Travel Log 8 - Khartoum to Kadugli, Nuba Mountains, Kowda, Hayban and Kassala (Sudan)

22/02/08
After two coaches, one car and fourteen hours we reached Kadugli approximately 800km South of Khartoum. The road from Dilling to Kadugli was in the process of being constructed (as part of the north / south peace agreement) so was regularly blocked by great mounds of dirt which our driver (in a small Kia) either ramped over or avoided by going off road, requiring us to get out and push. There was a great deal of anticipation as we tried to gauge the landscape in the moonlit, forested mountains which looked like the curves of a predator stalking its prey.

We were driven to a lakonda to register with the police at midnight. The area was still fractious after the war between North and South, ending around five years previously: a man from the UN spoke of tribal skirmishing in the hills a few days previously. The area is jointly controlled by the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) with the backing of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Northern run government. We had received permission to travel in the area after a day of traversing Khartoum from one government building of another in order to get the vital military stamp.

On the way back to the lakonda after an uninspiring dinner of mashed beans and onion we followed the sound of distorted music to a tent in which a mass of people were dancing raucously. The music stopped dramatically and they piled out with whoops and yells of intoxication, it seemed like we had arrived in another country.


23/02/08
In the sweltering Kadugli afternoon a man dressed in army fatigues smashed off his face on something mimed swinging a stick at our heads. He lambasted us in a mixture of languages then raised to strike, it was a stark reminder that we needed to watch our backs, although he was an exception judging by the shocked expressions of onlookers.

We spent the day talking around the town, as we had become quite accustomed to doing, even mastering the art of scanning cafés for someone with an authoritative air and a good command of English. We came to the decision that Hayban would give us what we wanted from the few days we had in the Nuba Mountains. So we set about receiving permission to travel there from the SPLA.

We spent our time in the office of first lieutenant Khamis Mugagdam. He made the process as smooth as possible for us and gave us the details of his brother who had a shop in Hayban who would help us find accommodation.


24/02/08
We sat playing cards in the market and visiting the stalls piled high with clothes donated by Americans, until we could find transport to Kowda –further into the mountains and closer to Hayban.

The seven hour Bedford truck ride was in the company of a twenty plus strong division of the SPLA. They wore a mish-mash of uniforms, some in berets some in green baseball caps, some just nonchalantly soaked up the intense sunlight. The only consistency was in the SPLA stamped patent leather boots. Many wore the tassels of a tin pot general, but theirs were hand knitted from wool, strung to the shoulders which were adorned with beads making up vibrant patterns, including the Saint George’s Cross. All carried Kalashnikovs, some were left to bounce around in the spare tire where there safety catches flicked on and off with the uneven track. The truck already created quite a spectacle with the soldiers shouting obscenities at passers by, which they found hilarious, particularly when an old man responded with the apparently uncouth placement of his ring finger into his mouth. The additional presence of three hawajas onboard sent many of the children wild. Unfortunately either modesty or fear of reprisal made the soldiers camera shy.



The mountains were not huge but were still grand as they sprouted from the eerie plains dotted with double headed coconut palms, the baobab or upside down tree and trees without leaves that were covered in bright pink flowers. The villages we passed through were small and a sure sign of the distress the area had suffered was visible not only in the large number of NGOs present but in the abundance of UNICEF tarpaulins covering many of the shelters. The road in points could hardly be described as much more than a steep mountain track. For the last part of the journey a woman got onboard at the German NGO hospital carrying a small package, wrapped in a blanket. The soldiers gave her a great deal of reverence, clearing space in the cab for her. A man who was returning to his village on holiday from his job as the Recreation Manager at the Khartoum Hilton explained that she had given birth that morning. We watched as she clambered down the side of the truck left the truck to show her mother her new grandchild for the first time.

Upon arrival in Kowda we were taken to the police / NGO compound. After the police read through our security passes thoroughly, then thoroughly read the photocopies it was deemed acceptable for us to spend the night there for $20 a discount from the usual $35. The most we had paid in Sudan for accommodation had been the equivalent of $3.50 and this was nothing special so it seemed extortionate. After a great deal of awkward silences, the scraping of chairs the police chief left. The Recreation Manager apologised profusely for the police chief’s behavior saying that he was known locally as ‘Mosquito’ because ‘he is only small but he causes many men a lot of problems.’ He suggested we spend the night in his house. As we left the compound, walking the sandy path back towards the market by torch light Mosquito came tearing up to us on his motorbike and furiously lambasted us over the sound of his engine which he revved angrily, he had come to the conclusion that we were, ‘very bad people!’ The upshot of it all was the security pass given to us by the SPLA stated that our safety was his responsibility and he was therefore obliged to put us up for the night for free. We spent the evening eating the food we had bought in the market under supervision, wondering who was in the wrong because although this man was an annoyance and it was satisfying to get one over on him, there is the potential for huge tourist crop bringing money into the area and our actions may have damaged it. We were reprieved though a few days later upon meeting the Canadian in charge of the compound who explained it is church run and should be free to all.


25/02/08
Over a breakfast of cold, fried dough balls and a slab of pink sogum dumpling in okra stew we discussed Sudanese politics with the Hilton Recreation Manager. Reading about the subject was a very different experience: putting faces to what were previously numbers was an uncomfortable experience. One of the soldiers on the truck had described how he fought on behalf of his brother who was killed in a random act of violence during the war with the North, during the same incident all of his cows had been taken so he was now also poor. He explained how he wanted to learn English and Toby gave him a collection of Yeats poems he had finished. He was very taken by the following lines from ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The South of Sudan which is predominantly Black Christian is rich in resources such as oil which the Northern, developed, predominantly Arab, Muslim part of Sudan was exploiting but without returning any of the revenues or development benefits. This disparity was the cause of the war between the North and South. In the peace agreement after the war the North promised an equal share of the revenues and development, however, there is still a great deal of friction in the area because these promises are not being fulfilled, the North is dragging its heels.

The people we met recommended that Yuya (the only remaining tortoise with us) ensured that people we met should realise that he is Japanese because the Chinese support of the Khartoum government is making them very unpopular and Arab people are still unwelcome in the areas we passed through, it would likely be dangerous for them to go there.

We managed to hop a lift on a landcruiser heading to Hayban found for us by the helpful Recreation Manger.


26/02/08
There would be no transport to the following village of Delami because market was not until the 28th so we would be in Hayban for at least two days.



Watching the people going about their business was fascinating. Electricity was at a premium and set aside mainly for lighting the cafes and the three ‘video clubs’; one for eighties blockbusters, one for kung fu and one for Bollywood. We watched as they baked bread in a community oven, transported water to the houses and shops from a storage tank by ingenious donkey carts, repaired rickety Chinese bikes with hammers, cooked food with utensils made from tomato tins, fashioned spears from metal construction poles and drank freshly roasted coffee by the light of gas lamps. It was like a post-apocalyptic vision of the future.

The whole village had a lingering smell of jasmine as many of the old trees were in bloom. The village square was a large flat patch of sand dotted with old trees under which shawled women sat heating various mysterious teas.

We were put up by the ‘Norwegian Church Aid’ who had a series of squat, thatched huts a short walk across the tree lined football pitch. Under the boughs of these huge dark trees which were hung with heavy roots to the ground, was the town’s barber. As we went about the place we were treated with looks of disbelief and fear. The younger children followed us in procession singing hawaja! The adults would look at one another and with a flash of teeth and a clap of the hands for acknowledgement of the strangeness of the situation. This was especially the case when we borrowed Victorian style, Chinese bicycles and cycled about the place like country gents. Those we met in more Western dress treated what we said with undue gravitas.



Wandering about the village deciding which of the many, identical eateries in which to have fu’ul, we came across a group in the ruins of a school building drinking sogum wine called assalia. As the women put henna on the soles of one another’s feet and sorted through bowls of peanuts the men drank heavily. They were determined to prove the freedom of the South to us by getting us plastered. We were still unsure whether the sharia law of Khartoum was nationwide so we were a little uncomfortable with the situation. However, the chief drinker’s claim that he was a general in the SPLA was partly confirmed by the arrival of a man in army uniform saluting him stoically who was promptly handed a jam jar to drink from, which made it all slightly less worrying. This soldier was a member of a tribe from the deep south of Sudan where the four bottom lower teeth are ceremonially removed. They showed us a series of mud pots they used to distill a date spirit that they insisted we try. When the finished jam jars of a clear liquid emerge, it became clear that this was no longer a matter of hospitality but a test of our metal and a matter of national pride. The fact that the British had constructed the school we sat in the ruins of, helped stiffen our backs. It had been ruined when commandeered by the army during the war.



At the point when everyone decided they could trust one another, Toby was renamed enfouko which roughly translates as both naked and mad, there was uproar as Stuart attempted to balance on a very small stool and the expression on Yuya’s face when he downed his shots. They explained the kirang festival, which can cover eventualities such as the coming of rain, the harvesting of a crop or a marriage. It generally involves a lot of singing, dancing and alcohol. In the case of a funeral, a bull is locked in a darkened cage at the time of death and fed only milk. Upon the three year anniversary of the death the cow is killed with a spear like the one we saw being made and it is eaten by the whole village. This was all explained in faltering and slurred English so it is difficult to known its accuracy but it made interesting listening. As did the magician who could cure AIDS and the giant snake which lived in a square cave in the mountain which loomed over the village and who had a fist sized diamond in its belly which the general told us about. We tentatively and unsteadily headed back into the town to eat fu’ul with tinned tuna and it never tasted so good.


27/02/08
All of a sudden there was a lift for us to Delami with two women from Save the Children and their driver in a pickup. Raja and Aza were touring the area to promote landmine education project, part of a wider program of child soldier community reintegration.

We stopped in the middle of nowhere for lunch and sat in a shack constructed from branches and World Food Program sacks, the table molded from the earth beneath us. As we ate a woman repaired Toby's flip-flop with a knife heated in the fire. Outside there was a market of three different items; bread, mangoes and grasshoppers. The mangoes went down far easier than the latter. The taste was taken out of our mouths by the surrogate travel sweets – sour yellow berries they collected from a tree.

In the next village we stopped in, a court was in session in a shop. Most of the village vied for a good view of the sentencing. Apparently a man had ‘a problem’ with his wife and the judge (apparently more senior than the village’s two chiefs) was to decide whether or not she should be beaten. Throughout our time in this village we were followed by a ghost-like child, emaciated and covered in a pale dust.



In Delami it transpired that the information we had been given was wrong and after tomorrow the next truck out of the village would not be until the next week, taking us dangerously close to end of our Sudanese visa. With the help of the two women we got a lift on the back of a pickup owned by the Catholic Church carrying plastic chairs to Dilling, driven by the pastor. As the fat sun set we could see a sea of savannah with a wake of bright flame moving over the light grass like a tide.

Before Dilling we dropped some passengers in a village where we stopped for tea and we moved inside the cabin. The pastor explained that he had his calling after surviving a collision with a landmine in his pickup, which had left him with a deeply scarred face. Our other passenger wrote for various Khartoum papers on politics and described to us his hopes for a new, united Sudan in which Jesus would play an important role. He waited with baited breath for the 2011 referendum in which the South would be offered the opportunity to vote for independence.


28/02/08 – 01/03/08
In Dilling market we found the Nuban knives we had been looking for and we watched a man sharpen them with great skill using a hammer and the dirt below his engine part anvil. The market also offered shoes made from car tires, jewelry made in a hand operated press and all the goat organs you could ever need.

From Dilling we caught the seven hour bus to Khartoum where we parted from Yuya and caught the eight hour bus to Gederaf, slept on the parked bus once we arrived in Gederaf for four hours then caught the two hour bus to Kassala in the East, at six in the morning.



With its large population of Yemenis, Eritrean refugees and Internally Displaced People Kassala was a vibrant place. The most prominent groups were the Bija women with their large, gold, hooped nose rings and the Bija man with their dark waistcoat and four foot swords strapped to their belt. The Rashaida women had spectacular jewelry hanging from their bhurkas. Groups of men with similar hairstyles hung about together, box shaped afros and strange European curls. Many of them carried boomerang shaped sticks with animal skin grips. A man on a bus said he used his to kill cows, which seemed a little unlikely, later we saw it being use as a seat, its two ends resting on the ground.



After a couple of days in Kassala we were heading back to Gedaref to cross to Ethiopia, we had hoped to cross at Kassala to Eritrea but we had no luck with the visa. Taking a small bus to Gederaf seemed like a simple enough journey but half an hour outside Kassala the inner tube of the front tire inexplicably exploded causing the outer tire to also fly off the wheel. We swerved dramatically off the road towards the embankment, the drop onto the dessert plain was undoubtedly steep enough to have tipped us over. However, the driver fought bravely and when we came to rest everyone shook hands with one another and repeated inshallah, meaning 'god willing', joyfully. We sat outside the bus looking out towards Aweitila, Totil and Taka, the three dramatic mountains which dominated the landscape. When asked a lengthy and complex question about our opinion of the accident, the response, inshallah was met with great uproar. In Gedaref there was no room at the inn, we wandered about the stinking town for a hotel where the manager could be bothered to find the forms that would be necessary to accommodate a couple of hawajas. First prize for worst accommodation goes to the beds we were given in the corridor outside the toilets. The Spanish and German tortoises we had been travelling with previously were staying in the same place so we went with them the next morning in a minibus to the border with Ethiopia.