Wadi Halfa
Upon my first step into Sudan, which had always been the
most fear-inspiring country on my map, I have a major problem with my bike. The
chances of finding spares is laughable and they would have to be imported,
under a regime of sanctions that will
double the prices, to Khartoum which is a harsh 5 or 6 day ride from here in
Wadi Halfa. And I don’t even really know what the problem is, just an
intermittent loss of power. My instincts tell me it is a fuel problem, maybe
dirt in the system so I set about finding an injector cleaner, some hose and
fresh petrol.
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| Keeping the fluids flowing. The bedside table of an intrepid explorer, Wadi Halfa |
All this swirls in my head through the night and as I eat my
delicious
fuul &
tamiya breakfast, blearily surveying Wadi Halfa’s less
than confidence-inspiring shacks and
rutted sandtracks.
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| Wadi Halfa |
It’s all just a story, I tell myself, and stories have
endings. After a lot of asking I do
manage to find the cleaner and hose and when I ask for a 5 litre container, a
man next to me says wait here and comes back ten minutes later with one he has
fetched from his house. This starts a pattern that continues throughout my time
in Sudan. Complete strangers, with no ulterior motives, bend over backwards to
help me and refuse all offers of payment. They rightly pride themselves on their
hospitality and see a stranger as someone they are responsible for.
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| Fryin' up the tamiya, Wadi Halfa |
Petrol is however not as freely-flowing as the goodwill.
I walk to the various little petrol stations. On my way to the petrol station, I get talking to Mahmoud, a buzzy 20-year-old
geology student and his friend Omer. They are absolutely lovely and we walk
along the dusty road together in the burning heat swapping English and Arabic
idioms. At the station, there are only vague predictions of a mythical truck
that might come tomorrow or maybe the next day. Eventually my hotel owner’s
brother sells me a couple of litres he has stockpiled – enough to test the
engine at least.
After a delirious and fitful siesta, I siphon out the
petrol (always pleasant when your stomach is feeling wobbly to start with) and
run the cleaner through the engine. Gradually the engine’s hesitations smooth
out and I take the bike out for a test on the desert just out of the town and
all is zippy and happy. Maybe I got away with it..
Over a cup of warm sugary milk, I meet Tom. He is a deeply
intelligent and well-spoken Ethiopian-Yemeni. Fled the war in Yemen to a refugee camp in Djibouti in 2014. He
couldn’t stand the conditions there so he started walking. So this is
where I find him, 4 years later, after some seriously inhospitable terrain and
warzones. He speaks Yemeni, Amharic, Arabic, English and Chinese fluently. He
quizzes me about my route around the lake and talks of walking into Egypt. I
say take a lot of water and watch out for the Egyptian army who I’m pretty sure
will shoot him on sight. We talk at length about the philosophical side of
travelling. I ask him where he is
staying. He says he is like a cat and he sleeps wherever he is when he feels
tired.
Mahmoud finds me and he takes me off to climb a little
hill on the edge of town and walk another perfect sunset. From here the little
clump of humanity that is Wadi Halfa resembles a moonbase.
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| Mahmoud, Wadi Halfa |
The glow in the sky blossoms, the mosquitos put their
tray-tables into an upright position and the sides of the street fill with
clumps of men praying together like synchronized swimmers. Mahmoud, in the
office of the little import/export company he works in, kneels and bends and
sings. Then he jumps on the back of my bike and we go in search of benzene. At
the pump there is a festival atmosphere.
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| Benzine station party, Wadi Halfa |
Several lines of more than 100
tuk-tuks snake their way around a rabble of cars and trucks scattered in idling
supplication to the petrol altar. I am greeted like a football star and ushered
to the front of the queue and there is a scrum around the bike. The truck
arrives and dispenses its precious cargo but then the pump is not working and
the attendant gets out a screwdriver with about 25 people shining their
mobiles torchlight and poking their
fingers helpfully in his way.
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| Wadi Halfa |
Abri
I take what is left of the
old road south – mostly it has been replaced by a tar road but I find the first 30km which
takes me on a beautiful sandy track past Lake Nubia and a lagoon thronging
with pelicans.
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| Road out of Wadi Halfa |
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| Near Lake Nubia |
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| Pelicans in Lagoon off Lake Nubia |
Just as my mojo is really starting to kick in, the bike
abruptly dies. Immediately, with the lack of forward motion I start to sweat.
My phone overheats and dies. The spanners come out and I find a loose battery
connection and I am off again. I hit the tar and really start to move. To be
moving. Maybe it’s my mercurial Gemini nature. Between point A and point B,
which contain and corral all my cares I am free. Sudan is definitely not A and
it is assuredly not B. I love the simplicity and otherness of this starkly
beautiful black gravel landscape. I find a little shack where gold miners are
supping Jabena (ginger-spiced coffee) and take a rest.
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| Gold Miner, road to Abri |
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| Gold Miners, road to Abri |
I hear the
unmistakeable thump of a single cylinder and a motorbike goes by. I wave but
Jordan does not see me so I take off after him. But the bike is unhappy to get
going top speed in this heat and after a few miles I start to get a horribly familiar lurching of the bike. My heart sinks to the depths and I kangaroo the last 15km
into Abri forlorn. This is exactly the
same performance as in Peru six years ago and I know what a saga that
became.
I try to put my cares to one
side. I find Jordan and we pitch our tents in the “Nubian House” guesthouse on
the riverbank.
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| Abri |
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| Camped at Nubia House, Abri |
We eat in the village and I have to pinch myself to know that
the place is real, such is the sense of immersion.
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| Abri |
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| Abri |
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| Abri |
As anticipated, the bike behaves itself for shorter
distances and we ride off to find the ferry to visit Sai Island. We ride
through various fields and pop out in random places on the riverbank but
eventually find the ferry in a plague of flies.
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| In search of the Ferry to Sai Island, Abri |
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| In search of the Ferry to Sai Island, Abri |
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| The Ferry to Sai Island, Abri |
The engine is started by
holding the cables to the battery terminals with bare feet, spraying a almighty
shower of sparks across the petrol-soaked planks and partly dismembered crankshaft.
The desolate island is a dream to ride a motorbike around and we forge a path
to a medieval Christian church, just a couple of pillars gently merging with
the sand in an unhurried sort of way. Then we find, and it really feels like we
discovered it ourselves, such is the sense of solitude, a pharaonic ruin with Ottoman
walls. The island is a précis of Sudan’s rich history.
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| Ottoman ruins, Sai Island |
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| Sai Island |
We ascend a challenging
rocky path to a lookout
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| Sai Island |
and there in the far distance, among the
spider-scratched paths in the sand we see a tiny solitary figure walking,
seemingly from nowhere to nowhere.
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| Sai Island |
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| Sai Island |
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| Sai Island |
We gingerly make our way back down the hill
and head to some intriguing round tombs.
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| Sai Island |
There, the tiny speck becomes a little
round man who turns out to be a ticket collector. My jaw drops a little when he
pulls out a palm-sized printer and prints our tickets from his smartphone. I
give him a lift on my bike to the ferry and, his days work done, he vanishes
into the wastes.
We work on my bike which has developed another wrinkle –
the bashplate that protects the underneath of the engine has come loose. Jordan is a star and together we design a new
way to fix it involving splicing in pieces of fuel hose as shock absorption. We
try to secure his exhaust pipe, wobbly since an Egyptian soldier gave it a kick
when they locked him up for straying too near Libya. We make repeated trips to
the petrol pump on the basis of Chinese whispers but all it does is empty our
tanks further.
We share a boat with a couple of slightly lost-looking
Japanese guys to find the ruins of Amara West. We scramble up a sandy bank and find two Brits
with a few locals dragging a large stone covered with hieroglyphs through the
sand. They are from the British museum and look exactly how I imagine
archaeologists to look. Bespectacled, sporting panama hats, scarves and shorts,
as if they stepped out of a Tintin book, they are genuinely baffled as to how
we found the place. They are just completing 3 months of work here and about to
head back to Blighty. One of them is called Niall which is just the icing on
the cake.
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| Niall and his team of British Museum archeologists, Amara West, Abri |
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| Removing the loot, Amara West, Abri |
This all occurs in the blast of a minor sandstorm and we lurch around
the ruins, eyes stinging in the onslaught. The place is a former island
fort and capital of Kush (Upper Nubia). An Egyptian outpost in occupied Nubia, unusual in that there was quite a
bit of Nubian culture integrated in terms of types of tombs and pottery and so
forth.
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| Amara West, Abri |
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| Mohamed, our host at Nubian House, Abri |
We head down towards Wawa, still failing to score any
fuel on the way. At yet another fake petrol station we drink shai with a group
of men, one of whom looks like Samuel L Jackson
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| Shai with the guys, near Wawa |
and
directs us off into the desert to ‘the market’ which turns out to be something
out of Mad Max. Sandblown shacks in the dust made of sticks and rags
with men hunched around murky brown pools panning for gold. Strung-out characters,
barefoot in threadbare fatigues finger
AK47s and we feel many hungry eyes on us as we sidle around asking for benzine.
It feels like a long few minutes until we find a man with a few plastic barrels
under a tarp from whom we are able to score a few gallons.
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| Scoring Benzine in the Market, near Wawa |
Samuel L Jackson passes in a
ute and we greet each other like long-lost cousins – it’s the kind of place you
feel like you need a friend and we do not tarry even though it is
simultaneously somehow heart-in-the-mouth beautiful.
Wawa
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| Jordan takes a slither as we make camp north of Delgo |
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| Camp north of Delgo |
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| Sharp rocks, at camp north of Delgo |
We camp in a little ravine north of Delgo, where the rocks look and sound like broken glass to walk on. A little down the road I have a puncture. The rock sticking out of my tyre is like a stone age axe and it takes three attempts to get it to finally seal. This is what happens when you
'walk on gilded splinters'
We decompress over breakfast of surprisingly tasty
Kibda
(liver) and
fuul in the little village of Wawa, the softly-lit scene of
the villagers going about their routine made even more cinematic by the thick
smoke of an incense burner pouring fumes from the kitchen hatch in the ongoing battle with the belligerent
flies. We buy fruit from the back of a truck from two women
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| Buying fruit in Wawa |
and take a
succession of conflicting directions from random people in fields
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| Sara, Wawa |
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| Snuff seller, Wawa |
and a man selling
snuff until finally we get a solid fix on where the
banton kbeer is,
that being the big ferry, as opposed to the canoes they have been trying to
convince us will take our bikes without capsizing. On the way we see a donkey
up on an elevated section, apparently grazing by the side of a raised road.
Jordan piles up the bank and then comedically disappears nose first into the
irrigation ditch that the ‘road’ is revealed to be. The donkey stands munching
on the other side of the crevasse unimpressed.
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| Jordan in the ditch, south of Wawa |
What is impressive is that
Jordan does not actually fall off his bike in the process but it requires quite
a bit of thought and a leap of faith to get him out again.
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| on the road to Soleb |
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| on the road to Soleb |
and yet again my
bike shudders to a halt. The rough roads have dislodged my battery terminals
again so it is at least an easy fix and not the fuel pump but as I toil in the
furnace of the Sudanese sun, my sweaty fingers drop a screw into the depths of
my engine and we fiddle around in vain for a while to retrieve it. I can hardly
believe how many tech issues I have had since arriving in Sudan. We bushcamp in
a gully a little way off the main track under a full moon.
Dongola
We turn around and head south to Dongola along the smooth
new tar roads. I glide along listening to spacious Nubian music. We head to a
recommended guesthouse only to find it locked-up and a heart-breaking report of
the Korean owners being arrested and interrogated for 3 weeks before fleeing
the country, a hint of maybe the dark, paranoid and xenophobic side of the
country’s leadership. The second guesthouse is not accepting foreigners but the
helpful guy there sends us to a cheap place called Al Asra Wa Wara. The
toilet/showers are a little challenging but at least we can squeeze the bikes
onto their terrace behind a grille and it costs $2.
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| Breakfast of Talabia - mini doughnutballs with icing sugar, Dongola |
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| Ali at Al Asra Wa Wara hotel, Dongola |
Next day we upgrade to a
place that is all of $4 because it has a central courtyard where we can work on
the bikes and the toilets actually have some signs of having been cleaned this
year.
I change some money which involves getting in a car with a stranger,
driving a few blocks and then waiting while he meets a shadowy someone and
counts out a pile several inches thick on the tailgate. Then I in turn spend
ten minutes counting the wad on his dashboard. It is 200 pounds short and I
look at him questioningly. He hands over the missing couple of bills expressionlessly
and I finally hand over my single solitary 100 dollar bill. This process gets
me nearly twice the official exchange rate.
I spend the afternoon elbow deep in hot petrol, searching
for fuel filters, eating dry chicken and being eaten in turn by spiteful
mosquitos.
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| Working on the bike, Al Muallem hotel, Dongola |
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| Local teacher, Dongola |
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| Fruit seller, Dongola |
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| Driver, Dongola |
Teti
We cross the bridge to Kawa and follow a sign to ‘architectural site’, a soldier checks my passport and doesn’t want to give it back and I have to yank it out of his hand. The track is deep sand and soon we are both struggling and decide it’s too hard work and turn back. On the way back my front wheel has a difference of opinion with the rear and I find myself with a mouthful of sand and 270 kilos of bike to lift at gas mark 7. Back past the bemused soldier and after a few kilometers of tarmac the road abruptly ends. There is a car inexplicably unattended here. We literally plough on and presently I find myself digging myself a deep hole with the rear tyre. All the luggage comes off and Jordan and I, with no little effort, manage to disinter the bike and point it in the direction of full retreat.
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| getting stuck in - the road to Teti |
At the tiny village of Teti the next track we try
vanishes completely into open sand dunes and we decide to call it a day and
make camp under some palms. One man says he can take us in his Toyota Hilux,
one of about thirty identically ancient and battered examples that seem to be
the only vehicle allowed here, to Mulwad, the next village which is where
there is a ferry. We mull it over – it’s a long way back around by Dongola.
In the morning, I call the helpful Mohammed Nasir, a
biker in Khartoum, to translate and we manage to arrange with Abdallah to drive
with us to Mulwad, carrying our luggage in his HiLux. He makes us breakfast,
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| Breakfast with Abdallah, Teti |
lets down his tyres,
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| Abdallah and his daughter, Teti |
rasps his engine into life and we are off, deliciously
unencumbered and levitating across the virgin dunes. It’s an intoxicating
feeling and I grin from ear to ear as I crest and glide back to the gullies.
Then suddenly I find myself arriving at a sheer drop and just about have time
to think ‘oh well…’ before I am flying through the air at 50 miles an hour. The
unscheduled flight lasts a supernaturally long 2 or 3 seconds and ends with an
almighty crunch and yet unbelievably I do not fall. I come to a standstill and
survey the damage.
The instruments have been ripped off their supports and the
handlebar is bent but mostly I am thankful to be alive. I do a little first aid
with gaffer tape and we continue. We hit some harsh corrugations and Jordan,
behind me, sees a shower of plastic and electronics evacuate from above my rear
tyre. It seems that during my Evel Knievel, the rear wheel slammed into the
underseat and we wander around picking up bits of plastic and circuit boards. I
put it all in a plastic bag and head on, suitably chastened. Even this disaster
can’t diminish my sunny mood. The bike is running, I am in one piece and just
look where we are…
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| Stopping to pick up the pieces, between Teti and Mulwad |
Old Dongola
We sit with a couple of policemen while we wait for the
ferry
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| waiting for ferry with policemen at Mulwad |
and then zip down the other bank to Al Dabba, cross the bridge there and
backtrack north to Old Dongola and catch a lovely sunset at the pointy sufi
tombs there.
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| Sufi tombs, Old Dongola |
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| Sufi tombs and other Muslim graves, Old Dongola |
We scramble around the back of a big dune and make camp. I take my
sleeping bag up to the top for a utterly serene nights sleep.
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| Under the stars, Old Dongola |
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| Old Dongola |
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| View over Sufi tombs, Old Dongola |
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| Camp near Old Dongola |
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| Sands of time, Old Dongola |
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| Sunrise, camp near Old Dongola |
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| near Old Dongola |
At a little village downstream, after Jordan takes a little tumble in the bulldust, Sevedi, the local muezzin, insists we eat with him.
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| That bulldust is slippery! Road to Karima |
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| Sevedi and his brother feed us, road to Karima |
Karima
In Karima, it’s too hot to think. All we can do is melt in
the shade. We find our way through some goats and thorns to the river’s edge
and take a blissful dip.
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| looking for the Nile, Karima |
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| looking for the Nile, Karima |
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| a welcome dip in the Nile, Karima |
We ask a man with some camels about crocodiles and he
says, don’t worry, you only see them on the opposite bank! He also helpfully points out a treacherous whirlpool a few metres downstream. Some teenagers
arrive and want me to find some music on my phone to breakdance to.
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| a welcome dip in the Nile, Karima |
I try a plug of their chewing tobacco which oddly makes me hiccup and they giggle
uncontrollably. Then some 20-somethings come and offer me some bongo. I take a
couple of puffs and spend the rest of the day in a hazy hug of equanimity. All
decisions are left to Jordan and I just practice my thousand yard stare and
cook a mean dahl at our camp across the road from the Merowe pyramids which are
spectacular at dawn the next day.
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| view from Gebel Barkal, Karima |
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| Merowe pyramids, Karima |
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| Temple of Amun, Karima |
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| Mut Temple, Karima |
The tombs at Kurru have some nice paintings but the most
fun is talking to Nacho, from Valencia, who is there helping to restore them.
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| Kurru tombs, Karima |
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| Nacho, Kurru tombs, Karima |
Across the river at Nurri, we find the biggest Sudanese pyramids, again just
lazily becoming one with the sand.
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| Nurri pyramids, Karima |
We camp halfway to Atbara and overnight the wind picks up
and find ourselves packing up in a gale which becomes a sandstorm as we put our
shoulders into the ride. I start having more frustrating power problems which I
assume are more fallout from my aerialism. These manifest as a beep from my
horn or my indicators flashing and then progress to a reduction or complete
loss of power. I practice origami with electrical tape while being blasted with
sand.
In a chai stall in Atbara I hear some lovely music on the
radio and I ask the man there to write down the name for me in Arabic. I then
spend the next two weeks searching in vain for this music. Eventually someone
translates the note which simply says “Please help this man, he likes music”
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| Fatteh, Atbara |
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| Kids by river, near Begrawiya pyramids |
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| Donkeys taking a dust bath while we take a water one, near Begrawiya pyramids |
Begrawiya
At the Begrawiya pyramids at Meroe, we follow a
track around behind them to a known camping spot. There we find a petite woman
on a motorbike with two camel drivers pushing her through a sandy morass. This
is Caitlin and once we have slithered our way through the sandpit we also meet
Chris on his bike. They are from Colorado and have spent the last six months
travelling up from Cape Town. He is a soldier and we have a lovely evening
swapping war stories and exchanging tips. Chris gives me a GPS track for the
infamous Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. At dawn I steal over the dune and into
the pyramids before they can charge me the absurd $20 entrance fee.
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| Fuul place in Shendi |
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| My plastic bucket repair, Shendi |
We ride a lovely sandy track out to the temples at Naga'a but at every corrugation my horn bleats pathetically and my bike soon grinds to
a halt. Then it occurs to me to check the battery connection and abracadabra,
one twist of a screwdriver and I am back in business and we celebrate with some
proper crazy sand riding, up on the pegs, both wheels sliding in all
directions.
The temples are another of Sudan’s rough and rare
treasures. I meet another pair of archaeologists among the ruins, this time
French. I go get water from the well where a family is filling scores of water
containers, raising a bucket with a very long rope drawn by a donkey. It must
be about 100 metres down to the water table here.
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Temple of Amun, Naga'a
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| Temple of Amun, Naga'a |
|
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| Naga'a |
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| Temple of Amun, Naga'a |
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| Temple of Amun, Naga'a |
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| Amun Ra holding the hair of his enemies as he smites them, Temple of Apedemak, Naga'a |
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| near Naga'a |
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| Roman Kiosk, Naga'a |
From here to Khartoum there is the first real traffic we
have encountered in Sudan, an unbroken line of rattling grinding smoke-belching
trucks which sometimes swerve violently without warning around the huge
potholes. They go too slowly to avoid a lot of overtaking. It is some of the
more dangerous riding I’ve done especially as the last part is done in darkness
as we were delayed by my tech issues. Many of the trucks have no lights and of
course the road is unlit. I do as I have done before and choose a car that
seems to be driving somewhat rationally and stick to it like glue. He knows
where the potholes are and as long as I keep to his right hand tyre track all
is good.
Khartoum
In Khartoum we stay at the Youth Hostel where we meet
some other overlanders. A Dutch couple in a jeep that they completely rebuilt
from spares after they rolled it near Lake Turkana. Gilberto, a Brazilian biker
on the road for 2 years, Nic from Australia, 7 years on his bike and Olaf from
Belgium who has been riding with Nic on and off since Mauretania. Nic and Olaf
are an amazing mine of information as their bikes are very similar to mine and
Nic in particular has a lot more experience than me. He also carries an insane
150 kilos of luggage – twice what I have – and has every tool and spare
imaginable. Much of my ten days in Khartoum is spent in the courtyard there
with everyone working on their bikes. We are joined after a day or two by Nico,
a quietly spoken 22 year-old physics student from Stuttgart. He rode from Cape
Town to Nairobi with his mother on the back.
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| Olaf, Nic and Jordan, Youth Hostel, Khartoum |
I hit the various wild and wooly souks looking for parts.
In one shop I am halfway through an enquiry about a fuel pump when all the
dozen or so staff down tools, form a line in front of the counter and pray. Ten
minutes later I get to finish my sentence.
A old guy with a lurching gait like a drunk homeless man,
leads me from tiny shop to tiny shop and finally I find a Korean pump for $25
for a Toyota Corolla. The same thing cost me 20 times that six years ago when I
ordered it from Europe.
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| In search of a fuel pump, Khartoum |
In Souk Arabi, a city version of the
Mad Max encounter
up north a guy from Chad fixes up my temporary repair on my wheel arch. He
instructs a frail little old man to cut a sheet of steel into the right shapes
and finds some foam rubber to seal the gaps. In my head I had imagined finding
someone to perfect mould something from aluminium as good as new but in the end
it is only marginally better than my own repair and I keep my paint bucket in
there for good measure.
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| bike food and guy food lines are blurred, Khartoum |
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| Cutting my new wheel arch, Souk Arabi, Khartoum |
I meet the Sudan bikers. Mohammed Nasir in particular has
been lovely on my way here as I messaged him for advice several times and we go
on a big outing, around 40 bikes all told, tearing up the road out to the dam and Jebel Aulia and a huge meal of Nile Perch and Talapia. Locals along the way cheer us as if
it were the Tour de France. Of course they refuse to let us pay a cent.
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| Nile Perch and Talapia, Jebel Aulia |
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| Some of the 40-odd bikes of the Sudan bikers, Jebel Aulia |
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| Jordan, Osama, Nico, Zuhair, Nic, Olaf and I, Gebel Aulia |
One of them, Zuhair, owns a workshop that makes
crankshafts and lets us use his yard and staff to make some repairs. I have
discovered that the shock absorber’s bolt is badly bent from the Evel Knievel
antics, the frame too a bit and as a result my ground clearance is way too low
so there is a performance involving huge hammers.
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| Zuhair, Tahir Engineering, Khartoum |
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| Welding Nic's subframe, Tahir Engineering, Khartoum |
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| My bent subframe bolt, Tahir engineering, Khartoum |
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| The answer is usually a large hammer, Tahir engineering, Khartoum |
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| Zuhair and Nic, Tahir engineering, Khartoum |
I meet Amjad, cousin of Sami, a good friend and filmmaker I work with in London who spent his early childhood here. Amjad is crazy busy with work and an imminent first child but still manages to find time to meet me for a couple of meals which he refuses to let me pay for.
I visit Tutti Island which is where the two Niles meet.
At the northernmost spit of beach you can clearly see the confluence of the
White Nile with its chalky, muddy waters, coming all the way from Lake Victoria
and the Blue Nile with its clearer water coming from Ethiopia.
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| The White Nile (left) meets the Blue Nile, Tutti Island, Khatoum |
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| Tutti Island, Khartoum |
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| Tutti Island, Khartoum |
My mornings fall into a lovely ritual of drinking
shai
labana or
jebana with
talabia and sometimes
tamiya from a particular little
corner of one street. The shai ladies are lovely and usually I get talking to
one or other local too.
It’s suffocatingly hot at night and I often get up in the
wee hours to take a cold shower just to get a brief respite. Another of the Sudanese
bikers, Hisham, tells me how the temperature in Khartoum has actually increased
by about 10 degrees since 2003 when there was an oil boom. The Sudanese badly
neglected their agriculture in favour of this new easy money and, around 100km
south from here, what used to be forest is now barren desert. Since the crash in
the oil price a few years ago they are starting to try to reverse the process
but it is easier said than done.
We go to Hamad Alnil to see the Sufi dervishes. It’s a
large cemetery and we ride into the middle next to the mosque where everyone is
congregating. Before the dancing there is music from a band of blind musicians.
It’s mesmerizing. Then all the Sufis form a huge circle and there is chanting
and drums and the dervishes spin. Each one has a totally different outfit. I
talk quite a bit with one of them beforehand and then, during the ritual, he
calls out to me pointing up and down “Hey English! No Earth! No Sky!” The
atmosphere is intense and before I know it the sun has set. After the ceremony
breaks up, one of the dervishes passes out. “Too much wine” someone tells me.
Not having had so much as a beer since Egypt I am slightly jealous. We have to
get the bikes out quick as everyone is beginning to pray and we edge between
them to the exit. On the way a guy jumps on the back of my bike, standing on
the seat and leaning on my shoulders and shouting his head off. Nic passes me
after a while and says someone told him to tell me that that man is crazy. He
falls off after a while.
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| Sufi Dancer, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Sufi, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Blind musicians, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Sufi Dancer, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Sufi Dancer, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Sufi Mosque, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Sufi Dancer, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Sufi, Hamad Alnil, Khartoum |
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| Tailor, Khartoum |
Kassala
I head off from Khartoum alone – Jordan has to be in Cape
Town by July while I am moving at a slower pace. It was great to have a partner
in crime for a while but equally I am glad to be solo once more. It’s a more
immersive experience to travel alone. You meet locals much more readily and
your whole experience is direct and unfiltered.
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| Having Jabena with the guys at the Benzine station |
The dial says it's 46 degrees. An unbelievably long hot ride brings me to Kassala. It’s
dark and my bike starts to misbehave again. My fuel pump problem is back and
again it is related to how hot it is which means partly how long I have been
riding. I limp through the craziness of the huge souk and find a hotel but they
won’t give me a room unless I go to the police first. I go to another hotel and
they do check me in but tell me I must go to the police tomorrow. I have so far
avoided being registered and the 500 pound fee it entails so I am evasive and
in fact manage to leave the country without ever being registered.
I visit the Khatmiyah mosque, a beautiful mudbrick oasis
of calm, climb the curvy Taka mountains that are its backdrop and meet the Imam.
A man brings his daughter to him. Some problem with her foot. I watch the Imam
pray at the tomb of Hassan, a Wali (like a saint) of Sufi Islam which is
in a dovecot. The sound of the man’s gentle incantations and the beating of
wings meld and dance in my head for days.
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| Prayer at the tomb of Hassan, Khatmiyah mosque, Kassla |
I meet Hisham. He is an environmental engineer who
studied in St. Petersburg and designs special incinerators for animals and
medical waste. He shows me some great hidden places to eat and where the best jabbena
is made. He wants me to introduce him to businesses in London that want
furnaces. He says he will show me where authentic Sudanese music is to be found
and waxes lyrical about Sting.
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| Hisham, Kassala |
I meet Omer and Saddam. Omer teaches me the Arabic alphabet,
helps me get my laptop fixed when its hard drive dies (so sick of things
breaking!) and takes me to the sad little zoo, the River Gash, the open air mosque that looks
like a cross between a bandstand and a flying saucer. He wants me to tell the
embassy to invite him to the UK and to live in my flat. While we sit in the
park he tells me that if he does not cut his hair short enough, someone from
the government comes and does it for him. When we part he gives me a little
plastic Bob Marley ‘One Love’ bracelet.
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| Omer, Saddam and I, Kassla |
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| Omer and I, Kassala |
Several people try to convert me to Islam. They sit down
with me and have a sort of staring contest while issuing quite threatening
ultimatums about my eternal soul. One asks me how I feel when I hear the call
to prayer and when I say ‘peaceful’ nods approvingly and mentally measures me
up for a
galabiya. Another sees me smoking a cigarette and, in order to prove
how bad it is, subjects me to a hand-squeezing contest along with the evangelism.
I get a tailor to make me special bags to carry water
which is a convoluted process of wandering the souk looking for suitably tough
material and bottles, drawing designs and bringing the bike to the tailor
repeatedly to get the fit right, drawing a large crowd at all turns.
I meet a man called Ozeiki, a neurologist who studied at
Queens College London. He is just emerging from the grand mosque and it turns
out it was him coming over the speaker, educating people about hygiene and
disease. He says he can tell me all about Sudanese history and music. We go sit
in a shady area and he summons up youtube and shows me BBC documentaries narrated
by Joanna Lumley.
Al Qedarif
I head for the border and the stopover town of Al Qedarif.
On the way I head off the road to chase and photograph one of the many
mini-tornados that are sucking up sand and plastic bottles. My wheels churn in
the bulldust, which is earth so powdery that it flows like water. Another 30km
later, the huge refugee camp on both sides, my fuel pump problem comes back to
haunt me and I have to perform open heart surgery in the shade of a thorn tree.
This is when I find my camera is missing. I try to focus on the one disaster at
a time and once I have cleaned out my fuel filter again I spend the remaining
hours until sunset searching the ditch along the previous 30km at a snail’s
pace trying laboriously to explain to the police at the various checkpoints
what on earth I am up to. I lose the light, bushcamp and continue searching at
dawn. But by 10am I finally come to a state of acceptance and set sail for Al Qedarif. My fuel pump has different ideas and throws a fit. I find space under
a tree with some nice guys who feed me watermelon and put my fuel pump in their
fridge, and get my arms elbow-deep in gasoline once more.
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| Changing my fuel pump, road to Al Qedarif |
I meet more interesting characters in Gedarif as I eat
chicken on the wasteland opposite the hotel. Samani is from Sudan and went to France illegally
but got papers via his Ethiopian wife and now lives in Marseilles. He
translates for his friend Ibrahim, a local truck mechanic who cannot understand
why someone would take a holiday in Africa when they could do so in Europe. We
talk quite deeply about politics and compare cultures and arrange to meet when Samani is in Addis
Ababa in two weeks time.
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| Al Qedarif |
Hosham is a vet from Darfur. He tells me how he cannot go
home and how everyone there sticks to the towns as out in the villages they are
in grave danger of being robbed and killed. He says it is a war between black
and white. By white he means Arabs. He approves of the president’s current
policy of an arms amnesty but it’s hard to believe once the guns have been
handed in that they won’t simply be replaced from the freely available supply
from Libya.
Trent, a South African biker I met in Khartoum, very
generously runs around in the city looking for a replacement camera for me but
in the end it is a wild goose chase and nothing suitable has made it past the
sanctions.
On the way to the border the landscape starts to change.
The word savannah swims into my head. A profusion of dessicated life in
intricate trees and burnt grasses. I stop just to breathe it in.
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| Road to Ethiopian border |
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| Road to Ethiopian border |
A puncture bursts my bubble. Should have had that
permanent repair in Khartoum… I labour twice in the searing heat.
The border goes relatively easily. I say a fond goodbye
for now to the Arabic world and the thought catches in my throat a little when
I consider the breathless beauty and adversity I have been shown in the last
five months.
