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.