The Road to Car Tomb! After picking up plenty of supplies in Wadi Halfa , Biggles and the two Toyotas drove together along the Nile towards Khartoum. Biggles had already developed a little starting problem in Aswan and wasn't in the best of states to undertake to next leg of the journey. What ensued was the most exhilarating and demanding drive of our trip so far..... To start with, most of the heater plugs had blown which meant that starting from a cold engine was particularly difficult. Not only that, but we lost a bracket and two bolts from the side of the engine resulting in the exhaust pipe bashing against the side of the engine. As the corrugations were particularly bad, a small crack emerged at the top of the exhaust at the joint with the turbo. Valiant efforts from the lads, such as pulling the exhaust back on to the bracket and using metal cable wire to fix it place, helped slow the demise of the exhaust. However, after three days of hard driving in the desert this hair line crack became bigger each day leaving the exhaust completely broken in half. After it broke all the exhaust fumes came straight into the engine bay leaving us feeling like we had smoked 60 cigarettes a day! The road south via the Nile is a particularly difficult and demanding stretch of driving. It was incredibly bumpy with miles and miles of corrugations. Each car took a hammering we had to stop on numerous occasions to fix snapped roof racks, broken jerry cans, and pull struck vehicles out of the sand. It was a great team spirit and we all helped each other (although we did feel that poor old Biggles needed most of the help...the phrase that's been said many times is "Land Rovers are great because they're easy to fix...Toyota Land Cruisers are great as they don't need to be fixed". The drive was made more enjoyable by the fact that we all bush camped along the Nile and we spent our time cooking food on open fires and laughing about our ferry crossing. We had some lovely meals and all took it in turns to cook for the group of six. Picking up fuel became even more adventurous. When we could find the stuff we had to wait behind donkeys carrying large fuel canisters then had to filter the dodgy-looking muddy-brown diesel through wire mesh...goodness knows what damage this will do to Biggles... At Dongola we tried to find the A11 road - a red line on our Michelin map so we were looking forward to a better road surface. We thought we were lost as we couldn't find the road but instead spent a day and a half driving in serious offroad desert conditions. It was great fun and we had to rely on our GPS to get us in the right direction. When we eventually reached the outskirts of Karima we found a part of the A11 - a sandy, desert track: it transpired that the cartographers had been told to draw this road on the map even though it hasn't been built yet! We left Sofie and Wim in Karima and we and the Swiss couple spent another couple of days driving on the 'tarmac' road to Khartoum - once again we were to be disappointed as the road was full of potholes and disappeared all together in patches. Poor old Biggles was crawling along, exhaust hanging off, having to be jump started and everything covered in dust. Our cargo nets had collapsed and our luggage was in a complete mess so we were really happy to arrive in Khartoum and park up at the Blue Nile Sailing Club - a dusty car park where we thought we might camp. As we pulled in to park, Biggles packed up all together and the engine wouldn't even turn over...so that made up our mind, we were staying here for a while!