We woke early and caught the rickety train with its doors wedged open and all of its fabric, ceiling mounted handles severed, as if it had traveled as slowly as it was taking us from Aswan to the High Dam, all the way from some distant metropolis. We were fast tracked through the passport control to leave Egypt, joined by a different breed of tortoise (traveler / backpacker), two Peruvians (smartly dressed and seeming out of place), two Japanese, two Spaniards and one German (The last three nationalities of which we would travel with on and off till at least Khartoum). Later we also met the three Russian cyclists we had met at the Sudanese Embassy.
We were scheduled to leave at 12.00 and instructed by the man who sold us the tickets to be at the ferry at 10.00 to get seats. We eventually set off at 21.00 on our seventeen hour ride to Sudan. We successfully vied for a bench each to sleep on and took it in shifts to guard as we the other took the opportunity to get some air. The wait for departure was a wait without air. With the boat stationary and the low-ceilinged seating area rammed with people, many of whom were smoking the air was clammy and toxic.
There was an uplifting atmosphere where we sat. A powerful lady led a group of passengers in a song which she MCed over with high-pitched, rapid 'lalalalalala's. The whole thing kept together with ingenious clapping rhythms, skipping on and off the beat. There was a colorful array of passengers – a brightly dressed woman with henna covered feet (meaning she was recently married), there was a man in a huge head scarf and an ill fitting Mafioso blazer, staring toddlers all vied for space. The space on the luggage racks was at a premium, as it meant the passenger would not have to wait for their luggage to leave the cramped hold, it was therefore the source of a great deal of heated arguments, placated and in some cases compeered by a tiny waif of a man. His job was to shout louder than anyone else, strutting around the boat with veins bulging from the side of his delicate head.
When we got moving some cool air came from Lake Nasser came through the portholes but it was not enough to prevent it from feeling like a steaming, mildewed flannel on the face. Above deck was an encampment floored with individuals blankets, surrounded by boxed held together with string, the lucky ones in the shade below the lifeboats. To get hold of our in-flight meals we handed in a ticket we had previously exchanged for a different ticket – presumably to keep a ferry official's relative in work.
Upon returning to our bench from the café on the mid-deck (a million miles from the Marseilles – Tunis ferry café) a man who had earlier positioned himself at the end of the bench and had been sleeping on it while we were away, insisted on positioning himself on the floor.
It is likely that actions of this man and a holy man in the café who bought us tea are more to do with the way of life of the passengers of the boat – being mainly vendors of wares for natives of their country as opposed to tourists but we felt a warm glow at the possibility that we were traveling to a place where people had a different mindset to that which we knew. This transition mindset was something we were privileged enough to feel change with the landscape, gradually.
05/02/08
We caught a lift in the back of a pickup from the Sudanese passport control to Wadi Halfa and after almost a month of travel, we found ourselves in what we had expected to find when we came to Africa. We left our bags in the mud brick hotel and went in search of food. A boy stood outside a darkened room with newspaper piled high with fried fish, seemed indifferent to our decision to come to his restaurant. Inside, there was a welcoming silence presided over by three men in immaculately white robes who responded to our salaams (hellos) with undue reverence.
06/02/08
From 8.30 till 12.00 we moved from room to room with in the police station in order to fulfil the required registration process. Our paths crossed those of the other tortoises, occasionally overtaking one another and keeping each other up-dated on how many officials we had seen.
The day before we had written our names in the book of a bus driver who said he would take us to the next significant village, eight hours away Abri for SP15 (about £3.20) but we had found a Bedford truck driver who would let us sit on his bags of cement for SP5 which would be far less stuffy. As we set off with some of the other tortoises four hours late (roughly on time, African time) the bus we had put our names down for pulled up in front of lorry. A great deal of shouting and shoving ensued and the bus driver offered us a ride in his heaving carriage for SP5 which we declined and he got in quite a huff.
At the back of the lorry was a white robed man with a strange arrangement of material on his head. He remained cross-legged in a Zen –like state of peace, seemingly motionless and unblinking in the clouds of dust. Periodically we stopped to refill the radiator and our bellies. It was good to enjoy the rough ride provided by the road which will soon be paved as Sudan is currently doing rapidly with all its major roads. The landscape was harsh desert but yet there was an alluring appeal to it, perhaps more of a sense of adventure.
As dusk rose from the horizon like ink on blotting paper, we were able to watch the stars fade into the blue sky to accompany the sliver of moon. When darkness fell the desert sky was so full of stars it looked deep as if it were the sea and we were fish held above its surface.
In the dead of night we passed what looked like a staged crime scene. Three people stood solemly watching the back of the head of a man on the ground, lit by the lights of their stationary truck in the middle of nowhere. One of our passengers mimed that they were praying
We spent the night in Abri's only lokanda (a very basic hostel) and ate the only thing on the restaurants menu, fu'ul (beans mashed with the bottom of a glass Pepsi bottle with oil and chopped onions and tomatoes with bread. We spent the night talking to a man from Darfur who eulogized about Sudan.
07/02/08
Our day spent unsuccessfully looking for a lift to Kerma by boksi (Toyota pickup with improvised roof rack and benches) lorry or bus turned out to be a good way of meeting the people of the village which had been built upon its market of ten or so stalls and people stopping on their way to Dongola and then to Khartoum.
We were sent from person to person about the town, fuelled by the tea they gave us. We were given high fives by the police who talked to us about the Queen Mother. A female teacher in the school instructed her prize pupil to speak English to us. We were told that we would be able to leave on Sunday at the earliest (two days time) so we prepared ourselves for another night in the mud brick hotel. Showering from a bucket in a silver basin used for mashing fu'ul, in the stinking toilet.
We spent the evening watching the semi-finals of the African Cup with most of the village, who all paid the equivalent of two cups of tea for the privilege and were boisterous company. It was strange to see the reverence with which they watched the premium adverts which were offering Saudi golfing and bespoke bathrooms and brought to mind the question of how these people perceive the world base upon the information received by State Radio, BBC Arabic service and satellite TV for Arabia.
Spectators with and without English were keen to speak to us. The police captain, then wearing his garabea moved the tobacco wad behind his bottom lip slowly smiling at us like Little John. He stood by us dumbly as if his very presence spoke for its self, shifting the weight on his feet several times then mooching off with the same grin fixed across his face.
That evening we were treated to an unexpected appearance of local hero on television – Muhammed Wordi. An eighty year old Nubian crooner sat upon a wooden throne with an extensive backing group sat in front of 1970's Top of the Pops backdrop, singing to the Sudanese glitterati who were sat upon plastic garden furniture. He had an impressive voice and sang in Nubian and Arabic.
08/2/08
We were woken by an irritating runt repeating ‘Now truck!’ We followed him outside, ‘When is the truck?’, ‘Eight’, ‘Its nine now’, ‘Yes’, ‘Where is it?’, ‘Here’, ‘Where?’. At this point the farce was ended by a half Egyptian half Sudanese pizza chef from Berlin who translated for us via our German traveling companion, Johan, that the bus would come tomorrow.
A seemingly dead day was put to good use as there would not be transport on this day being Friday (the Muslim day of rest). We paid a man to take us down the Nile to look for crocodiles. The crocs nervousness was explained as he pointed towards them and mimed that they tasted delicious. As they came into view they shuffled awkwardly into the dark water. They seemed far from threatening despite their relatively large size (7ftish).
Upon our return to the hotel a man with the drooping moustache and facial scars of a panto villain bundled us into a boksi and all of a sudden, we were on our way to Kerma, just as we had relaxed into the bokra (tomorrow or bokra bokra for the day after and so on) mentality. Johan took exception to the driver’s technique of generally off road, straight through the desert sand, very fast and stopping at most of the hamlets to embrace friends and family. At regular intervals he would say, ‘this man is so stupid! No? He is crazy!’, he repeated this like a mantra it is interesting to see different people coping mechanisms for quite a rough journey. The sugar coated peanuts were got in Cairo went down well with the children who came running to the back of the boksi when it stopped as we shook hands with the men authoritatively and the women tittered from behind their veils , chasing us down the road through he clouds of dust the children were filmic. The sight of women in jet black hijabs bordered in colors, iridescent like beetle backs gliding through the yellow of the desert was beautiful. We ate fu'ul and slept in a room with ten other snoring men.
09/02/08
The Spanish German extremely tight budget prevented then from seeing the Deffufa, a mud temple built three thousand years BC. After a session of lackadaisical bargaining with the armed guar we were allowed clamber all over it. It was reminiscent of the twenty foot tall contemporary mud domes we had seen in the graveyards we had passed. Inside the thick towers hundreds of birds nested and shot out as we passed under. There did not seem to be an inside to it – it was all wall and crevice. Any explanation we may have received in the recently opened museum was denied as the guards could not find the key.
The Spanish and German tortoises headed for Dongola while we and Yuya (Japanese) decided to stay another night in order to see the market the next day. We found a café and sat by the Nile drinking guava juice. We watched as three people within ten metres of one another, one fished, the other bathed and the other threw in the waste from his restaurant. Our lunchtime mission to find something other than fu’ul was a success. We were invited in the kitchen of the restaurant and pointed out what we wanted – omelet, goat, fried fish, beans, rice and lettuce. Our stomachs were very pleased with us.
To walk it off, we headed out of town and came across a maze of brightly painted houses and alleys ruled by gangs of small children who darted from building to building, peering around corners. We were greeted on the road by a lanky man in a garreba (local dress, long flowing gown) and wrap-around sunglasses. He invited us to his relatively grand house and plied us with spiced tea, telling us about his farm and life. More men from the village turned up and tried their hand at speaking English. This continued until dusk, all the while, a stream of women passed in front of us, through our host’s garden. From our laid back chairs and with the conversation flowing sedately from the universal humor of mild sexism to matters of gravity we got a glimpse at what they got up to. Within the context of the history of conflict between the north and the south it was interesting to hear that it was invariably Southerners who were given the public whipping. As they did not have houses to stay in, they were seen on the streets drunk and punished.
We were offered a date alcohol but declined as no one else was drinking it. Maybe we were overcautious but the penalty for drinking in Sudan is forty lashes. Our host offered to take us his farm on an island in the Nile the following day. A teacher who had joined us suggested we visit the school he taught at – Sukdo Primary.
10/02/08
A man in Western dress and very proper English ushered us into the school. We were brought to the headmistress’ office and were given tea and toffee and introduced to all the school’s teachers. It transpired that Said (the teacher from the previous day) taught in the boy’s school and we were in the girl’s. Said would arrive shortly, as was explained to us with all finger-tips of one hand touching and pointing upwards like a sleeping snake. Until he arrived we were taken from class to class to give our royal approval to the students. They were instructed to sing songs for us as we stood at the front of the class, after introducing ourselves. We clapped politely as and nodded approvingly, relishing the smiling awkwardness of it all.
Said arrived and took us to his school where lessons were postponed and we ate a delicious breakfast of grahna (pancake-like bread and mashed, spiced okra)with all of the schools teachers. Everyone was keen to emphasize that not all of Sudan was like what we had seen on TV, that was the west and we were in the north – a reasonable point in a country the size of Western Europe, Darfur alone the size of France. Several teachers walked with us to the riverbank to catch the boat to the island where we had arranged to visit the farm previously.
We sat below the date palms and ate what the teachers had knocked down with rocks. They explained they did not talk about politics in general as we probed as this would lead to a jail sentence. One of our company, wearing fetching mock leopard skin shoes, explained the scarring we had seen on many people’s faces. This practice was unusual in the north but still widespread in the south. All over Sudan people still used ritualistic burning for its medicinal qualities, which does not seem that dissimilar to acupuncture. A burn to the arm for stomach aliments, a burn to the back of the head for throat problems, two burns to the temple for eye problems. On dark skin these burns did not look as gruesome as they might on white, no more obtrusive than a tattoo.
We retuned to our hostel by donkey cart hoping to find transport to Dongola. We headed for the market while our boksi driver ate his lunch before departing. The market was a meeting for people all over the area who brought their fruit, vegetable, spices and cakes to sell to one another. The small stringed instruments some men from our room had been making at the hotel seemed to go down well, with people, perhaps a little too old, strutting about the place, playing them enthusiastically. There was a great deal of bawdy slapstick that could have been lifted from the Canterbury Tales, like the midget selling papers from the back of his cart was taunted by a group of teenagers and retaliated with his donkey whip.
To enter the town we took a ferry across the Nile where we met a man with a fancy Chinese motorbike and either an overactive imagination or an amazing tale. Perhaps, he had studied in California and Russia and received is PhD in New Dehli. Perhaps for a time he shared a house with a man who flew one of 9/11 planes. Perhaps, as a result of this he was kidnapped in Sri Lanka, almost shot and ended up spending three years in Guantánamo Bay, then the police took us into an office to take our passport details so we never got to hear the end of his articulate and well told story even if the reality of it is in doubt.
Three of us, luggage included, just about fitted into the tuk-tuk the police instructed us to get into. Upon arrival at the hotel we walked for half an hour to find the police station to register ourselves in the town. We spent the night watching Rigobert Song loose the Africa Cup for Cameroon in a gloomy club, where people smoked and watched TV as if they were in an opium den, on a TV balanced on a bottle crate.
11/02/08
Dongla was an unappealing place interested in the shifting of Chinese tat. When we met our lokanda owner he would get us to repeat the Nubian ‘hello’, ‘Mescargis’ we had originally greeted him with, as it was a joke which did not grow old for him. We spent our time mooching from shade to shade drinking tea. We met a student of pharmaceuticals a lawyer who told us legally, we could drink alcohol in Sudan and a very short man with a huge gold-buttoned blazer who thoroughly confused us.
2 comments:
Most interesting and insightful blog. It's not clear why you should identify this one as 'environmental': it would be very interesting to read your observations and thoughts on environmental issues - and on how these are perceived locally. Have you seen or visited any projects, locally or internationally-sponsored, designed to mitigate some aspect of environmental degradation?
Some evocative writing here, the 4/2/08 entry especially.
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