Every One Man Has 40 Faces
Trip Start
Apr 08, 2003
1
12
14
Trip End
Aug 2003
Khartoum,
Sudan
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
"Kadugli? Where's that?"
"The Nuba Mountains," said Midhat.
If you do any research on tourism in Sudan on the internet Midhat's name will pop up. He works for a private tour operator but is the most effective information source in the whole country.
I'd been kicking back in Khartoum for a week after Steve left for Egypt and finally was getting around to travel permits for my next jaunt out to the west of Sudan.
My time had been spent hanging out with Tony, an English volunteer teacher, wandering aimlessly around town and getting sucked into the strange social undercurrents of Khartoum.
Tony and I also visited the British Embassy for a bit of thursday night fun.
Every thursday night the embassy runs a bar for expats called "The Pickwick Club". You can ring up, get put on the list, turn up and have a surreal 5 hour return to Britain.
The regulars have a pretty tight clique but the beer is cold and where else can you drink a pint of Guiness in extremely dry Sudan.
We stood in the games room playing pool badly and sipping our beers.
Standing there with a cold pint glass in my hand, a pool cue leaning on my shoulder while the click clack of ricocheting billiard balls bounced around the room, drew me through a portal of perception straight back to a pub in downtown Swansea.
That was until we were reminded we were actually still in Africa by a male gecko who started clicking loudly and chasing a small female around the ceiling and trying to copulate with little success.
"Just like England except it would university students," said Tony wryly.
Tony's teaching stint at one of the universities in Khartoum was over and he left to go back to London. I told myself not to be lazy and coincided my departure for the same morning.
The evening before as we crossed the road outside Tony's flat we saw a man get run down by a Toyota Hilux.
I scribbled down a few notes on the bus later: "bouncing smash ragdoll - flailing shifting metal, attempt to get up, fall down, torn shirt, carried to car, legs flopping, crowd around, momentary horror, too hurried to watch, must keep walking."
It amazes me how nonchalant I've become to human suffering in Africa. I think after a while your brain starts blocking it out.
I was up early the next morning and, within a few hours, on a bus heading south to Kosti after which the road would turn west towards El Obeid.
The rainy season was in full flow here and it was raining hard over the flat desert plain. Pools of standing water were soon replaced by grass sitting like an ill-fitting carpet over the yellow and ochre sand.
After 8 hours we arrived at our destination.
El Obeid is a pleasant town. Sand lined streets, framed by walled compounds brimming with green plant life, were laid out on a roughly grid like pattern of tarmac main roads intersected by sand alleyways.
I was off the hardly beaten Sudan tourist trail now. I'd been warned that the security services would want to talk to me everywhere I went.
Within minutes of getting off the bus I had a curious crowd of 20 people around me. Eventually a big fat guy in a white galabiya and a turban yelled me over.
He was sitting down drinking tea, his glass resting on his rotund belly. He yelled every word in a deep thunderous tone. Immediately everyone backed off when I approached him.
I'd found the Don of El Obeid bus station.
He put me in his friend's truck and we drove off to find a hotel. They wanted a letter from internal security so we drove to security.
Security was down a completely random sidestreet away from the center of town, in a signless building manned by a guy in civilian clothes. Just as you'd expect in Sudan.
He gave me a bit of paper torn out of a cheap exercise book with Arabic scrawled on it in exchange for my document photocopies. He also told me to come back tomorrow morning.
At 8am the next morning I returned to security. The room was full of apparatchiks in civvies lounging around wasting time.
They questioned me for 15 minutes, took down my details and let me go.
After breakfast and a wander around the large souq (market) in the middle of town to people watch I struck off in an arbitary direction for a walk.
A guy in plain clothes (of course) on a motorbike stopped me.
It seems that when you arrive in a town in Sudan there are two different services who want your undivided attention. The first, who I'd already dealt with, was internal security. The second, who I had know ran into, was immigration (really the Alien's Registration section of the Ministry of the Interior - Orwell would love this place).
I jumped on the back of his motorbike and we drove off towards his office. We passed a large hotel in town.
"Are you staying here?"
"No, but its near."
We continued until we past the street my dirty little lokonda (cheap hostel-like hotel here) was on.
"This one?"
"Yeah."
"I thought so. Someone staying there rang me yesterday to say a hawagga had arrived." Hawagga is the Sudanese version of faranji - it means "white man".
I was getting a bit paranoid. Informers and security men in plain clothes picking me up off the street. It seems all the stuff you hear about military dictatorships I was seeing in full colour. It was all a bit KGB.
Abdelbagi, my apprehender, took me to a big government complex on the edge of town. A Sudanese flag fluttered atop a large colonial style building. Policemen in sky blue uniforms walked around not doing much, Orwellian eye imposed on an upheld palm symbols attached to their sleeves.
So it was another 30 minutes of sitting, having my details recorded, another set of photocopies taken off me, a few questions fired at me and getting shown the door with a hearty handshake and insincere "thank you" from both them and me.
The rest of the time in El Obeid was nice and uneventful. I walked around, talked to people, read and visited a large Catholic cathedral in the middle of town.
The church was a nice, quiet, empty place to relax. Two tall minarets of the brand new monolithic, even bigger than the cathedral, mosque across the road could be seen over the edge of the compound wall. A bit of religious penis envy I think.
The next morning I was on the move again.
I got a lorry (an old flat-bed truck with metal seats and a roof welded onto it) from the bus station out of town and we headed almost due south towards the Nuba Mountains.
The journey was a gradual 8 hour return to real sub-Saharan Africa.
The Nuba Mountains are sometimes described as an island of African culture and ethnicity in an increasingly Arabized north and middle Sudan.
The Nuba people are famous for their traditions of wearing no clothes, wrestling and body scarring. Leni Riefenstahl, the woman who made propaganda films for Hitler, photographed the tribal peoples in Nuba area before the civil war really effected that region (for photos: http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/eng/nuba.html). Since then the government has made a concerted effort to eradicate their local traditions.
There has been fierce fighting between the government and the SPLA (Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army) in the past but in 2001 a ceasefire agreement was signed. The uneasy peace is monitored by JMC (Joint Military Command), an independant organisation formed mainly by the Americans when the Sudanese government had an aneurysm over the UN running the ceasefire.
As we headed south the vast desert plains of El Obeid gradually gave away to a wide tree scattered savannah. In the distance the bruise black shadows of the hills of Nuba drifted along the horizon. Little groups of huts began appearing with mud worked walls and pointed straw rooves, very much like Ethiopia.
The vista was something out of King Solomon's mines.
The sense of an idyllic African paradise was shattered occasionally, by a burnt out tank, the remains of a blown up bridge, a line of camouflage trousers hanging out to dry along a fence, an abandoned house scarred by a montage of bullet holes, languid soldiers sitting around bored with their AK-47s never far away.
At the edge of my destination, Kadugli, internal security finally realised there was a hawagga on the local bus and I was taken off. It was the usual routine: copies of documents taken, my details recorded, a couple of questions asked. By this stage you may have also guessed that I carry an absolute shitload of photocopies of my passport, visas, travel permits, photo permits, etc, etc.
An apparatchik was put on the bus with me and we carried on. I felt bad as everyone had to wait 20 minutes while I was interrogated. But then I remembered Mike's story about how the police in Tajikstan kept a bus he was on waiting for 3 hours while they questioned him and didn't feel too bad anymore.
In town I grabbed my bags off the top of the lorry and followed my minder, Hakim, to security. At least there was a sign in Arabic this time.
They sat me down for half an hour before telling me to come back in the morning. Hakim showed me to a cheap lokonda and said he would pass by in the morning to pick me up. All the while he was asking me questions about why I was there, where was I going, where had I been. Despite being a security stooge he was a pretty nice guy.
He was late in the morning and we walked over to security.
While the security chief questioned me, a white landcruiser came flying across the brown mud football field adjoining the office.
It came to a stop and a surprised looking hawagga got out of the passenger seat.
"You're from New Zealand?," he said. I was wearing my battered All Black jumper.
"Yeah."
"Me too. So what are you doing here."
His name was Graeme and he was working with UNMAS (United Nations Mine Action Service) in the area and were based in the JMC compound just out of town.
We agreed to meet later and the landcruiser zoomed off. The security chief didn't look happy but an hour later they let me go.
Next stop: immigration. Another hour of questioning before letting me go.
"I will show you where you can buy a ticket to Khartoum because you do not know your way around town," said Hakim as we walked up towards the main square. It was a bit of a "nudge, nudge, take the bloody hint to bugger off will you!"
Once all the bureaucracy was dealt with I was free to walk around. I liked the look of some rocky jebels (mountains) to the north-west of town so struck out for them.
After walking for an hour I came across a local farmer carrying a hoe. I got across that I was going to climb the hill above us and they showed me the best way. They left me at a small field where a couple of other farmers where busy tilling away.
An hour later on the way back down the hill I bumped into them again.
About 10 villagers, men and women, were working away in the communal field. Some of the guys had their shirts off. They had traditional Nuba scarring, ridges of patterned scar tissue forming rows of lines and circles on their arms and chests.
It was very impressive. Its just a shame they have to wear shirts now and hardly anyone gets to see them.
They sat me down and gave me some water (oh-oh) and some traditionally brewed beer (big oh-oh - yep, its the same stuff that gave me Typhoid in Ethiopia). It was too impolite to refuse despite the danger and I gulped down a few mouthfuls.
I bade them farewell and headed back into town.
It was a great walk and was so glad I had made the effort to get there. The people were so unsullied by tourism. I'd found there some of the traditional Africa I had failed to find in Ethiopia. Not a single person held their hand out for money or shouted out "fuck you, white devil". They even asked me to take photos of them instead of me having to negotiate a fee before shooting.
Its just tragic that the reason they aren't assholes to tourists is because their home has been a warzone for the last 20 years.
That evening I met with Graeme and met the other 2 UNMAS guys in Nuba: Dave, another Kiwi, and Rikhard, a Swede. Graeme and Dave explained that no UN outfit is complete without a complementary Scandinavian.
They took me out to the JMC compound and explained about their work in the area.
The mine clearing they need to do is not extensive but very scattershot. Neither side in the war has kept records of where the mines were placed and so they have a real task to track them all down. Not many were laid but no one knows where the hell they are. They estimate it will take a couple of years to clear all the roads and civilian areas in the Nuba Mountains.
They also showed me on a map where I could walk without any problems. I was 17km from SPLA territory so it would be unlucky if I wandered onto their patch and was taken hostage. They recommended a nice walk out to the Merri Hills to the west of Kadugli where a small JMC post was based.
I got up early in the morning to try and avoid the midday heat and headed out along a path to the west.
I got lost in a village on the edge of Kadugli and eventually someone showed me the way to the main path. After that I followed the line of the hills for about 10kms until after a couple of hours I stumbled onto the JMC Sector IV post.
The little military observation base is placed on a hill in the middle of nowhere. To the north is an incredible view of the plains and south and west is closed by rocky hills.
All it needed was a full bar manned by a guy in a Hawaian shirt and it could've been the perfect African eco-resort.
The 2 observers there, a retired US Airborne officer and a Swedish army officer, gave me some more info on the situation in the area. They also introduced me to representatives from the Government forces and from the SPLA. Every JMC post had representatives from both sides of the conflict.
They explained that the bustling little village I'd walked through on the way to the post had been empty a year ago. It had been abandoned when heavy fighting raged through the area (as testified to by the amount of empty Kalishnikov bullet casings scattered around the area).
Only since the JMC had been there had people slowly creapt back to their homes. They explained about how there was over 100,000 refugees waiting in Khartoum to come home.
They also found it frustrating that WFP (World Food Programme) had to bring in food for the villagers away from the main population areas. The land there is incredibly fertile but most of the farmland lies dormant. Only now, as the villagers begin to rebuild their lives, are fields being planted and the cycle of life is becoming normal again.
A fantastic testament to work the military observers are doing is shown by the reaction of a lot of the kids in the area as I walked back.
I approached Kadugli by the main road I'd strayed off on the way out. There was much more people around and household after household came out as I passed. They'd stand at their doors and wave and shout "JMC, JMC!" happily, assuming because I was a hawagga I was involved with the ceasefire.
Finally I'd seen some Western intervention in Africa that was having a positive effect. It was a far cry from the food aid which feeds Ethiopia so the government can spend its money on guns to fight Eritrea instead.
I met with Dave again that evening (Graeme had left for the field).
During my walk I'd considered heading south into the mountains about a kilometer or two and then walking back to town due east using my compass.
After a while I got lazy in the heat and ended up at the JMC post instead.
I explained to Dave where I walked and my initial getting lost.
"If you get lost here, what ever you do, don't climb the hills. There's stacks of anti-personal mines up there. Always stick to the paths."
Glad I'd abandoned my plan to go off-road! It wouldn't have been nice coming home from my Africa trip missing a leg or worse.
I liked Kadugli a lot and wanted to stay longer in the area. There were more places I could walk to and Dave invited my to watch the All Blacks test vs. Australia on satellite TV at JMC on the upcoming saturday. Unfortunately I only had 2 days left on my Sudanese visa and after my run-ins with security the past few days, I didn't want to give the government an excuse to kick me out (though they probably would if they saw what I've written in this post).
There was a cheap, direct bus back to Khartoum leaving the next morning. I was lazy and decided to take it instead of having to go back to El Obeid and get another one.
Big mistake.
We were supposed to leave at 9am. We finally left at 11am and it wasn't long before we broke down for the first time. And again and again the old school bus kept dying.
As night fell we'd all get out and lie down on the side of the road to sleep. I'd lie there on the sand with my head propped up on the gravel that collects on the edge of the road and just stare up at the star-filled night that stretched out for eternity above us.
It didn't help that I'd taken my Larium (malaria medicine) that morning. My sleep was filled with vivid dreams, so vivid that there was no discernible difference between sleeping and waking. I could only tell I'd been asleep when a person I'd been talking to, who wasn't in Sudan, would disappear suddenly and I'd be all alone on my seat.
At 11am the next morning we finally abandoned the bus somewhere "near" Khartoum and flagged down another on the main road.
We rolled into town at 3pm. The whole journey had taken 28 hours (as opposed to 16 total on the way there), my new longest, beating 24 in Turkey a few years ago.
Back in Khartoum, back to my crumbling, $2 a night, hotel.
Days spent getting visa extensions, travel permits, photocopies, visiting friends and listening to my Iraqi roommate's stories about getting arrested by the Iraqi secret police and being made to work as an informer and assassin before getting smuggled out of the country and into exile.
I'm off north in the next few days. Its the last leg to Egypt. Almost can't believe it.
New post when I arrive in August sometime.
PS: The lads from Ethiopia made it to Egypt OK.
Rob and Steve are currently in Alexandria. They've completed their Cape to Cairo adventure and are having a few days of well earned rest.
Mike has flown to Turkey and is heading to Ukraine by boat sometime soon.
