Malakal, Sudan - Friday 9 February 2007 - "Why don't they build bridges?"

Two days ago, I wrote; "Finally we are ready to go...". Well, it was not totally true! Due to the fact that I write and post the blog a few hours before midnight, things might change. Here in Malakal it has been more like "will change" instead of "might change". We went down south (26 kilometers) to check out the place where the river crossing should have taken place. Unfortunately there was no pontoon that could take us across that day and we had to return to Malakal.

We got an offer on Wednesday, but the price was too high. 1300 US Dollars for 50 meter is more than we could afford. As Erlend said "How about some bridges......"

LATEST!!! We hired a pontoon on Saturday morning

We just had to post an "EXTRA" addition on the web today, as we have found a solution to the pontoon challenge. Late Friday afternoon, "our" boat was still missing, so it was evident that we had to come up with something new. With excellent help from Charles (ADRA), we learned that SudanAid had a boat that could cross the river with Betsy. Although they charged 300 US Dollar for the river crossing, we were happy to book the "ride" with them.

This means that we will be rolling south some time after mid-day on Saturday and if we "step on it", we could reach Juba on Tuesday afternoon.