / matches / 1 aa and 3 aaa batteries / 2 oral b essential floss dental threat / petzl head lamp / 2 sleeping bags mountain equipment / silk bedsheet from bangladesh in cotton bag / i audio hdd digital audio & video player with 2 ear plugs and devider in black bag / ibook g4 with bag & protection foil / usb cable for mp3 player / usb cable for camera / boeddhistic mala wood and turquoise / islamic mala / hinduistic mala / bracelet from girl in dahab / beadwork turtle / msr traveling towel / 2 ropes / ‘reading lolita in tehran’ by azar nafisi / ‘the rosegarden’ by saadi / tropicare mosquito net / our sleeping carpet / persian music on dvd / howl’s moving castle / persepolis / charlie & the chocolat factory / sleepy hollow / spirited away / nausicaa of the valley of the wind / laputa castle in the sky / moneybelt and 2 passports / lock and key + chain / two bottles of water / vaccination passport / handmade leather go board / pin pass / expired credit card / 100 dollars / copies of the passports / 100 euros and 65 cents / 75 turkish lira / hku student pass / nikon coolpix l2 camera (not on picture) with case and two rechargeable sony batteries / ace nike sandals / osprey atmos 35 backpack / black dress and two belts from israel / trousers from ethiopia with big flowers / trousers from iran with small flowers / legging from shanti / handmade silk golden skirt / hand made black skirt with spangles / hand made blue & black skirt / cora kemperman t-shirt with holes / cora kemperman t-shirt from israel / 2 senior tshirts from india / 8 years old singlet from hema / singlet from the floor of a guest house / singlet from turkey / woolen sweater from inbal / socks from fundas grandmother / socks from india / sjawl red silk / uncomfortable bra from h&m / bra from dubai / 4 slips from india, turkey and dubai / 3 strings from home / 3 headscarfs, iran, pakistan, india / silk boxer / tatanka air- and waterproof bag / black thin bag / 3 moleskine notebooks / half bread / half package halva / bottle of rakia / blue scissors / leather etui / 14 mitsubishi uni pin fineliners / 12 faber-castell markers / 6 neon turbo sleek ballpoints / 10 pars medad coloring pencils / eraser / stanley knife / filling pencil with rotring 0,7 hb fillings / pencil / 3 porcupine needles / big glue / staedler triplus 0,3 mm fineliner 20 colors in case / red eagle creek small suitcase / red glass bracelet / 2 bengali marriage bracelets made from shell / 2 wooden malas / bracelet from dahab / piece of crystal with golden threads inside on a string / beadwork scarabee / betadine 10 ml / 2 mijex mosquito repellent / homeopathic mosquito repellent / opinel pocket knife no 6 / canesten gyno / 7 elastics / bactroban 2% / 2 sargi bezi hydrofyl gauze / trupore tape / package of 12 different colors of spangles / hadex water disinfecting drops / bag of purple basilicum seeds / dr fischer ultrasol 34 spf suncream / some mire / 1 spirograph set / bag from underpants with 12 colors firstler acrylic paint / 2 kliniderm film / leukostrip / brandless bandages / bepathen plus cream / vitamin a & d cream / johnson & johnson lubricating jelly / lucky rupi / 1 monoject 2 ml / 3 bags ors salts / 3 instant ayurvedic samathan sri lankan medicin bags / 3 sterile syringes / sterilon / trimetroprim antibiotics / emergency chloriquine / trekpleister thermometer / ethiopian tribal medicine necklace against weak eyes / ludanmel red nail polish / 5 tampons / red, black and white leather / indian summer tobacco can / pipe tobacco from pakistan in plastic bag / 3 dried roses / 2 braids from yak hair / bag with dried sage / mala from yak bone / varanasi mala from chrystals / mala from sudan / string tobacco ties / tie fabric / traveling icon with leather case from werend / rope and threads / feathers from everywhere in envelop / silver saint catharine / golden needle / silver coin from 17th century from afghanistan / vaccination passport / loads of passport pictures / mac zoomblack lash aa7 mascara / 3 lucky shells / usb 2.0 hdd external box portable hard disc in leather case / usb splitter cable / money tube for snorkeling / kipling bag / money belt / pin pass in plastic cover / 50 euros / vgz card / isis travel insurance card / stone for hard skin / villiger sigar can / 1,5 cm candle / fox maniago scissors / mopes solingen no 7 tweezers / 7 needles / 7 hair pins / 6 symbolic beads / vingerhoedje / carmel wines seal / 3 nose piercings / 2 safety pins / 8 different ear rings / 3 stones for big hole in ear / ring from marnix / comb / gilette razor blade / 3 international plugs / adaptor for mp3 player / adaptor for computer / sony cycle energy ni-mh battery charger / long and short cable / cup / lip balm himalaya / ace nike sandals / himalaya nourishing skin cream with winter cherry / himalaya refreshing gentle face wash cream and fruit pack / rexona 24 hr intensive deodorant / toilet bottle / washing powder / himalaya massage oil / sunsilk shampoo / pink box with lux soap / embroidery ring with big belt to embroider from yemen / needles / 4 different kinds of green embroidery threads / 2 colors velcro / 8 yellow stars from felt / guatamalan bag / tooth picks in seal bag / 25 john james beading needles no 13 / 20 symbolical beads / 12 pins / 10 needles in tube / purple stars beads / deer leather for beadwork / 9 colors of beads for beadwork / special beadwork thread / ‘de weg naar mekka’ by jan leyers / plastic bag with documents / tibetan recipes / isis service booklet / train tickets, bus tickets, memories on paper / 23 postcards / fake marriage certificate / tan codes list / map of the world / map of europe / 3 news paper articles / free tibet envelop and others / business cards and countless small notes with addresses / more passport pictures / oasis carpets-poster / ilya’s birth card / global reserve bank-poster / 12 pictures of utrecht and family / copies of passports / insurance papers and administrative paperwork / copy of pin pass / 4 empty match boxes / hitchhiking sleeve / 1 piece of the j, q, u, w, x, y, z / 2 pieces of the b, c, d, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, p, v / 3 pieces of the a, e, n, o, r, s, t

So we knocked on their door. They evenopened the door, but it took another five hours before we deciphered theirriddle, the magic word to set foot and wipe our feet on their holy doormat. Wehad the feeling we were so close all the time, but then out of the blue theofficial on the best chair told us again: ¨But I still don’t understand whatyou did for three months in Iran¨. But we didn’t mind explaining it again. Wehad time. Eventually everybody in the room fell asleep, we grabbed our bags,helped ourselves to an entry stamp in our passport, which actually read besidesthe date, ‘welcome to Israel’and off we went. Our first steps in this most controversial of all countries wepassed a big sign which said ‘go in peace’, this I understood so far, even agreedupon, but looking back over my shoulder I didn’t see anything like this. Itseemed like they have only one way traffic in this place.

We entered Jeruzalem in the middle of the night. Wedidn’t see anybody because the black of their cloaks camouflaged them againstthe black of the night, only the next morning, when we woke up looking out onthe ultra orthodox Jewish quarter, and through one of the hundred gates as theghetto is called, we entered the theatrical world of the saddest people in thewhole wide world. People mourning the loss of their temple thousands of yearsago. Mourning the loss of their grandparents. Mourning the fact that theircountry isn’t only theirs. All together, mourning life in all it’s facets. Andwe are there, in the middle of the sancta sanctorum of three big religions,feeling the tenseness of society. Also aware of the fact that Jerusalem is notonly the sancta sanctorum for the people of the book, but also for politics, itseems like every conversation is soaked in some kind of propaganda, and welisten to it (you don’t discuss in Israel), until we get tired of it.

We didn’t sleep much last night. We are in Istanbul, the city thatwe came to love so much in the past month. And even before, because this iswhere our travel started two years ago. From where we flew to Hindustan as they know it here. We are still on the Asian side in one of the mostbeautiful districts. It’s quiet outside not only because it’s early but alsobecause it is one of the few quiet places in this vibrant metropole. This isthe house of our friend Funda who lives here. We make a fast breakfast oftahina, salad and delicious braided Turkish cheese, we take a cold showerbecause it’s the only flavor there is but it wakes us up. Now we are ready forthe road, the long road but short when we look back over our shoulder fromwhere we came. Leaving Istanbul is hard, weleave friends behind and it’s a magic city, a city of sultans, city of palacesand bridges to Europe. Maybe that’s why it’shard to leave as well, because it means a definite goodbye to the orient we gotused to, and not only used to, but the orient where we truly lived. But wedon’t look back. And there is no more beautiful way of leaving Istanbul than by taking the ferry from Asia to Europe,passing the Topkapi palace and the blue mosque. A last hug at the trainstationand we hop on a suburban train out of Istanbul.At the last stop we get out, not knowing where we are and start walking in whatwe think is the right direction, the Balkans. Good for us, is that the bestpart of Turkey is inhabitedby very friendly people who used to live in Holland or Germany and are more than willing to help us out. So a conversation about Dusseldorf in German did the job and a very friendly truckdriver helps us to the highway to Edirne at thecrossroads between Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece. Down the viaduct and herewe are again, besides a rushing stream of cars, of which only the trucks seemto be within arm reach. But before we are able to lift our arm (Nina is stillmaking the decent from the viaduct) a truck pushes his breaks and comes to ahalt three hundred meters ahead of us. We run because the side lane of a bighighway is never the most energetically balanced place to hang around. For adistance of thirty kilometers the guy on the steering wheel keeps on naggingabout hitchhiking being so dangerous (well, there is a funny anecdote to this,since one month ago there was an Italian woman who wanted to make a statementby hitchhiking from Europe to Israelin a wedding dress. Somewhere around Istanbul she got raped and murdered. Point made, I would say. But there is more to it,namely that these things only get in the media in Turkey when it concerns aforeigner while still making a half-hearted attempt at joining the E.U. but Idecided to try to talk about politics as little as possible in this blog, so,where was I?) … The guy went on talking in Turkish, repeating the word ‘maniac’over and over, until I asked Nina if we should make him stop since he was the biggestmaniac we met in more than 5000 km of hitchhiking, but we were saved by thebell. We were at his exit and we exit. Next car is a 19 year old boy driving aneat 90 km/hr who makes an effort to bring us to the right road towards theborder. Next ride (there is no waiting time at all this time, Nina is stillcorrecting the rose in her hair we plucked in the green stroke of the highway)is a Bulgarian man with his neighbor coming back from some Saturday shopping in Turkey.And this ride turns out to become a funny one. We tetris ourselves and our bagson the backseat of the car which is merely filled with obviously cheap toiletpaper from the Turkish Republic. They are on their way to some kind of ‘gratand we are with them. Soon after we arrive at the border, and we can see thatTurkey was running out of money in the last (or first) twenty kilometers oftheir country, where factories are abandoned and the roads full of potholes. Wepass customs easy and efficiently, and together with Giorgis and Elena we makea stop at the duty free shopping centre where the real purpose of their journeypops up. Nina and me, we both get a bag with 36 packages of cigarettes, themaximum amount you are legally allowed to take into the E.U. if we would benice enough to tell customs we own them if they ask for it. We are. It takesanother 15 minutes before Elena manages to hide about 60 other packages ofcigarettes underneath her clothes with tape. We take a look around and seeseveral other people doing exactly the same thing, taking their cars apart tohide some fags. We are not worried, laugh, get in the car and we are in foranother surprise; getting into the European Union is a bit like getting into,or at least how we imagined, getting into Kazakhstan. It involves a tremendousamount of waiting and seeing a lot of different counters. It even involvescarrying a memory stick from counter a to b to c. There hasn’t been an officialwho took so much time inspecting our passports on not being counterfeits as thegentleman at the Bulgarian border. And more and more counters where there. Andnot one selling snacks. This must be Europe. It took more than an hour beforewe were in Bulgaria where the potholes were even bigger. The first village wepass goes by the fantastic name of Kapitan Andreevo (we are not near a sea atall, in case you were wondering) where we wait for the next ride. It’s a niceone as well. It is the daily bus from Istanbul to Kosovo, who usually goescompletely empty but today had one passenger. Think about this again. Every daythere goes an empty bus from Istanbul to Kosovo and back again. And we were onit, all the way to Plovdiv where we would end the mission for today. The onlypassenger in the bus turned out to be a very interesting man from Kosovo who fledduring the war to Istanbul and now returned for a visit. Now, while being amechanic engineer, he is teaching children at a primary school since 80% of allfactories are destroyed in Kosovo. His Turkish driver drives Turkish whichmeans it doesn’t take long at all before we are at the turnoff for Plovdiv.It’s raining, another sign that says we are in Europe. In the distance thecommunist style skyline of Plovdiv during a sunset in black and white. Nextride, another Turk being here for oil or the market, depending on Nina’sversion or mine since the guy was very nice in his own language. He brings usto the main post office where we are supposed to meet Daniela. We eat pizzawith pickles of which I think is something that should be illegal in the E.U. Tonightwe sleep in her kitchen. Let’s call it a day.

We decide to take a refuge in what Israeldoes have to offer us, that what triggers the love for what we do, and so wemove to the epicenter of Israel’s young and creative generation. Tel Aviv.Where fashion meets the beach. I think we left as the only people in the worldwho actually went there who didn’t like the place. The chocolate soup we atewas pretty sexy, we met Oded Ezer in his typo lab who was absolutely inspiring,and the fact that we can say “we were there” is all there is to it. We don’tunderstand the hype. But that’s us, We hitchhike through the PalestinianOccupied Territories, in search of better places. We walk the Golan Heightswhich are indeed very beautiful but is still not really Israel if you ask us.We stayed in a Kibbutz, which was less a Marxist occasion then I (romantically)imagined it but much more one of Zionistic appearance. Despite the very nicepeople we came to know here. We tried to go there with as less prejudices as possible;please believe us, we really tried. But suddenly we had to leave, We rush toHaifa where we manage the same day to embark a gigantic tanker which will bringus to the island of Cyprus, of which we know nothing about except being aholiday destination for the British. We hold our breath and pass through, asfast as we can. Halfway the island we have to cross the green line of theirsilly conflict, through a city divided as Berlin once was. This is the secondtoo high, too concrete wall in too short time we see this month, and it makesus sad. But even more confronting was the alien kind of tourism we met. Englishin kaki clothes, totally ignorant of the pointlessness of the conflict, on whatis going on in their holiday paradise. But maybe that’s just the right thing todo, and I shouldn’t feel sorry for the Cypriots selling their land to theBritish, polluting the beautiful coastline with their ugly villa parks, stillthinking that they can colonize the world. The first European country we enterdoes not feel correct at all. The third night on Cyprus we have the mostbeautiful thunderstorm and we are happy that we treated ourselves for once to aproper bed & breakfast. This is the first rain we saw since nine months.The next day we leave by ferry to the Turkish mainland. We cross the heart ofAnatolia where the mountain peaks are still covered in snow, to the magic landof Cappadocia where we sleep in caves in a landscape of fairy chimneys. Alandscape in which we expected Tim Burton-like creations to jump up from behindthe rocks and start doing a beautiful dance and sing a pretty song. We made upthe song and while humming the tune, we made our way to Istanbul.

And here the circle is round. From Istanbulto Istanbul with a detour. The month we spent here was a month in which ourminds already wondered ahead of us. Ahead to a studio in which we willtransform our dreams into reality. Where new dreams will be born. The roadahead of us is just a formality, a thank you for all the things we learned in thepast two years. Tomorrow in the morning we’ll be on the road again. We arelooking forward. We’ll see you soon.

There is something strange with the Turkish alphabet. I always appreciate it when a special character fills up a phonetical gap the Roman alphabet leaves behind after having used up all its 26 letters. But when with Atatürk’s initiative the earlier Ottoman Turkish script was reformed he missed a skilled typographer in his language commission, or at least a person who should have told him that a dot on top of the capital ‘I’ is a bit conflicting with the overall balance in leading. Anyhow, the Turkish alphabet also knows the letter ‘ı’, pronounced as the ‘u’ in the English word ‘hut’. Hence, the dilemma, since this letter also exists in the beginning of a word. The capital ‘I’. So, since probably every sane typographer in the Netherlands would agree with me that it at least looks a bit silly, I point this out to a Turkish colleague graphic designer. Her answer was surprising; it’s impossible to touch this letter since it‘s Atatürk’s letter. Doubting this typographical error would be like doubting his overall supremacy, and so, it is not done. So where the Germans scrap their beautiful dreierles-s (ß) from their Berliner street signs where they shouldn’t, worse things are going on in the world. Anyhow, the only people in the world getting excited about these things are the Dutch, i suppose.

After ten days of severe waiting we finally went. To Africa, that continent just after the horizon. I could tell you the story about how our wooden vessel, the Al-Marwan 1, slightly bigger than the Al-Ghamdan (you’re still with us?) got involved in a devastating cyclone, shipwrecking in front of the Eritrean coast, and how we were just able to get hold of a piece of the mast, it’s pitch black and we are there drifting along with the currents until the sun breaks through. After two days of floating, we are just about to faint because of thirst and the heat; we are found and rescued by the infamous pirates of the Red Sea. They treat us well; they feed us, bandage our wounds and bring us to shore of the war torn Somalia since we refused their offer joining them on their quest for gold and incense looted from foreign ships along the East-African coast. In Mogadishu we hide ourselves inside a burqa and this way we travel in caravan in the direction of the Ethiopian border. At some point we got captured by a Somali warlord but we manage to escape in the night, having to leave our camels behind. By foot we reach Ethiopia half dead a month after we were shipwrecked and we start living our normal life again and dream away in our nomadic existence, leaving you behind without a word.

I drifted on a river I could not control.
No longer guided by the bargemen’s coves
They were captured by howling Indians
Who nailed them naked to colored stakes.

Lighter than cork, I revolved upon waves
That call the dead forever in the deep,
Ten days, beyond the blinking eyes of land!
Lulled by storms, I drifted seaward from sleep.
[Rimbaud]

But it didn’t went like this. We boarded the Al-Marwan 1 and in a bit of an anticlimax we sail on a silent sea in twenty hours towards Djibouti where we set foot on African soil for the first time, where our arrival turns out to be not as baroque and grotesque as arrival in India. Now, Djibouti might sound quite exotic, and the motivation to get to Africa is strong, this was not the welcome we expected. But than again, what can you expect of a country, which has been colonized as long as the concept of colonization exists? There were two flavors in this country; either you were French, or American. And concerning your business, it was only a matter of which battalion you belonged to. Asking directions involved a ten-dollar bill and to white people was referred as the white foam on the beach. Ok, fair enough but that is not how we feel and we decide to leave as soon as possible and we will not bother you with stories how customs thought Nina was a prostitute and how we slept in a dirty shed without windows or electricity for way too much money since we did not want to spent a ridiculous amount on a cockroach infested hotel in the most expensive country in the world. And here we are, in the last wagon of the legendary Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway, the most feared train track of the African continent with dozens of dark tunnels and rusty bridges that are more than a century old, still original from the time the French built this track. Money dried up decades ago, so last chances to board this train. Despite children throwing stones into the open wagons (are we really here for less than sixteen hours?) is the ride of a phenomenal beauty. This is the Africa as we expected it to be. Camel carcasses along the track, mutt huts, red earth and really, really black people herding goats. In the evening when a giant sun goes down (the African sky is really broader) we disembark in the Somali town of Ali Sabieh, where a ‘connecting’ train leaves the next morning. It turns out that the next twenty hours we will be waiting on the train which is traditionally late, in the shade next to the train track, watching the village life go by, finally to got defeated by all the attention in a town where the last foreigner they saw was probably Rimbaud (we always seem to be in some poet’s footsteps), we surrender and retreat to the home of the station manager, we enjoy fresh coffee and sweet popcorn, but, mash’ Allah, the train is suddenly in town.

Africa is so immensely colorful, but this would be an understatement if we would describe what we saw riding this train over the border towards Ethiopia, the country of kings, emperors and decay. The cargo piled up inside rendered the possibility of passengers basically impossible. The amount of travelers outside the train, eager to board seemed to be impossible to fit inside, even without the cargo. In the end it both did, including us. Here we encountered one of the many features we did not understand about Ethiopia and Africa in the beginning, and still don’t. It’s bloody hot in there, but the windows stay closed, which does not only exclude us from some fresh air, but also from the view outside. Inside is a celebration going on, it’s Islamic New Year tonight, so clap your hands, and use the closed windows as hi-hat. Dreadlocked bums, big mamas and gorgeous Amhara and Oromo girls sitting side-by-side traveling into Abyssinian heartlands. The following night is one of very little sleep and a lot of conversation, trying to figure out what continent we got ourselves involved with, a continent of new smells, new flavors and sounds. Of new words and languages (Ethiopia has over one hundred) new scripts and etiquette. And at first sight, a lot of new hassle.
The following morning by the break of dawn we arrive in a town called Dire Dawa, the train will go no further. Walking up and down the station road, this country looks like it’s constantly dressed up for a national reggae party with flickering red-green-yellow-neon about everywhere. We learn a couple more of African oddities. Last night we did pass several esoteric time zones, we find out when we ask the time at sunrise and get told that it is exactly twelve o’clock. Strange, we think, but even stranger when we find out that we are not talking about a reggae party that’s coming up, but we celebrate the millennium. Last night we went back eight years in time. Great! And what about the woman, they look like photo models but are not wearing hijab, niqab or burqa? Marnix loves this country, just as Nina who can feel the wind in her hair again after wearing something on her head for several months and forgot what it felt like. Almost. That’s what we are here for, a place where everybody assumes you are Christian because you are white, we needed a break from Mohammedian morality just to put things in perspective. A place where nobody cares about religion, so here is what we do; we drink a couple of Harar (the local beer) and watch the hyenas roaming around the bushes just outside our bedroom window. Listening to their giggles we fall asleep. Smiling.

The next morning we wake up with the realization that last night there was a bedbug-boogie feasting on our bodies between the sheets. But bliss! Make us forget, we decide to go outside for our first fresh morning on this continent. After long months without a proper coffee we enjoy the small but outstanding heritage from the short lasting Italian colonization. Code-name macchiato. While listening to the hiss from the espresso machine, we adapt our eyes to this new surrounding, like adapting ones eyes to the sun. This world speaks a new visual language. Around us are lots of women in brightly colored dresses; elaborate hair dresses with braids or dyed curls and beadwork around their wrist and bellies. Old men with grey hair and a cap sit on terraces with Italian stainless steal chairs sipping a macchiato or a local beer. In a shrill contrast to the numerous homeless people roaming the streets, sleeping in it’s corners. They all wear a layer of dust and dirt. Some have thirty plastic bags tied around their feet. They run and make throat noises, not entirely unlike hyenas. There is some kind of desperateness in their manifestation, which is new to me. They seem to have no energy left to fight for something, for reasonableness in the first place, in their lives. Poverty is unmistakably blacker. Whereas in India the pavement dwellers still treat a piece of newspaper like their carpet, they take their shoes off before stepping on their living room, they still take an urban bath everyday. People smell fresh which goes hand in hand with a relatively fresh mind. Ethiopian vagrants seem to have been victimized by something. It seems like they completely retreat in their suffering. Maybe by themselves and their environment or maybe by their religion. Definitely because of a very recent and very violent history. Dictators follow up emperors, and on top of the food chain is the Ethiopian church. At the bottom her people. In Christianity suffering takes place on an inherited base. Suffering is culture. We wonder if this is representative for Africa. We wonder what the lessons are we have to learn on this continent. We even think for a second we maneuvered ourselves in a cul-de-sac on giant scale. It’s needless to tell you, off course, that it is not, it’s an highway to everywhere else and we just have to focus.

And so green hills are rolling by when we are making our way towards Ethiopia’s new flower, or as you might know it, Addis Ababa. Here it is where we get accustomed to the dining scene which consists everyday out of fermented pancakes called injera, topped with some meat, no vegetables, except for Wednesdays and Fridays which are national fasting days according to the Ethiopian church, when there is only spinach available for your injera, and no meat. The people are a lot more complicated to deal with, and after a good month in Addis, as we like to call it, we still can not put our finger on the Ethiopian spirit. They are a proud lot, that’s for sure, but in general it was difficult for us to find the people who we could trust to do the job. Now nothing new, you might say if you look at the general line in our posts on the blog, but there is something new; the fact that there is nothing that seems to inspire the people. Although individuality is more accepted as a virtue in this country, it often seemed misunderstood. Corruption is a widespread problem in all layers of society, and no wonder that about a fifth of the country is depended on begging, making more money by asking alms than by honest, hard work for the day. There is a solution, but this is Africa where today is a lot more alive than tomorrow. Unfortunately. We feel genuinely bad for the people, their situation and the hopelessness of there future, where nothing seems to change on the short term. Knowing that everybody dreams a different perspective for there families. So we are sincerely involved in an initiative as the Global Reserve Bank, even though it is not much more than a prayer.
Needless to say we do meet interesting people, with interesting visions, with stories touching the heart and that’s why we are there. Not to get confused on our own reason and purpose, but nevertheless, we never felt, literally, so white before. We do make an extra effort on peeling of layers of the Ethiopian psyche and decide to make some serious travel for this. Now you understand that we are used to something by now, when it comes to enduring bus rides, but getting around Ethiopia was tough. The roads are bad, often very bad, busses are cramped and altogether slow. But we gave it a chance and have to conclude that miracles are to be found and the country is generally beautiful, but sheer beauty is not what we are looking for since it is not to be found externally. You don’t have to travel far to encounter someplace beautiful, just in case you were packing your bags. We had to retreat from this country, we make our way back to Addis Ababa and line up in front of the Sudanese embassy, begging for a visa. The best thing they could do was providing us with a transit. No matter, we think we know this place.

We didn’t, but in two weeks you don’t have time to get to the core. We started our travel northbound at the source of the mighty Blue Nile, at Lake Tana, where we saw some lazy hippos bathing. The longest river on earth we’ll follow all the way to the delta where it ends in the Mediterranean, almost five thousand kilometers. And so we pass the magic cities on the Nile. We meet the nouveaux riche in Khartoum who did not lose any sense of their hospitality we were almost took for granted in the Islamic world. We climb pyramids in ancient Meroe, even slept there in the night. We pass Karima and Dongola, spent a night in a secret garden on a Nile island, and could easily spent a thousand more. But we can’t. We have a rendez-vous; we have to make it to in the Sinai desert. Besides, in a country where the state is the biggest employer you’d better respect the rules.
But when we made you think travel is tough in Ethiopia, the last leg along the Nile towards the big artificial Lake Nasser turned out to be almost a mission impossible, and it seemed that we had to backtrack a couple of days travel to Khartoum, to take a train north again. Two days we spent sitting underneath a shady tree in Karma (I love that), hoping there would be any kind of transport passing by. Until that point it took us anything from donkey-carts to lorries transporting watermelons, hitch-hiking with refugees from Darfur (what the world tends to forget about…) to get where we were. It even involved some serious hikes through lush oasis’s hoping that there would be a road with tarmac around the corner. But here, underneath that shady tree, it was only on the third day that we could move. After a very bumpy, but even more dusty ride which took the best part of the day along a string of Nubian villages to Wadi Halfa, where it is night when we arrive. It will take a couple of days before the ferry to Egypt will leave from here. We spent our days the way you spend days when you are in a place where absolutely nothing of interest is happening. You drink tea, stay out of the ferocious sun, smoke a shisha and drink another cup of mint tea. And at some point you learn something interesting; In this case it is that the original Halfa was once the second biggest city of the Sudan. For a ridiculously low sum of money the (mainly Nubian) city was sold to Egypt to create Lake Nasser because of the High Dam, the same dam that made the Egyptians rebuilt Abu Simbel on a higher location. The dirt poor Sudanese had at that time no choice, and besides, who cares about the minorities? Until not so long ago the lonely minaret towered a couple of meters above the lake. Sitting on the ferry it turned out to be quite an eerie thought. But in this corner of the world more awkward things happen. This ferry used to have for a long time a permanent passenger; the man spoke a language nobody understood, and wore a plastic bag on his head, hence his name, Father of the Plastic Bag. Since neither Egypt or Sudan would let him in (he did not carry a passport, and nobody knew how he got on this ferry in the first place) he got stuck on this ferry, sailing back and forth already for more than four months. I wish I could tell you he did meet the woman of his dreams, got amnesty, and lived happily ever after. But this is Sudan, and this is not how a man and a woman get introduced to each other within Islamic tradition. Neither, I can tell you, this is Charles de Gaulle.

And so we arrive in Luxor, where we indulge in something else than brown beans three times a day, where Islamic fashion is strongly influenced by three hundred thousand (yes) foreign visitors a year and seems quite ridiculous to me. We are ‘welcome to Egypted’ by ‘boys’ who try to be more Italian than Italians, and we see, refreshingly, that there exists something as female sex tourism. But honest is honest; not every Egyptian is a loverboy. In fact they are quite a cheerful people, and they have to in a country where the main income is that from tourism. Not a place where we’ll stay long. We drink fruit juices like we didn’t have any fruit for weeks (which was actually true) and we sincerely don’t care for the Karnak temple or the Valley of the Kings. This raises some eyebrows. “What you come to Egypt for then?” Well, on the seventh of March we meet Marnix’ father in the Sinai. That’s about tomorrow. We have to hurry. The same evening we have a night bus, and with voluptuous feelings of impatience and excitement we endure the ride and the attached delay of an overheated engine. The meeting was everything beyond expectation in the first place. We exchanged stares and stories and embraces. This was the first time we got reflection from somebody who knew us from before we left. Maybe two years of travel lifted our feet from the ground, without us actually noticing this. Unanimously we concluded that we actually became more ourselves during our journey, and we are still standing firmly.

So we backtrack to the megapolis of Cairo where we find us a nice apartment with a view, if we look close enough and narrow our eyes to look through the thick layer of pollution, we see the ancient shapes of the pyramids. We have to spend longer there then our itinerary told us on forehand, and we start making side-trips to the Nile-delta, romanticized by the still vivid imagine we’ve been keeping in our mind of the Ganges-delta. The Nile is not the labyrinth mangrove forest we encountered in Bangladesh, the possibility of pirates around every corner. The delta here is an industrialized, fertile triangle of land which harbors some of Egypt’s biggest cities, not exactly what we were hoping for after sailing down the Nile for a couple of weeks. But in Tanta the moulid is in town. Circus for the people, the places where teenage love stories come in existence in Europe, here we celebrate the birthday of the prophet Mohammed. The muazzin chants his birthday songs from the minaret, a man making animals from balloons in front of the mosque, children eating chickpeas and girls eating ice cream. And we getting lost in between knowing this is not our party. In the train back to Cairo, people are stashed in the luggage racks. Our never ending transit calls.

So here we are. We just came down from mount Sinai, where Mozes received his revelation, where the bush was burning. At the summit, we see Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories in the distance, not so far away. Let’s take a look from up close, knock on their door, see how holy the land actually is. I hope they let us in, wanderers, and if they do, I hope they say: “Welcome to Israel!”

Sincerely yours, Marnix & Catharina