The Inshallah Express
Trip Start
Apr 08, 2003
1
13
14
Trip End
Aug 2003
Cairo,
Egypt
Saturday, August 23, 2003
In early August there was a serious bus crash here in Egypt. Steve, who, with Mike and Rob, travelled with me from Addis Ababa to Khartoum, was severely injured.
On the 8th of August he passed away.
So, please say a prayer and raise a beer to Steve Erdmann, 31 years old, engineer from the USA, great guy, loyal friend and brother traveller.
We'll miss you, buddy.
..seems a little frivolous to write anything after that preamble
Bilbo Byron the Hobbit and a smiling Midhat
. Will try though, its the last leg of the journey. Need to connect the dots... It was definately time to leave Khartoum.
I'd had a great time in the city. My Egyptian visa was ticking though and the crazy fundamentalists at my hotel were starting to freak me out. Their nightly convert-Nik-to-Islam sessions had gone from surreally quirky to downright annoying.
When the local Imam was brought in on the last night to preach an hour long fire and brimstone session to me, I knew I was doing to right thing getting the hell out of the city first thing the next morning.
My Iraqi mates at the hotel were great. They stuck up for me and were highly embarrassed about the whole thing when the zealots finally left us in peace.
"Islam is not like this. These people, they change it. They make it hard for their own reasons," said Mahmud apologetically
Guest at a wedding in Khartoum
.Several other guests at the hotel who had heard what was going on came in during the course of the evening to apologise. It reminded me what good people the Sudanese were and how it was a small fanatical minority that was doing so much damage politically, economically and culturally to their country.
I nearly didn't make it out of Khartoum as planned the next morning. I slept through my alarm clock and it was a complete mad dash down to the station to get away in time.
I was heading north to Karima, a small village on the Nile situated near where the capital of Ancient Kush existed long ago.
Kush was a society in perpetual conflict with Pharoanic Egypt over military and economic dominance of North-east africa. Over the course of hundreds of years the tide drifted north and south, with the Egyptians sometimes sacking Kushite cities, and other times the Kushites ruling Egypt for short amounts of time.
The journey was in a UNIMOG, a Mercedes 4WD truck, and possibly the most modern public transport vehicle I'd been in Africa
More guests at the wedding
. The key indicator of this was the fact that the speedo actually worked. We drove out of the dispirited ruins of outer Omdurman and along the edge of the Kerreri Hills, a line of black jebels sitting above the city like an iron portcullis.
It was from these hills that the Lord Kitchener launched the attack which became the Battle of Omdurman. This battle finally destroyed the Dervish Empire, killed the Kalifa and brought Sudan back under British colonial rule for another 50 years ending in 1957.
After continuing north for 3 hours the driver turned off the road and into the desert. Our path was only defined by the tyre tracks of the previous day's traffic and the speedo never dipped under 60km/ph as we zoomed over sand dunes and along thorn-covered wadis.
We crossed the Nile on an rusty, overloaded pontoon and arrived in Karima.
At the edge of town crouched the forbidding shape of Jebel Barkal, a sheer edged volcanic relic, remeniscent of a sleeping lion, striped by tawny sand dunes drifting down its western edge
Sudanese women in their finest
. Barkal was one of the most holy religious sites to the Kushites and Egyptians. It was within its core that the god Amun resided and for a millenia was where the Kushites crowned their kings, at the feet of their most powerful god.
Behind the mountain, facing the Nile with their backs to the desert, were a line of small pyramids in the steep style of the ones I'd seen at Meroe earlier in my journey through Sudan.
I checked into a scummy little lokonda and rested for the afternoon.
The temperatures in this area during summer routinely top 50 degrees celcius. You need to start out at 6am if you're going anywhere to avoid the heat as long as possible and to carry lots and lots of water.
The water poses a problem itself.
Karima's water supply comes directly from the Nile. At the moment the Nile is filthy due to the mud being washed down from Ethiopia and Uganda with the rains. When I turned on the tap to fill my water bottles the water coming out was thick, brown ooze.
I've been drinking the water local water all over Sudan but didn't want to risk drinking this mud so pulled out my water filter.
An hour and a half later I'd finished pumping 4 liters of water and was exhausted. The crystal clear liquid in my bottles was almost unrecognisable compared to its source.
The day wasn't complete yet.
Compared to Ethiopia, Sudan had so far been relatively light on creepy crawlies. In fact it had been saving them up for my visit to Karima.
In the evening I visited the toilet (concrete room with hole in floor) and discovered something out of Naked Lunch.
Hordes of giant blood-red cockroaches swarmed over the floor and walls in their hundreds, laciviously searching for a fecal dinner. I had to keep sweeping the floor with my torchlight to keep them at bay. As soon as the light passed the little critters would scurry forward to get at the latrine buffet.
It was all a bit traumatic.
I headed out early the next morning to Jebel Barkal and was rewarded with a spectacular view from the top after a short, fun scramble up the rocky escarpment on its eastern side.
I walked around the plateau taking in the vistas of the hazy desert, winding Nile, verdent palms and black jebels streching out across the horizon.
Later, while looking around the cluster of pyramids nearby, I was lucky enough to spot a large desert fox making a dash for it across the dunes.
I felt honoured to see a wild animal in Sudan. Most of them have been killed due to an aggressive population and the ongoing Civil War. When Thessiger was in Western Sudan in the early part of the 20th century he was shooting 50 lions a year. Now there is probably only a couple of dozen left in the whole country.
Heading back towards the river, I followed the Nile through beautiful little plots of date palms surrounded by mud irrigation walls and tussock grass.
As I reached Karima I found the derelict shells of some old British river boats. Lying ruined and slowly sinking into the river, they're a testament to how the succesive military goverments in Sudan have let a relatively modern colonial infrastructure in the 1950s decay into nothingness in their pursuit of war and power.
The next day I headed out to Nuri, the site of an ancient Kushite cemetery. It holds a cluster of dilapidated pyramids including that of King Taharqa, who ruled both Kush and Egypt and finally lost his northern kingdom to the invading Assyrians.
Getting there was pretty easy. I caught an old Chevy van out to the pontoon, crossed the Nile and then jumped aboard a boksi (Toyota Hilux) heading up the Nile to Nuri.
The pyramids there are more like the Egyptian style ones, less steep and with larger bases. They are in a bad state of repair with many of them slowly crumbling into the sand dunes around them.
The other main historical site in the area is another cemetery called El Kurru.
Unfortunately the weather is greater than man's intentions.
During the night there was a cloudburst and the town was completely flooded.
It had been threatening to rain since the evening. Lying there staring at the stars (you sleep outside in the north, its too hot in your room), the air electric, crickets chirruping, frogs croaking, bats chittering as their ultrasonic soundings occasionally dropped into the audible human range. Blasts of lightning illuminating the sky in bruises of pink and blue, wind and thunder rolling across the sky.
At 2am it finally gave and a torrent sent everyone in the hotel scrambling for shelter like cockroaches when the toilet light is turned on.
The result was, when I went down to the bus station the next morning, that the roads were impassable and I was not going to Kurru or anywhere else until the next day.
From Karima it was time to move onto Dongola, further to the north.
I wandered down to the boksi office to wait for the ute to fill up and leave.
I walked in and was very surprised to see another hawagga sitting there reading a book.
He was Chris from Austria and was also heading north to Dongola.
"There will be no boks today but my friend is going to Dongola," said Hamid, the owner of the boksi office.
We piled into the back of the Hilux. No seats or cushions, just the plain metal back of the ute.
We sped out of town, fast. Real fast. The driver was a complete loony without any regard for the safety of the passengers in the car.
Don't think we were going along a road. We were doing over 110km/ph over sand and rocks through completely empty desert. The nearest road was about 150kms away to the west - I hadn't seen asphalt for 4 days. If you get stuck here, your only hope is that someone else will come past in the next day or two. Otherwise...
In between enjoying the emptiness around us and hunkering under the blow dryer wind in front of us, we were having our arses bruised and battered two shades of blue and three of black.
After an hour or so we hit a bad series of bumps.
All I remember is holding on to the edge of boks with my left arm for sweet dear life while I was beaten and smashed against the metal floor of the boks as it dropped and rose viciously with 100km/ph force.
"Woah, woah, woah!" bellowed Chris as jerry cans, date palms and almost us, flew off the back of the boksi into the desert.
The car slowed, stopped. I lay there dazed feeling like I'd been beaten with a baseball bat.
My arm hurt.
I turned it around and saw a tennis ball sized bump halfway down my forearm. First thought: broken. Oh shit!
But it wasn't. Just badly bruised.
We tied a compression on it and carried on.
When we finally rolled in El Selim, the little village across the Nile from Dongola, we were both eternally grateful to have survived the journey with only a busted arm.
We checked into a great little hotel in Dongola and slumped onto our beds exhausted.
Later we bumped into a Dutch couple, Loraine and Edwin, who I'd met in Khartoum. They were heading back to Khartoum then north again to Wadi Halfa where we were sure we'd bump into each other again.
I spent the next day resting. I felt like I'd just played a rugby match and ached from head to little toes. Fortunately the swelling on my arm was slowly receding.
The rest of the time in Dongola was spent sweating, listening to music, reading and failing to find an ancient temple in the nearby desert (worth the walk though, strolling through beautiful nothingness desert in bare feet because my sandals were irritating an infected wound on my foot from the Nuba mountains).
I'd planned to go from Dongola to Kerma then to Abri, both small towns on the Nile with historical sites nearby.
But I hadn't counted on the inshallah (Arabic: "God willing") nature of the transport in the north of Sudan.
There's no roads and buses or boksi only go when there's enough demand. Chris had been stuck in Atbara a week waiting for a boksi to Karima because of this.
It was 400kms to Wadi Halfa, our goal. From there we would catch the ferry across the Nubian Lake/ Lake Nasser to Egypt on the 13th of August. We'd been told it takes 24 hours from Dongola to Halfa.
"400kms takes 24 hours?" I thought, "Surely not. You could do it in 4 if they drive the same speed as the guy from Karima to here."
3 days later we arrived.
We started out by waiting for a boksi to go from Dongola. Jamal, the Barry White-esque manager at the hotel had a friend who was heading to Abri and got us on board. He told us to be ready to go at 11am.
We finally left Dongola at 2:30pm after the passengers had finished their afternoon prayers.
We didn't get far. The line at the pontoon waiting to cross the Nile was hectic. We waited for an hour in the sun and dust with buses, boksi, sheep and fighting bulls.
Once over the river, we set out at a more sedate speed than the last ride. We were 10 in the back of a covered boks. I was near the cab and so could peek out through the welded metal bars to enjoy the view.
The sand track took us through thorny scrub, mud walled villages and Nile green date palms.
It was about 4 hours to Kerma. It looked like a nice town and would've been nice to stay in for a while.
Unfortunately our short stop there was ruined by a young zealot who decided to come and rant to me that George Bush is Hitler.
I'm no fan of American foreign policy but this mindless regurgitation of anti-Western, anti-semetic government propaganda really pisses me off. They revile the West, especially America, for this and that, but quite happily except food aid with USAid stamped on the side and crowd around a TV when a Britney Spears video comes on.
But before I get carried away jabbering on about the war of ideas currently being waged in Sudan between the conservative fundamentalist government and the Western mass media, I'll get back to the story...
..After Kerma the real desert began.
The village opened out into flat rocky sand. Brooding black jebels loomed out of the wastes towards us. As we picked our way through the rocks the arterial red Sahara sand in the atmosphere cast a diaphanous ruby veil over the sky and over the desert below.
It looked more like Mars than Earth.
The evening wrapped the air around us in an ethereal blue shroud. As we passed through small villages, the Nubian houses stood out against the horizon, seemingly impenetrable behind high mud walls.
We passed through the driver's home town and stopped shortly for a cup of tea.
Chris has just finished his masters in Astronomy and spent some time showing me a few constellations. The near full moon obscured most of the sky with its opal glow. Scorpio was clear though and later the planet Mars rose fiery in the east.
After the passengers had prayed we continued into the town proper. A mosque was lit up in neon sterility and a phalanx of men in white prayed in regimented unison.
The car stopped again to let the passengers pray (again). We sat there talking in the dark, ignoring the throng of bored teenagers who found us more interesting than their devotional duties. It was a surreal atmosphere.
At 12:30 we stopped in the small village of Koyamato.
Exhausted we slumped into some plastic mats on the side of the road. Sleep came easy and eventually the dawn woke us to the delicate half-light of a desert morning.
A local villager brought out shai laban (Arabic: "milk tea") for everyone. Sated, we continued and 3 hours later arrived in the small Nile-side hamlet of Abri.
Unfortunately, we were cornered by a similar young bigot to the one who spoiled my impressions of Kerma.
He invited us to his house. We reluctantly agreed due to the fragile state of my bowels (yes, I was sick again).
We spent the afternoon debunking his propaganda created preconceptions of life in the West and pointed out especially that a lack of male circumcision doesn't effect a man's sexual ability one bit unlike what he'd been taught at school.
He wanted us to stay but we both wanted to get out of there. Chris gave me a handful of immodium pills and I feigned magically being well again.
Despite his protests we walked down to the town and discovered that he'd lied to us about when our ride to Halfa went so we'd miss it. Luckily we didn't and we were glad to leave the young bigot behind to his blinkered ignorance and hospitality-with-an-agenda.
Its a shame that these random idiots were ruining our impression of the Sudanese. I bet that if most of the local guys sitting around drinking tea knew English and understood what was going on they would have taken him out the back of the souq and beaten the crap out of him. Inshallah.
Our next ride was a proper lorry. No seats, just an empty rear cargo compartment.
Heads to the wind we traced the Nile's path north. The landscape was stunning; sharp jebels, arching dunes, falling light glimmering on the river surface, emerald leaves around it.
We stopped in a village about 20kms out of Abri.
The lorry disappeared to be filled up with charcoal sacks. Chris and I wandered down to the Nile to take photos. The sun was setting and the light was perfect. Unfortunately a beautiful young woman filling up water bottles from the river was too shy to be photographed.
We left the river and climbed a small rocky outcrop nearby. There we watched the sun plunge like Icarus into an ocean of soft red dust.
The truck returned and we precariously balanced ourselves on the sharp edged sacks. Before long my face was as black as a Welsh coal miner's. I wish I had a photo to attach to show you. It must have looked hilarious.
We raced through the ghostly desert hills, throats choked with dust and eyes stinging.
At midnight we stopped. We'd been going 6 hours.
We laid out our sleep sheets on the sand at the edge of the track. The stop was busy, maybe with three other trucks clogging the roadside. Crackling radios hummed, men snored, goats cried like tortured small children.
I had trouble sleeping. I was lucid and languid from the muscle straining ride and still angry at the young bigot. Wide awake I lay and brooded under the stars.
Later, I realised I was dreaming when evil, blind, bearded gnomes began crawling out of the sand and killing all the sleeping people. I was running around kicking and punching the close-lidded incubi, desperately trying to save the people when I woke to find the air quiet, the slumbering unharmed and the goats still mewling pathetically.
I am very thankful that I have now finished my crazy malaria medicine. So far no more frightening Larium nightmares. I suppose at least I didn't get malaria (yet) so it was worth a few broken nights sleep.
Everyone stirred early. I dozed for a while and was suddenly jarred wide awake by something climbing into the collar of my shirt. I jumped and the black shape flew into the air and scuttled away into the sand.
I'd just come bloody close to getting stung by a big scorpion. Luckily he was even more keen to get away from me as I was to have him out of my shirt.
By 6am we were on the road. We'd swapped our uncomfortable reclining positions with the lazy lorry boys and sat perched on the cab of the truck.
The desert was revealed in rose and gold in front of us. The sun climbed slowly, sending creepers of hazy light across the horizon, stretching long shadows along the stone pitted sand dunes.
After three hours the tones of the desert were sharply broken by sapphire water and green lines of fertility.
Before long we arrived in Wadi Halfa.
It had been a fantastic journey and Chris and I stumbled into the decaying chaos of the worst hotel in Sudan to rest up until the ferry went. Seems like they've never heard of this crazy concept called a "toilet door" in Wadi Halfa.
We lazed around the empty dustbowl town. Chris likened it to a bald man's head, covered only by the odd hair and swollen pimple.
Later we bumped into a Sudanese guy named Hasan and a Canadian girl named Emmy. Hasan invited us to his house where his cousin had just celebrated his wedding.
It was a welcome final dose of amazing Sudanese hospitality. We'd eaten only one meal of fuul (beans) each day for the past three days so it was great to gorge ourselves on an amazing array of leftover wedding food.
I think I ate 5 dinners before finally falling asleep in the front yard of the house in the early hours of the morning.
The next morning we bumped into Loraine and Edwin again. It was a restless day of doing immigration paper work and getting out to the port.
I was happy but a little sad to be leaving Sudan. Thoughts of a cold beer were paramount in my mind as we pulled away from the rusted pontoon moored to a couple of rocks which passes as the main port for Lake Nasser in Sudan (more important for the government to buy guns and helicopters for the war than to build a proper port or even a road which connects it to the town).
The boat ride was a long 18 hours punctuated by a picnic on deck, overpriced softdrinks in lieu of beer for a little longer and evening prayers which threatened to capsize the boat as everyone came up onto deck to do them.
I'll miss Sudan. Its an amazing country with so much to see and experience. The people are amazing and are so cursed to be saddled with such a destructive government who are squandering their amazing oil and agricultural resources in their pursuit of an ideologically motivated genocidal war against the peoples of South (and now West and East) Sudan.
Maybe one day there will be peace. I can't see it happening while Omar el-Bashir is still in power though.
We arrived in Egypt to be greeted with the typical Egyptian need to make even the most simple things incredibly difficult and time consuming.
I was glad when we finally pulled up outside the Noorhan Hotel in Aswan.
The first ice cold beer hit my stomach with a click. Fantastic stuff!
The euphoria of arrival soon wore off though. The streets were jammed with fat, skimpily dressed Western tourists and aggressive Egyptian salesmen. Within 6 hours of arriving I was wishing I was back in Sudan.
It was here I learned about Steve's accident. It made me even less forgiving to the parasitical display of soul-sucking mass tourism being displayed on the jaded streets of Aswan.
We organised to go up to Abu Simbel, a large temple to the north of Aswan with the hotel. There's no public transport so you either get a minibus from the hotel or charter a taxi.
I'd missed Abu Simbel last time I was here due to EgyptAir screwing up my booking and was one of the reasons I'd returned to Egypt. For a historical nut like myself, it was one of the top things to see in the country.
At 3am the next morning we were up and being herded around like cattle to the minivans. It stopped at hotel after hotel, filling up with loud Europeans wearing sleeveless shirts and tiny shorts in complete cultural ignorance of the standards of a muslim country. It was embarrassing to be a hawagga.
About 3kms out of the center of town we stopped at a police checkpoint and joined a convoy of 20 aircon tour buses.
The whole time I'd been getting more and more angry and frustrated. It was a far cry from walking across the wind swept desert plains of Sudan with Steve, Mike and Rob towards the lonely grandeur of the Meroe Royal Cemetery.
Finally, I got out of the minibus, apologised to the others and walked back to town.
I decided I wanted no part in modern Egypt prostituting its amazing history for cash. When the paintings are gone due to camera flashes and the sandstone and marble edifaces eroding rapidly due to the bus choked road next to a 3000 year old temple then maybe the Egyptians will realise that these things are treasures to humanity and not an amusement park to make as much money out of as possible.
Ironically at 4:30am I still had Egyptian taxi drivers stop and ask: "Yes, mister! Want to see Philae temple, High dam, obelisk? Good price for you!"
I ran away from Aswan as soon as I could.
I hid in Alexandria, my favourite city in Egypt because hardly any Westerners come here, for four days.
And today I arrived back in Cairo with its all night traffic jams, great street food and delightfully scummy bars.
Then after here...?
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