Khartoum Characters

12^th-19^th November 2009 – Days 45-52 – Khartoum, Sudan

Khartoum, on first sight, had everything it needed to be recognised as a big African city – dust, people everywhere, taxi drivers offering rides into town for hideous prices. We had no idea where we were besides a vague inkling of being in Khartoum Bahri, the northern suburb where we weren’t aiming to be. The tactic of walking away from the taxi drivers didn’t work, as they just continued prowling around for other passengers instead of running after us and offering more reasonable rates. We found another one down the road who offered us a decent rate after we’d only walked off twice! As always, once the question of the fare was settled, he was friendly and talkative as he navigated us through crowds of people, piles of discarded cardboard boxes and plastic bottles and the omnipresent dust left swirling in the air having been kicked up by other cars. Eventually, we found our way to a cheapish hotel and lay on the bed to watch the news on Al-Jazeera. Khartoum is indeed a big African city.

In this big African city, we did big African city things – wandering the streets, going to cafes, partaking in shisha evenings, buying luxury items like toilet paper and shower gel and even taking advantage of some cafes’ free WiFi! It was quite a shock to suddenly find ourselves in situations like this after spending time in northern Sudan, yet Khartoum was also unmistakeably similar to her smaller sisters we visited on the way down. The streets were busier, yet looked the same. The buildings, aside from a few 5-star hotels, the presidential palace and the like, looked the same. And the people, despite having more of a big city busy-busy way about them, were the same. We were greeted, welcomed, and our health enquired about on every street corner. The city is really three cities in one – Bahri, where we arrived, Khartoum proper and Omdurman, on the western bank of the Nile. Khartoum proper in particular looks like it started off as a small town and successive suburbs have been tacked on when the time seemed right, giving it a small-town feel on a big-city scale. We hadn’t been in a big city since leaving Cairo but we slotted back into the big-city mindset almost immediately – crossing roads when we wanted to rather than when it seemed sensible to; getting used to walking with our eyes on the ground, especially at night, to avoid falling into the numerous pits and open manholes dotted around Khartoum; arguing with taxi drivers for every ride; and consistently failing to get a grasp of our surroundings, leading us to get lost with depressing regularity.

The Nile snakes its way through Khartoum, preventing the khawajas from getting utterly lost

One landmark was the Nile (or rather two landmarks – the Blue Nile flows into Sudan from Ethiopia and the White Nile from Uganda, and they meet in Khartoum) and we decided to move to the Blue Nile Sailing Club where a night was half the price we had been paying in the hotel and, interestingly, spent on pillows aboard Gunboat Melik, which was last pressed into military action during General Kitchener’s campaign against the Mahdi Army over a century ago. One of the more interesting places we’ve slept, certainly. Just down the road was the presidential palace, and in another intriguing piece of legislation it was forbidden to walk in the road between it and the Nile, meaning that drivers wouldn’t have to worry about pedestrians while they admired the front of the palace, but people without cars were forced to take a long detour to get to the other side. Apparently this regulation had been in place since the British ruled Khartoum, and no one has ever bothered to abandon it. Aside from this section of Sharia an-Nil which we didn’t ever get to see, we found it to be a pleasant, shaded, leafy walk where young couples sat on the wall swooning at each other, soldiers waved at the two passing khawajas while they guarded various ministries, and overgrown tree roots ripped paving stones from their resting places, creating a formidable obstacle course for anyone wishing to get from one end of the street to the other. This obstacle course, naturally, combined with open manholes to make night-time a particularly interesting time to take a walk down Sharia an-Nil. Fortunately, some of the streets close to the Nile had something that I haven’t ever seen before – motion-detector-equipped streetlights! The first couple of times a streetlight flickered into life as we approached and then returned to darkness after we had passed by we just considered ourselves lucky, but we soon realised that this was a regular occurrence and concluded that there must be some kind of system behind it. Ingenious!

Kitchener's boat/Khawaja dormitory

Khartoum meant several things to us. Firstly, it meant paper-chasing – we needed to get an Ethiopian visa (successfully obtained) and a travel permit allowing us to go to Port Sudan and Kassala (also successfully obtained). Secondly, it meant football – we’d arranged to meet up with Lucas and Dixon, Grant and Sebastian, and Mohamed and Waleed to go watch Sudan play Benin in Omdurman. Aside from Waleed who was too tired, we went over to the stadium with another recruit, Sean from California who was on his way up to Cairo. The game was uneventful and Sudan lost 2:1, although given that both teams had already failed to qualify for the World Cup, the score didn’t matter. We’d gone to see the game - that was the essential. The Beninese flag was held upside down during the presentation of the teams, the Sudanese national anthem completely failed to materialise, and at the end of the game a few of the Sudanese players went home on foot, still wearing their shirts and boots - great to see that football has not been consumed by mass capitalism in some parts of the world at least!

SU-DAN! SU-DAN! The Merreikh stadium is packed to the rafters

Khartoum also meant relaxing and getting energy levels back up for the next leg of the trip down to Addis Ababa. It meant sitting in cybercafés writing mails to people, it meant sitting around sipping cokes and watching TV, meeting up with Mohamed and Waleed to sit around sipping cokes. In another gesture from these two delightful gentlemen, we were introduced to Arrij, Waleed’s girlfriend, and heartily invited to their wedding in Port Sudan next year, which we accepted happily and told them we hoped we’d be able to make it. In the meantime, they gave us gifts - a necklace for M and a bracelet for me – to remember them by. It meant taking a trip up to the confluence of the Nile where the “Al-Mogran Family Park” was situated, a place where local schoolkids could go on rides and laugh at the khawajas who were there. Why our presence at this place was so funny I never managed to work out, but at least we provided some sort of entertainment. The barbed wire fence at the back end of the place was also a good place to sneak a picture of the White Nile bridge, which is forbidden otherwise on the grounds of military significance. It meant hanging around with a few of the others passing through - the South African guys, 3 friendly Slovenian bikers who were good company and also kept M plied with coffee, and Sean from California who we wandered the streets with for a few days. The real big-city moment came at the post office though, where we actually managed to find postcards! At this point, we realised that Khartoum really has it all. We also had an expedition to Bajarawiya to see the pyramids of Meroe but, given that we don’t want to bore you all with excessively long posts, I’m leaving that for M to write about separately.

Our final moment of excitement came with the Algeria-Egypt playoff which was held in Omdurman – we’d wanted to go to see the game but were advised against it by many people. That, and the fact that we’d have had to get up very early to get tickets, led to us watching on TV instead. The sight of trucks full of riot police, ambulances speeding towards Omdurman after the game and news reports of a three-way diplomatic rift between Sudan, Egypt and Algeria in the aftermath of the game indicated that maybe we’d done well to see it on the TV anyway.

We never really did find the soul of Khartoum, just like we never really found our way back to that cafe we went to in whichever district it was. We just wandered, took in what we saw, and supposed we may never find our way back. One sunny morning, we made our way to the bus station, got onto a bus to Wad Medani, and waved goodbye to Khartoum for now.

Sudan, the real land of smiles

10th-11th November 2009 – Days 43-44 – Atbara, Sudan

We didn’t really see much of Atbara, at least not in the daylight. Instead, we definitely found more of the Sudanese warmth and friendliness that T mentioned before.

Upon arrival to Atbara bus station – or the dusty plant of land with loads of Toyota Hiluxes of all possible upgrades and minibuses the shape of large yoghurt pots that classifies as a transport station in Africa – we had mixed feelings about where to head off to. Atbara seemed like another one of the towns we’d seen on our way south so far, just slightly more crowded and visibly dirtier with litter scattered blatantly on the streets instead of just in ditches and on street corners like in the northern towns. The general layout was still the same and it wasn’t hard to find refuge at one of the many tea stands that the veiled women tend everywhere here. So I took the lead and ordered us some shai and jabbana (local coffee flavoured with ginger, cardamom and sometimes cinnamon as well) while trying to get T to drag his corpse around the corner from where he had halted with our bags.

We sat and sipped our drinks away, and were trying to locate ourselves on the map with the help of my minicompass (one I got as part of a farewell gift from colleagues - thanks guys, it has come in handy on several occasions!!) at the same time replying to the friendly chat initiated by the locals at the same stand. Next thing we noticed was a determined, well-framed Sudanese guy in black shades and a clean tidy shirt walking up to the stand and giving the tea lady some money for our drinks. As he sat down next to us, he introduced himself as “the king around here”. We tried to insinuate that it was ok for us to pay for our own drinks but he wouldn’t have any of it so we just settled to thanking him. The man offered us some jabbana to taste and noticed that I was actually already having the same thing. He nodded deeply in appreciation and offered us both some more from his own pot. Less than a couple of minutes later, another skinnier guy in a dark blue shirt with a kind smile on his face also sat down next to us. They both asked us about why we were in Atbara and about our trip in general and where we are from, as is the habit to do to khawajas (=westerners) here. They told us what they were doing in Atbara and about their work and where they are from, as it is a courtesy to reply to khawajas’ questions too. They are both engineers working at a building site of a new hospital not far from the tea stand, but are actually from Khartoum and not from Atbara. Soon they found out that we didn’t yet have a place to stay in for the night and insisted that we come to their place, as they live together. T and I looked at each other for a brief second before nodding eagerly at this lovely sign of hospitality. The matter was settled. This is how we met our new friends Mohamed “the King” and Waleed.

The guys really took us around Atbara after that. First, we went to see the building site of the hospital as the working day had not finished for them yet, and also met their boss, the main consultant set to supervise the project. Waleed was in charge of the telecommunications installations at the hospital and took us on a tour of the whole site and also to test the public announcement system. T ordered one of Mohamed’s and Waleed’s friends from downstairs to urgently come and bring some Fanta to the thirsty foreigners on the 2nd floor. There was clearly some work to be done for Waleed still, as T’s voice echoed all around the site but yet we never got our Fantas. In general, the work seemed to be well on its way and the facilities looked modern. When fully built, the hospital will have three big labs, two big surgical operation rooms, around five patient rooms per floor, a restaurant on the top floor and a veranda on the 1st floor for the patients in order for them to lounge and get some fresh air. All the main infrastructure installations had now nearly been finished and presumably the medical equipment would be brought in next. The boss consultant took us into his air-conditioned office for a lengthy chat about Sudan and treated us for some afternoon coffee and shisha at a nearby café still well within the working hours. It was critical that we drive the 200m distance to and back from the café in the boss’ Camry, as it had air-conditioning after all.

Second, after the working day had finished for the guys, Waleed took us to the shop and bought us some food and drinks before we headed back to their house in a rickshaw. We were not allowed to pay for any of this. Mohamed had already got back by the time we got to the house. We chilled for a couple of hours while the guys taught us some more Arabic and told us stories about Sudanese everyday life and the football culture. Mohamed, especially, shined out in this category and enlightened us about the teams in Khartoum: Merreikh, the government team, bad while Hilal, currently top of the league, good. You gotta believe the King!

Third, we wanted to go and see Atbara a bit more so the guys volunteered to come and escort us around. We got a couple of rickshaws around town, both sides of the railway track and to the bank of the Nile, went to the football stadium to see a bit of the training session of the local team al-Amal Atbara (who Mohamed knew half of), and finally had a big meal and some shisha and tea before heading back to the house. Again, we were not allowed to pay for anything, not even for the teas. Waleed also ran off at some point and came back with a local SIM card for which he would not take money for, even if we insisted very hard.

The bridge over the Nile. "No photos!" the guys said. "So come over here and hide, take it from here..."

In the late evening back at the house we chilled some more and the guys both called their girlfriends, who we got a chance to exchange a few words with over the phone as well. We exchanged contact details, I had a shower and T gave the guys the photos from our cameras that we had been taking over the day. Both of the guys went to sleep in the other room for the night, after putting up a cheeky show of how they want to give us some time alone in the bedroom. I scanned the corners of the room for hidden cameras at this point, which caused great amusement to Waleed, the cheekier one of the two. I have strong belief that any material of the nightly actions has not been recorded.

In the morning we slept late with T again. So late it caused Waleed to be late from work, as the poor man had been waiting for us to wake up so that he can get to his wardrobe in the room we were sleeping in. I felt absolutely awful to learn this. Seems, however, that we were good enough excuse to be late from work, as to our knowledge he did not get sacked – even if the big boss had told us earlier that “there’s two reasons not to come to work: 1) you’re dead and 2) you don’t come the next day”. Waleed must be a good worker.

The guys even took us to the bus station together on their way to work and helped us get some tickets to Khartoum. We shared a final jabbana-moment with them at the station (again not spending a single Sudanese Pound of our own), meeting their preferred tea ladies of the place. Everyone here has their own favourite in this regard. We said our fond goodbyes to these incredibly friendly faces and agreed to meet them in Khartoum later in the week, as they were heading back there too, with work finished for their part of the hospital project. There was also a certain Sudan-Benin football game scheduled for the following Saturday so we promised to be in touch concerning hitting the stadium together.

On the way to Khartoum, they both called us at least four times just to make sure we were getting to our destination all good and well and only stopped calling when they could hear the taxi drivers of Khartoum haggling over us on the background.

Waleed, M and Mohamed chillin' near the big bus with no wheels

Can it get more hospitable than this? This post is dedicated to you, Mohamed and Waleed, if you ever stumble across this blog. Many great thanks for everything.

"A plague on both your feet!"

7th-9th November 2009 – Days 40-42 – Karima, Sudan

I like Karima. Not for any particular reason, but for the same reason that I liked Dongola. It’s got that relaxed feel about it that I’ve only ever felt in the Sahara. When people are walking they walk slowly, and they will always give the Khawaja (foreigner) a smile as they walk past. There are few cars, but those that do drive past will normally have a passenger who leans out the window with a smile and a wave. People lounging around in the midday shade will call out a greeting as you walk past. Unlike in Egypt, though, you actually interpret it as a greeting rather than the beginning of a sales pitch, and it’s always a pleasure to return a smile or a wave. Much like Dongola, Karima has sandy streets and the occasional tarmac one skirted by sand “pavements”, hugs the Nile and is surrounded by fields and palm trees resisting any encroachment from the desert with attacks it from all sides. The walk from the souq where we were left by the bus wasn’t without incident – M twisted her ankle while looking at the map to find out where we should be heading and so we’re having an enforced few days here while it gets nursed back to health.

What human rights?? Brutal abuse of the physically challenged I say.

Karima is a typical north Sudanese town, nice to walk around, drenched in sunshine and buzzing with people at any time of day except between midday and 3pm, when everyone (including shopkeepers, restaurant owners and so on) retreats to the shade of their homes for a nap. Like many typical towns, it has its own little attractions and abnormalities too – Karima, unlike other towns we’ve passed, has a 150$-a-night boutique hotel, the Nubian Rest House, run by an Italian woman. We decided to aim for a spot of luxury by going there for a meal on the second night’s evening – a four course meal featuring such luxuries as spaghetti, mortadella, Italian ice cream and other things which totally remove the visitor from the surrounding country but still makes a nice change…

Karima also has Jebel Barkal, “the holy mountain”, which was revered by the ancient civilization of Kush. It has an old temple at the foot, another one inside, and a 90m statue of a cobra carved out of the side. More importantly, it’s good fun to climb up. By the third day here, M’s ankle has recovered enough to let her scramble up Jebel Barkal, and her slightly slower pace is matched as my sandals from Cairo have started disintegrating. Well equipped as always, then, we start the ascent of Jebel Barkal, picking our way to the top across rocks and soft patches of sand and after half an hour or so the view from the top is laid out in front of us – the town of Karima to the east, the setting sun to the west, the pyramids of Karima to the north, and the Nile snaking its way past from horizon to horizon. It’s a beautiful sight and we sit and watch while the sun goes down. A guy comes to say hello for a few minutes and as darkness falls, we run down a sandy face of the Jebel, at a much quicker pace than we went up at. Heading back to town we bump into Sean at the bus ticket office, where we get tickets for Atbara tomorrow.

Karima from above

Karima also has El Kurru, a site where there used to be some pyramids. Having visited El Kurru (and walked half of the way back to Karima because there were no more minibuses) we can deliver the following report: it sucks. It looks more like a quarry than an ancient cemetery.

We actually saw this car move!

Introducing ourselves to the locals, El Kurru. Their analysis of their town? "El Kurru UGLY!"

We don’t know much about Atbara but it’s a convenient stopping off place on the way to Khartoum and we decide to spend a night there before heading down to the capital. As seems to happen in these towns, on the walk back to the hotel we are showered in greetings, both from people who we don’t know and people who we do – the cigarette man, the guy in the hat who always says hello as we walk past his shop, the rickshaw driver who gave us a lift a few days ago and still gives us a smile whenever we cross him. It’s another show of Sudanese warmth and friendliness, which hopefully will continue in the bigger cities we’ll see further on.

Kawabunga!!!!!

6th November 2009 – Day 39 – Dongola, Sudan

It’s Friday, a lot of shops are closed, it’s hot, and our little commune lazes in our common room. The atmosphere’s good, Rui has a pair of small speakers and we listen to music while doing odd jobs. The English guys read books, Sean and I are typing away, and M washed clothes while I went off to the bus station to get tickets for Karima tomorrow, where we’ll be heading with Sean. Rui will stay another night while Dixon and Lucas are heading to Khartoum but we’ll probably meet up there next week for the Sudan-Benin football game. The battalion’s last day together, for the moment at least.

With the cooling of the air towards the evening the battalion (minus Lucas who was laid low with troublesome digestive complications) trekked off towards the ruined temple of Kawa, with a vague idea of where to go and no idea how long it would take. After stopping off at a shop for a bottle of cold soda each where the shopkeeper asked us to write our names and nationalities on a sheet of paper he’d titled “My Friends”, we were offered a lift by a guy in a pick-up who we’d seen in the hotel once. He drove us around 5km out of town and dropped us off on the edge of the desert and pointed the way, wished us good luck and did a u-turn back to Dongola. Another great example of the Sudanese attitude towards welcoming their visitors! The walk was slow and hot across a flat sandy plain and we were parched by the time we got to the banks of the Nile without any ruin in sight. Another great example of the Sudanese ability to give directions! I spotted what seemed like a wall off in the distance and we set off. Halfway there, what seemed like the ruin of an old house appeared in the sand – it wasn’t much to look at, but it somehow seemed far better than any of the ruins we saw in Egypt. Out here in the middle of the desert with no touts, other tourists, ticket offices or organization of any sort in sight, we felt less like sheep and more like adventurers discovering an ancient ruin for the first time. An empty Pepsi bottle nestled in the sand put paid to that feeling, but still…

The apparently previously enormous temple of Kawa

Feelin' hot, hot, hot

Continuing on towards the mysterious wall, another wonderful aspect of Sudanese tourist attractions – pieces of Kushite pottery thousands of years old were scattered over the ground along with other pieces of rock and carved objects that had been used for something or other. Dixon, the group’s only geologist, looked with interest at a lot of the objects and we formed educated guesses as to what they could have been. Spear points, balls used as part of a pestle and mortar combination, handles from cups and bottles. We walked slowly, picking up anything of interest and analyzing it before leaving it in the sand ready for the next visitors to wonder over. When we finally got to the ruined temple and found that the walls and pillars had been eroded down to less than half a metre in height it didn’t really matter so much – the walk and the isolation of the place still made it a really interesting place to sit, imagine the past, and listen to the total silence interrupted only by the occasional breath of wind and the slow passing of the Nile a few hundred metres away. As the sun went down, we decided on heading back to the road while there was still a bit of light left for the 6km walk back to Dongola. This being Sudan, of course, the 6km walk never happened as a pick-up stopped in front of us and we were enthusiastically welcomed aboard, swelling the population of the truck to 18 people!

As we opened the door, we heard voices from within the room – it was Sebastian and Grant, the South Africans on bikes who’d caught us up! Not only that but they’d met a South Korean guy who’d moved to Dongola with his wife and three sons (and why not indeed?) and he welcomed us to his house where he and his wife plied us with industrial quantities of hibiscus juice, watermelon, lemonade and cake which the neighbours had baked for them – a real oasis in the desert! M and I were sat up the other end of the table from the hosts with Dixon where we were being terrorized by the kids so we didn’t really get to follow the conversation much at all but we appreciated the gesture all the same… Once again, we slept like babies, ready to be up bright and early for the bus to Karima tomorrow.

The gang at the Korea House (minus one idiot who was taking too long to emerge from the toilet...)

5th November 2009 – Day 38 – Dongola, Sudan

After more truck-bus and service-station adventures (this time with cold Pepsi) with the newly formed gang, we arrive somewhere on the outskirts of Dongola in the delightfully African position of not being able to find out where we are. People, as elsewhere in Sudan so far, are very friendly, wave and greet us but their ability to give directions and distances is far inferior to their friendliness and we start to wonder if we are going in the right direction. We are consistently waved in the same direction though, and our curious column plods on. I can only imagine what people must have been thinking behind their smiles – 4 white guys, one woman and a Chinese guy lugging their backpacks along the main road into town, greeting everyone along their path and asking for the nearest hotel. M remarks that it looks more like a low key military invasion of Dongola, and at one point the group decides to invade a small shop and get supplies (Mirinda and Pepsi). Here, the battalion set up camp and sent an advance reconnaissance party in the shape of Dixon and myself, and we continued, freed from the burden of the backpacks, down sandy streets to eventually find a cheap hotel where the owner offers to put 6 beds in one room for 12€. We head off back to pick up the rest of the battalion. Dixon’s a very enthusiastic character about most things and on this occasion, he asks a boy on a passing donkey-cart for a lift and the boy waves us on without stopping. The impact of two guys on the back of the cart is enough to tip it over and the boy falls off the front but in a show of deftness probably eliminated from the Western gene pool, he manages to take a few steps between cart and still-moving donkey and hops back onto his cart, balancing it perfectly, in one movement. He laughs and we carry on our way.

The cortege marches into town

The Lord Hotel is a novelty in many ways. Firstly, it is next to the first set of traffic lights we have seen in Sudan – it’s strange how quickly you forget that these things exist and their sudden reappearance can even cause mild excitement! The pleasures of travelling, eh… Secondly, the Lord actually has showers. Being naked before going into the shower is also a sensation that is easily forgotten, and I have some kind of sensation that something is missing. M had showered already and drowned the cockroaches which were lurking, and I flicked them into the Turkish toilet that the shower shares floor space with. Fresh and smelling good for the first time (and probably the last time) in many days, we head to the street café outside where the guys are sat with Mohammed.

Mohammed is an English literature teacher at the University of Dongola and his English is a fantastic mix of high-class Windsor and L.A. ghetto and his sometimes complex sentences are interspersed with “dude, no biggie” and “Wassup my man” and tales of appreciation of series like Only Fools and Horses. We suggest that he watches Fawlty Towers, which he hasn’t heard of but shows a great interest in. Eventually he gets up and invites us to his friend’s wedding just round the corner and we happily accept this time. No sooner have we arrived than we are brought chairs and, five minutes later, a guy in a Jalabiyya comes and drags us off to the “dance floor” where we bop around to Arab-Nubian wedding music and congratulate the bride and groom. The guys and the girls dance close to each other but separately. Seeing us guys dancing, a big group of younger guys from the wedding party come and dance with us and egg us on. M’s efforts with the girls are rather less successful and, with the exception of a small girl, the other girls seem either shy or confused, or both, and just stand and stare as M struts her stuff in front of them. Her efforts to wriggle out and join the guys are unsuccessful and she is relieved when the rest of us go to sit down. Mohammed’s a great host, answering our endless questions happily. When he leaves, he agrees to meet us tomorrow evening and take us to a small castle on an island close to Dongola. We stay on a bit longer, get dragged off to dance some more and take our leave, sleeping like babies.

First Steps in the Outpost of Tyranny

3rd to 4th November 2009 – Days 36 and 37 – Wadi Halfa to Abri, Sudan


The ferry ride to Wadi Halfa took roughly 20 hours, and sadly we had passed the temple of Abu Simbel in the dark so we did not get to see it from the lake. Upon arrival we were faced with the sight of a dry and dusty desert town with not much going for it. The original Wadi Halfa drowned as a result of the building of the Aswan dam in Egypt so the population had to relocate, and the newly built Wadi Halfa really seems like it has lost its soul in the process. Together with some of the other foreigners from the ferry we spent the day sitting in the couple of cafeteria/restaurants in town enjoying some beverages and having a chat with the friendly owner of one of the places and following the amusing anger sprouts of the owner of the other one. We pulled back to our lokanda early for the night, in preparation of sorting our way out and down south from here the next day.

One small step for a man... One giant leap into Sudan

The next morning T and I slept late again to compensate for our hardships of sleeping on the ferry the night before. Around noon we eventually went looking for the registration office where we completed the lengthy and hierarchical process within two hours. In this time we were pushed around to walk between four different clerks at least ten times, filled another form and had to provide copies of our passport info page and Sudanese visa page with one photo each. The result of the registration was a stamp on our passports for the price of SP100 each – price seems to have gone up quite a bit from the SP57 in the guidebook from four years ago. We then swooshed quickly by the bus station to ask for bus times to Abri, the next town down the Nile, as we agreed that we wanted to suck in as much of the Northern desert atmosphere as possible. There was one going in an hour’s time so we headed off to pack our bags there and then. Back at the lokanda we bumped into Richard who had decided to take the direct bus down to Khartoum, so we said our goodbyes and seeyalaters with him, hoping to catch up with him further along the way.

Downtown Wadi Halfa and its many entertainment options

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With a new registration sticker in passports we hopped on an infamous truck-bus, equipped with musical horns and a driver happy to use them, we tooted and bumped our way along the mostly tarmac, occasionally gravel road towards Abri, stopping at a “service station” of sorts along the way. The Sudanese service station is a patch of sand by the road (much like anywhere else in northern Sudan) with a shelter of palm tree branches propped up by wooden poles. Underneath this, woven mats are placed on the floor and people lounge on them, swatting flies. The most important man in the whole place is the one who owns the key to the chest fridge where piles of bottles are stacked. In this particular service station the fridge was sadly empty so we whiled away the time in the shade before being moved onto another truck-bus towards Abri. The truck-bus is another curious typically Sudanese contraption – the body of a bus is welded onto a truck, seats are bolted to the floor, and any semblance of suspension is removed. These were used before the tarmac road was finished this year, which has cut travel time between Wadi Halfa and Khartoum from 4 days to 12 hours. Air conditioned buses are now running the roads but truck-buses are still used on shorter routes.

Sudan's new fleet of luxury buses

Two women are sat over the aisle from us and, in marked contrast from Egypt, they are quite happy to strike up conversation with us. The language barrier prevents us from actually talking about anything but they are happy to point things out to us, such as the South African cyclists we met on the ferry. I’m already feeling a much more relaxed vibe in Sudan than in Egypt, and the feeling is reinforced on arrival in Abri, a small town with one storey buildings and sandy streets. We rolled up at the only lokanda in town and got a mud-floor room for the night. Here, we met up with Dixon, Lucas, Sean and Rui who we met on the ferry and went for falafel sandwiches before the two of us went to the house of Mugzoub, our new acquaintance. It’s a funny evening – Mugzoub seems happy in our company but we spend half of the time in silence and Mugzoub only becomes more animated on the phone to his girlfriend in Cairo. After a few cups of tea, he invites us to a Nubian wedding but we’re so tired that we have to turn down the invitation. We are in a similar tired state and wouldn’t mind going to have a look but getting roped into a full blown wedding until the early hours of the morning would be a bit tougher, and we are heading to Dongola tomorrow so we want to get some sleep.

Sailing south

2^nd November 2009 – Day 35 – Lake Nasser Ferry, Egypt/Sudan

Our evil plan of crudely exploiting Richard as our walking alarm clock by dropping him casual hints, such as our hostel name, location and room number and a time we thought suitable for a meet-up for catching the train to the port, worked perfectly as we were woken up by him punctually banging on our door at 7.30am on the morning of the ferry trip. After yet another morning scramble of grabbing all our stuff and stuffing it into our backpacks upside down and inside out and then screening the room for any objects we could identify as our own we hurried downstairs to pay and were further postponed by having to wait for the guy at the reception run around the nearest block to get us our change. We got to the train station in time for the 8am train, however, and to the amazement of us all, the train actually left on time! This would make it the first train in Egypt so far to do so, and ironically it should of course be the last train we’d be taking in the country.

The rattle to the port took about half an hour, and after getting to the gate of the port we made acquaintances with two chatty British guys, Lucas and Dixon, while having to wait for our turn to enter as 2^nd class passengers. What followed was an amusing set of formalities for boarding the boat and exiting the country. At the first step the stamp didn’t work and made the whole queue stand for 15 minutes before the man operating the stamp had a revelation and started using a pen to mark “II” on our tickets for 2^nd class, supposedly. At the next step another ticket stamper compensated for this with his over-eagerness and actually mistook my passport for his ink pillow so I now have a stamp of some sort on the back cover. At the next step we first paid to get a paper stamp licked and pressed onto our exit forms (what a job that man has!) and then brutally cut in front of the locals in the passport queue. The final step involved getting our forms for the Sudanese immigration which was to be performed later onboard the ferry.

Thankfully it wasn't in the boat.

Already at this point in time we could hear the signs of dissatisfaction of some fellow passengers behind us in the queue. A certain angry middle-aged whitey had an imminent attitude problem towards queuing at this time in the morning and having to fill in this many forms, especially when they asked for your mother’s name on one of them as well. This raises a question of why this man would choose to visit what has been titled as the most bureaucratic country of Africa, let alone the continent of Africa in the first place. The process all in all had been very smooth and reasonably quick so I couldn’t understand this man’s reaction even from that side of things. If you want to travel, you have to stand in line at border posts from time to time and transport tends to leave at early hours all around the world – at this time in your normal life you would have been in the office for an hour already, and probably sitting in a meeting which would easily outdo this little bit of queuing as measured by both boredom and effort levels. Being the head of the queue at this point and having already gone through all the steps, I sat down on a sunny spot of the ground to enjoy my breakfast (take away from the hostel) not far from the groaners, who still had at least 10 people between them and the clerk, and smiled away at the beautiful morning.

We stepped onboard the ferry around 10am and were in for the long wait before it would eventually pull away from the pier. The ferry is a three-storey beast with somewhat the standard structure of a cruiser: 2^nd class on the bottom with restrooms and a restaurant serving our onboard meal for which we had a coupon each, 1^st class above it on the middle level with its own, smaller restaurant, and the sundeck! We walked through the 2^nd class section enough to label it as a grim and hollow hall full of wooden benches and stinking of engine fuel and headed straight up on the deck to hunt for our perfect corner to camp for the trip. We tried to negotiate our way to the roof of the captain’s deck, but were unsuccessful and settled for the rear end of the deck in the end. We placed our bets for the actual departure time of the ferry: me the optimist went for 13.05, Lucas said 14.20, T guessed 15.02 and Richard played safe and realistic with his 17.00. We bought the firsts of many teas from the restaurant downstairs and sat down for a chat and Jungle Speed, yet again we had some new people to teach this great pastime to and we sure had time to pass.

Is there a bar on deck?

Surprisingly the proportion of foreigners onboard the ferry was quite high, with a big group of 50 people travelling on an overlander truck from Cairo to Cape Town, a smaller group of nine Czechs driving the same route in their own vehicles, two South African guys doing a slightly longer run from Scotland to Cape Town on their bicycles and a few other faces – a Japanese guy whose name went past me, Xiang from China and Rui from Portugal – passing through here as part of their long and comprehensive itineraries. The older generation was represented by a couple of grey guys who we saw in the restaurant in Aswan the night before and two elderly German ladies who are hard to imagine being on this ferry. And of course we had the company of the angry whitey from the queue before.

As hours passed while we waited to set sail, we learnt the meaning of this ferry to the trade between Egypt and Sudan. Merchants, mostly Sudanese, kept appearing and cramming every corridor and free corner of the deck with their goods to the extent that the open and relaxed deck suddenly seemed to serve its purpose rather as an outdoor hold, probably because the ferry lacked an actual one. Our space on deck was also drastically reduced as it was absolutely essential for the Sudanese merchant community to pile their mountains of stuff somewhere. Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be much more goods to be crammed onboard, I saw a jalaabiya-covered butt pushing its way up one of the staircases leading onto the deck, obviously pulling with it the rest of the man in the jalaabiya and seemingly something very heavy. And hop! A huge American-style fridge had just been swooped on deck with the support of a lot of swearing from the other guy who had been pushing it at the lower end of the staircase.

Our sleeping space shrinks by the minute...

This surely was not the only fridge that was included in the unwritten manifest. When the chimney finally started pushing some black clouds in the air as a sign of departure at 19.20, we declared Richard as the closest guesser and decided to go downstairs to celebrate in the form of dinner. This is when we saw that the access to the restaurant was blocked – by another monster fridge! This one raised even more anger among its carriers who were stuck with the fridge in between the restaurant door, a metal cage to the side of the corridor and a pole at the mouth of the other end. The situation soon broke out into a proper row as people were trying to get through the corridor for obvious reasons, as this corridor was the only one that could be used to get inside or out on the deck. Richard somehow managed to sneak in before one of the merchants started pushing another mouthing something at him and slammed the metal door to the restaurant shut. I tried to explore our possibilities of getting inside as well but I was signaled to pull away in a less than friendly way. No dinner then? Eventually we got in as the guys recouped their strategy and somehow managed to pull the fridge out of its box and squeeze it through the metal pole end of the corridor. Unfortunately, we were too late for the chicken and macaroni we had seen being served earlier in the afternoon and had to settle for ful (Sudanese fava bean stew) and a boiled egg with bread and salad. They had started serving the breakfast meal already at this point. Mental note: the chicken comes before the egg.

Dinner was followed by the Sudanese immigration procedures which weirdly enough included taking everyone’s temperature. All of us cool northern visitors at least seemed to be dangerously low at 34,5 °C - a detail to which no one seemed to mind at all. Another one of those that are not even worth questioning, just go with the flow. Shortly after this we tucked into our sleeping bags under the bright white stars and the black smoke flying straight onto us from the chimney in front of us. As I lay awake with my iPod and covered in my eye mask and pashmina protecting me from breathing in a deathly amount of this black poison, I thought back to the old Finnish women’s magazine I had seen at the Finnish embassy in Cairo with the hilariously Finnish reportage on some unemployed woman who becomes a janitor in Korso, I suddenly felt that I was in fact made for these kinds of moments.

A classic for those of you who understand Finnish, both the language and the culture.

Spacefiller day

31^th October 2009-1^st November – Days 33-34 – Cairo and Aswan, Egypt

Getting back from Dahab at 6.30 in the morning, we had 14 hours before the night train to Aswan. Once again, our only mission for the day was successfully pulled off. Not only did we get the tickets for the ferry to Wadi Halfa, but we also jumped the queue to get them. Positioning ourselves at the back of the queue to the ticket window, we were spotted by a man a few places in front of us who called us over, opened the door to the office and waved us in, where we were served before the masses who had been waiting at the window for quite a bit longer than us. The feeling of slight awkwardness was far overshadowed by the happiness of finally getting everything we needed to head to Sudan, and we celebrated with a long day of (wait for it…) tea, backgammon and the odd beer, eventually heading back to the Dahab Hostel for the last time to pick up our bags, say goodbye to Daniel and Megan, and sneak into the shower. The train to Aswan held the entire population of Cairo in it and moving from wagon to wagon searching for seats involved heavy planning to avoid stepping on the people crammed into every little space, but somehow we managed to find 2 empty seats (probably the only ones on the whole train) and fell asleep quickly. Sudan, here we come!!!

The question of what to do all day in Aswan was well answered for us by the Egyptian railway company – the 7 hour delay meant that we arrived in mid-afternoon instead of mid-morning and, after finding a place to stay, we went for the last beer for a while, and food. Richard had got stuck in Luxor but we agreed to meet up for the ferry tomorrow.

One month on the road – the analysis

It’s been a bit over a month since we left Helsinki now and we’ve had a mixture of activity and laziness but we’ve seen and done quite a lot, all things considered. So far, we have been zipping around Egypt, getting used to the new lifestyle, waiting for replies from 1% Fund projects and our Sudanese visa application for the trip to really begin. Our route has been mainly determined by a process of joining the dots between various projects sponsored by the 1% Fund. Before we went the question had come up of how we’d fare together – back in Helsinki we’d have gone our own ways to work, seen friends and so forth. On this trip, we’ve been attached to each other pretty much the whole time. I’ve always thought that a long trip like this is the ultimate test for a relationship – without total communication and understanding there would undoubtedly be disaster and any faults, exposed 24/7 instead of bit by bit and under more intense circumstances, could cause much bigger rifts than they would do at home.

The first month, all in all, has been our easy start. After 3 weeks in Sudan we will enter Ethiopia and the hunt for the first project sponsored by the 1% Fund will begin.

The 1% Fund, our raison d’être in many places across Eastern and Central Africa over the next year, is an NGO run by retired UN workers to which those who sign up give 1% of their salary, used to finance development projects across the world. I visited the organisers in Geneva in August to finalise the details of what M and I would do for them, and we have a list of several dozen projects financed over the last five years to visit, look at, talk about with local people and prepare a report to send back to Geneva. The reports in turn would be put into the projects’ dossiers and would be used when considering other projects from the same local NGOs. A totally non-profit organization in which no-one receives a salary, it’s a very worthy NGO which, as we will hopefully see, makes a difference in small communities across the world and for which we are very happy to give our time and efforts. Our first projects may be in Ethiopia if we can make contact with them, although we are definitely going to visit some in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo amongst others.

Awards so far :

T’s “Natural Selection” Award for mass reproduction goes to Egyptian cats. They’re everywhere and, quite honestly, if they can survive the Cairo traffic, they deserve all the awards they can get.

T’s “Questionable Interior Design” Award goes to the United Arab Emirates for uniformly placing its toilet roll holders in such a bizarre position near the floor of the wall behind the toilet that it’s impossible to reach, unless you’re Nadia Comaneci or some breed of snake.

T’s “Ridiculous Amounts of Food Served” Award goes jointly to every Indian Restaurant in Oman for serving the entire annual rice consumption of Equatorial Guinea with every meal.

T’s “Nice Story” Award goes to the guy who runs the minimarket across the road from the Shams restaurant in Dahab for trying to sell me a packet of cigarettes for twice the going price on the basis that all other L&M packs in Egypt were fakes and therefore cheaper. This was done with a completely straight face.

And finally, T’s Lookalike Award is deservedly given to Mohammed from the Boomerang Hostel in Luxor who, I believe, is actually Yannick Noah.

M’s Persistence award goes jointly to all Omani taxi drivers for whom “no” is not an acceptable answer. A refusal is generally met by a bemused look, and they will drive 10 metres to catch up with you and ask again. “Where are you going ?” – “We’re walking” – “Walking?!” – “Yes”

M’s “Dude Where’s My Board” award goes to an American guy from Dahab Hostel who backed up his floppy blond hair and bandanna by being totally incapable of finishing any sentence without including the words “weed” or “waves”. The runner up prize in this category goes to the Australian guy who declared that he didn’t like Aswan because “the drug culture isn’t a patch on Thailand’s”. A worthy reason to travel halfway around the world if ever there was one.

A whole lotta nothin'

29^th-30^th October 2009 – Days 31-32 – Dahab, Egypt

We went to Dahab with one main objective – do as little as possible. This was not only achieved, but achieved with flying colours! After an increasingly typical desperate dash for Cairo’s Turgoman bus station and a night bus in which I was woken up five times to show my passport and the driver got into a show of strength with an articulated truck (which, thankfully, nobody won) we pulled up in Dahab and headed straight for BishBishi, the place Richard had recommended to us. “Check in is at 12” they told us, “so your room is not yet ready. You can go to our restaurant on the beach to chill out for a bit if you want”. The expression “chill out” was one that seemingly everyone in the Dahab hospitality business knew and we soon learnt why. We hardly left “the place on the beach” for the entire two days and instead entertained ourselves with endless cups of tea, endless games of backgammon, and a few beers to boot. The first night saw a valiant attempt to do something else as we went to eat next door (and after my 6 hour nap in the restaurant, it seemed appropriate). M went one better and dragged herself several minutes back to BishBishi for a shower, although dragged herself right back after for more tea and backgammon. The following morning saw us greeted like old friends by the staff and we were then given a hearty goodbye and best wishes. A great and friendly place to “chill out”.

"Get the jumper cables, coffee isn't helping!'

Are we getting slightly too old and comfortable...?

Richard has headed to Aswan already and we’ve arranged to meet him on Sunday. Between then and now we have to get our ferry tickets from Cairo on arrival tomorrow morning, pick up our bags from Daniel and Megan and finally say goodbye to Dahab Hostel, and then get ourselves onto a night train to Aswan without any glitches in the plan. It should be fine, inch’allah, and we embark on the long road to Sudan.