Leaving Meroe (without pictures, sadly)
I awoke vaguely anxious and thought about why....came up with 3 possible things
1. The deep sandy patches on the way out were certainly one...the fully loaded GS is a real pig in heavy sand (or at least at my skill level!)
2. would I find fuel...I had to decide whether to backtrack or keep moving forward in my fuel hunt. Whilst my host Vivian had recommended going back, Hasan agreed forward was better as Al Damer and Atbara were, he said, likely sources of benezene.
3 would the oil plug fix Hasan and I had done, hold?
I had to remind myself that all these things could be managed.
And indeed I made it back the few kilometres to the road without tumbling in the sand which was a start.
I decided to keep moving forward (I hate backtracking) and trust fuel would be available. And if not, I told myself, I would wait until it was!
Finally the Hasan repair had certainly stopped the plug bouncing up and down like a demented lid on a boiling kettle. But very soon I saw the oil begin to flow, even more than before!
This became really frustrating and coloured my whole day and my subsequent decisions on direction (as it did, too, to my boots, trousers and left hand side of the bike which is now coated in a film of oil
. (Blokes who grew up with British bikes may be used to this but it really put me off....and even the touring pannier got so lubricated that it moved on its rails and jammed its lock...as I was to discover that evening when I dearly wanted to change clothes but couldn’t open the pannier
).
So I passed by and popped into a lot of sandy filling stations...which were fuel less
. But with my tank showing empty I rolled into one on the outskirts of Atbara....and they had no queue but DID have benzene.
So the first two....sand and fuel ....were ticked off my worry list.
But the leaking oil plug has become a real pain...I even hunted down a litre container of 20:50 as the bike will need a top up soon, at the rate is is spewing oil!
So when I got to the T junction I had a choice of going left and following the Nile up to Karima and Jebel Barkal, or right to Port Sudan and the ferry to Saudi.
But the oil issue makes me uncomfortable heading off into the wilds again. As I sit at the crossroad and debate this I check and see there is a BMW Motorrad in Jeddah....maybe that that can help sort this thing out?
And I conclude, regretfully, that I am going to have to head East and North to the Red Sea, prematurely and all because of such a small thing
.
So with a full tank and a weeping oil plug I head East into the desert
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. (Blokes who grew up with British bikes may be used to this but it really put me off....and even the touring pannier got so lubricated that it moved on its rails and jammed its lock...as I was to discover that evening when I dearly wanted to change clothes but couldn’t open the pannier 
.
