Last year I got to visit Bir Tawil via Sudan, a trip that would lead to one of the my more interesting adventures over the years, and holding an AK-100 in the desert of Africa.
If you’ve not of Bir Tawil it is small pice of desert that Egypt and Sudan argue about who owns it. The difference between this and other arguments of the kind is that boy argue that they don’t want it. This means Bir Tawil is essentially the only “unclaimed” peace of land in the world, or Terra Niullus if you want to get your latin on. Obviously this meant that I wanted to go here….
To read more about Bir Tawil click here.
To read about Street Food in Bir Tawil click here.
Football in Bir Tawil? We got you covered.
Said venture had us wanting to plant a flag for Islandia and getting into a spot of bother. It so turns out that the Ababda tribe, the actual owners of the land are not so keen on people coming to claim their land. We ended up at he leisure of the Ababda Emirati for the next 24 hours, or so.
I won’t go into great details about this story, as for $4 you can read the book about it! You can find the link to our book here, but suffice to say it was one of the most interesting trips I have had.
The AK-100
After fixing our issues with the tribe it was decided that we would go to Capital City of Bir Tawil, fill up on gas, kill a goat and be on our way. At this point things were a bit tense, so I walked up to big guy with big gun and asked if I could hold it. Kind fellow agreed and many laughs and selfies were had! I assumed I was just holding a regular gun, but apparently I was holding a state of the art AK-100.
The AK-100 is one of the top Russian Kalashnikov assault rifles on the market. Neither the Sudanese, nor Egyptian military have anything even resembling this. This was the the real deal.
Apparently there is some whole sub-genre that tracks how certain guns get into certain places, but no one knows how I ended up holding and AK-100 in the desert of Sudan, Including me!
To read about our exploits in Bir Tawil check this link. Also, you can build your own rifle using lowers from 80% Arms for a completely customized firearm.