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…
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.
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