I really enjoyed my time traveling overland through Sudan. After some up and down times in Ethiopia, Sudan was a welcome relief (which surprised all of us that were traveling together). Because of Sudan’s oil reserves and corresponding Chinese investment, things actually worked there.

me, third in line

Our overland truck took four days to drive through the desert from Khartoum to Wadi Halfi, where we were to catch the ferry to Egypt.

I was drinking a nice, cold glass of water last night with Lawrence of Arabia on the TV and thought back to these days in the Sudanese desert.  It was incredibly beautiful.  I cannot wait to go back and do some more desert travel (in fact, I have a trip in my head planned where I am going to cross the Sahara on camel back, perhaps in 2012).

The quiet.  The stars and night.  The vastness of the landscape. It is different from any other sort of terrain.

While I had a great time, I won’t be going back at the same time of year that I did it.  We were there in July.  Middle of the summer.  It was hot.  It was Africa hot (movie line reference, if anyone cares to guess).  It was over 50 degrees Celsius every day, which was the highest our gauges went to.

unaltered photo - straight from the well

As an American, I had to look that up.  That’s 122 degrees for most of you reading out there.  Yea.  Hot.

So the absurd heat is one thing, but being in the shade almost the whole time helped that particular situation.   What was unbearable was the water.

First, have you ever drunk water that is warmer than your body temperature?  Not just a little water, but about a gallon and a half a day, which is about what you needed to drink in this heat, even in the shade…. and that is your only choice of liquid.

Second, the water we had on the first half of the trip was water we got out of the tap in Khatroum.  Regular  water, that we treated.  We ran out of water in the desert and had to fill up our jerry cans on day three from a local well.  That picture is the water we got out of the well.

The color was one thing, but the taste…. o’ my.  It tasted like chalk.  And also had a metallic edge to it.  You know how you hear people say this or that was “the worst” or “the best” whatever in their life.  Personally, I think most of those comments are pure hyperbole.

On the other hand, I can state conclusively this was the worst water I have ever drank in my life.  Not sure I’ll ever be able to beat that dubious distinction.

But none of that was even the point of this post.  I tore the meniscus in my left knee that day hauling the water out of the well.  Later that night, my knee swelled up to about twice its normal size.  Obviously, we didn’t have any ice to ice it down, so we just wrapped it up and I dealt with it.

When I get back to home about a year later, I finally went to the doctor.  MRI.  Yes, torn meniscus.  Little surgery to clean it up (though I still get some pain in that knee still) and I’m good to go again.

Man, I paid dearly for that crappy water.

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this is Worst Water I’ve Ever Drank (Sudan Desert) from Overland Travel Adventures from Go, See, Write - overland travel, RTW travel, adventure travel

From Sudan

From Sudan

From Sudan

Sudan was one of the most interesting countries I visited on my RTW trip — and a passport stamp I am quite proud of. It is not visited by many tourists, but is well worth a stop, if you get in the area.

There are more pyramids in Sudan than Egypt…. and about 1% of the tourists. Enjoy the desert and the Meroe Pyramids.

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this is Sudan’s Meroe Pyramids from Overland Travel Adventures from Go, See, Write - overland travel, RTW travel, adventure travel

Boat trips are great times to catch up on writing. The crossing from South America to South Africa yielded about ten blogs. This trip up the Norwegian coast is about a third as long, but hopefully almost as productive. The scenery is a hell of a lot more inspiring.

Here is a brief recap of the ten days that I spent in Sudan. In July. Just to be clear, for anyone out there that wants to go to this part of the world in the future, July and August might not be the best months to visit.

At the time, I was on the Oasis Overland truck for three weeks, from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Aswan, Egypt. I’d been in Ethiopia for about ten days before getting on the truck, in my first prolonged stop somewhere to secure visas. Between that time and the five or six more days in Ethiopia spent on the overland truck, I was completely fed up with that country and decided to evacuate to Sudan a few days before the truck was going to go. One of the other guys in the truck, Sean, agreed to hop on a couple buses with me from Gondor to the border and then on to Khartoum, Sudan.

I think I’ve written about this before, but the image is still one of my favorites on the entire trip. The bus we took to the border was incredibly crowded almost the entire way. It would stop and pick up and drop off passengers all along the route. At one point, a sixty-year-old guy waved the bus down and got on.

In one hand, a live chicken. In the other, an AK-47.

Just thinking about that right now as I travel through very ‘civilized’ Europe brings a huge smile to my face.

After we crossed the border, we got the best bus that I had been on in months. It was more like the buses I rode in South America. Nice seats. One person per seat, which I now realized was quite and important criterion in a bus line. And air-conditioning. The summer heat had not been a problem for the most part on Ethiopia, because I had mostly been in the central and western part of the country, which is at elevation and quite temperate. As we got closer to the Sudan border, and then in Sudan proper, we got back down to sea level.

It was hot. “It’s Africa hot!” But that was just a taste of what hot was soon to mean.

Khartoum was a welcome relief from Ethiopia. For one thing, things worked. There was electricity every day. The internet was fast. The drinks were cold. There weren’t any kids begging on the streets. People would give you directions without asking for payment. It wasn’t the prettiest city in the world, but coming from where we’d just been, we were pretty happy.

A few days later, the overland truck could up with us and a couple days after that, we got back in the truck for the four-day drive to the Egyptian border. We were going to be camping in the desert every night. There weren’t any towns of any appreciable size on the way. We were going to be eating whatever food we bought in Khartoum. We filled up the twenty, twenty litre jerry cans full of water and set off on the way.

From Sudan

On the first day, we stopped at Meroe. Unknown to me, Sudan actually has more pyramids than Egypt, though the ones in Egypt dwarf them. These were quite well preserved and you could actually walk right into a few of them. There were no other tourists at the entire site, save for the twenty of us on the truck.

We walked around for an hour and half. A few of us took rides on camels from the guys selling rides there. Did I mention that it was hot??

The four days in the desert averaged over 50°C every day. Although you would rarely be in the sun for long – you actually felt that the sun was pulling the life directly from your soul if you stood in the sun for any period of time – it was still hot enough that you were drinking water all day long. Everyone on the truck was averaging drinking between three and five litres of water a day. Between using our water for drinking, we also were using it each night to cook and clean with. Needless to say, the two hundred litres we had weren’t going to last the entire trip through the desert.

Our truck was basically following the route of the train tracks between Khartoum and Wadi Halfa. On the third day, we stopped at one of the small way stations by the side of the train tracks and filled up our empty jerry cans. Directly from an open well.

Two of the guys climbed down the ladder to the bottom of the well, which was about a hundred feet down. We then tied together about all the rope and cord we had on the truck, so we could get our jerry cans down to the water, for the guys to fill them up. We then formed a line of four or five guys to haul the full jerry can back up. Repeat this about seventeen times in the mid-day heat for the full effect.

But the bonus from all the effort (and I think this is where I screwed up my knee on this trip), we got fresh, well water.

It combined a cloying chalky taste with a hint of metallic overtones. It was a little young on the palate, but with a bit of age, I’m sure some of its overbearing nature would fall out and it would bloom into a fine vintage. I personally think the ‘07s were slightly better than these ‘09s, but Robert Parker would disagree.

This is an unaltered picture of the water of life:

From Sudan

The worst water I have ever tasted in my life. A horrible, painful illness (I wasn’t dying, we would be in Wadi Halfi in a couple days) due to dehydration on one hand and this water on the other. . . It was a tougher call than you might think.

I seem to have the bad pattern in writing these blogs of emphasizing the negative. EDITOR!!

The desert was actually great. One of the highlights of the trip, especially at night and in the early morning. The long drives each day were fairly boring, true, but at the end of the day, the truck would pull off away from the tracks, we would whip up dinner, the ever-present wind would die down considerably, a few people would set up their tents, more people would just sleep directly under the stars – it was incredibly peaceful.

From Sudan

From Sudan

O yea, I forgot to mention that at one point, we were driving on the railway tracks and the right side of the embankment gave way. The truck slid to the right violently and almost tipped over. If it would have, we would have tumbled down the embankment and into a shallow pond. Twenty frantic people trying to get out of an upside down truck.

Yea, it would have been bad. But here is the video of the other overland truck pulling us out of the mess that we got ourselves in.

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this is Through the Sudan Desert Overland from Overland Travel Adventures from Go, See, Write - overland travel, RTW travel, adventure travel

Sudan was the first fully Islamic state I have visited – Sharia law is in effect there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia.  It was also the first police state I’ve been to.  You have no doubt read about the problems there – foremost of those the situation in Darfur, but also the independence movement in South Sudan, which might make headlines in a year or so, even in the U.S.  It’s pretty much impossible to get to Darfur these days, and I wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway.  No one in Sudan wants to talk about it either, so you get my thoughts and observations on other topics from this interesting country.

Before I get to the full Sudan story, I have to tell yet another bus ride story, this time the two bus rides from Gondor, Ethiopia to Khartoum, Sudan.  At the time, I was still on the Oasis Overland truck.  Pretty much everyone on the truck was fed up with Ethiopia and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.  Sean, an Australian/Irish guy (damn, I wish I could carry two passports) and I decided to hop off the overland truck a couple days early in Gondor and head over to Sudan on our own quickly.  Sean is a big guy – probably 6’2” or so and maybe 225 pounds.

We got up around 4:30 a.m. and headed over to the bus station.  We ended up on a medium sized bus to the border with a capacity of probably sixty people or so.  They managed to fit about ninety people on board.  The first four hours of the ride weren’t so bad.  The last couple hours were fairly horrible.

Sean and I were in the last row of the bus.  Good for safety.  Bad for comfort.  Sean was in the back right corner and right in front of him and me was the back stairwell of the bus.  They managed to fit five people in the back row of the bus.  During the last couple hours, I had three different people sitting immediately next to me (as people entered and exited).  All three stunk.

Don’t get me wrong – at this point on the trip, I stink also.  I have frighteningly gotten fairly used to showing just a couple times a week.  And if it’s a cold shower, I pretty much just shampoo my hair and give up on cleaning the rest of me.  That being said, I feel fairly confident that I have never, and will never, stink as much as any of these three.

Did I mention that one of the particular things that is completely different in Africa than in the U.S. or Europe is that there is no sense of personal space?  At all.  I think of all the things that I’ve heard from travelers in Africa – this is the one that confounds and bothers westerners the most.

At one point in the last couple hours, Sean (who was horribly uncomfortable and cramped up the entire way) had a guy sitting on his knees.  Sean’s legs were slightly sticking out into the stairwell and a guy just decided to use his legs as a chair.  Or a stool.  Tough to tell.  Sean just looked over at me and shrugged.  It wasn’t like we had any room to move anywhere.  Hell – he barely had room to shrug.  Like I said, he’s a big guy.  And these buses are not good for big people.

One of my favorite images of the entire trip happened on the last few hours of this particular bus ride.  The bus stopped by the side of the road to drop some people off and pick more up – strangely, there always seemed to be more people getting on than off – African buses work in a different space/time continuum.

An older guy ambled onto the bus.  Sean and I guessed that he was about sixty years old, by his appearance, which meant he was probably forty.  That obviously wasn’t the highlight.

He was carrying a live chicken in his left hand.  He was carrying an AK-47 in his right hand.

Come on – that’s awesome.  Africa, baby.

Another strange thing about African buses, at least the ones that you pay for once you get on (unlike the occasional nice ones where you buy a ticket):  sometimes people don’t want to pay.  I’ve never seen this anywhere else.  It never happened in chicken buses in Central America.  I’ve never see it in inner-city public transport in South America.  But this bus ride was probably the 8th or 9th time I’ve seen it in Africa.

A guy – always a guy, of course – gets on the bus.  The ticket/collection guy comes by and asks for his money.  The passenger, now seated, shrugs his shoulders in the “I ain’t paying” way.  By the way, this obviously is all happening in languages I have no comprehension of, so take my translations with a grain of salt.  Ticket guy starts yelling at the passenger.  Every time the passenger responded the same way – silence and more shrugs.

That never works.  The ticket guy starts yelling more and pulling on the guy to evict him from his seat.  Then comes the return fire from the passenger.  I tend to think the passenger is saying something like “not 60 from here – only 20″ or something of the like, but who the hell knows.  Most times in the end, the passenger hands some money over and its over.  Of course, I have no idea if they managed to get some sort of deal in the process.

That wasn’t how this argument ended.  The passenger never forked over the money and the ticket guy pulled him off the bus.  As he was throwing him out the door, the passenger reached back and grabbed the ticket guy’s jeans.  “That’s it motherfucker – its ON!”

Again, just my translation, but I’m pretty sure on this one.

And so started the fistfight.  Briefly next to the bus, but then ranging back and forth behind the bus.  At some point, the dozens of people standing there broke it up.  It was hard to tell who got the better of it – we didn’t see the passenger – but the ticket guy had a pretty nice little scrape on the side of his face.  And then the bus moved on.  No big deal.

Sean’s comment?  “I’ve seen 3-4 fights in Africa.  These guys have no idea how to fight.”  I trusted him.  Sean looks like he knows how to fight.  And he is Australian and Irish.  That’s good enough for me.

the border crossing (via travelblog.org)

We got to the border.  Did the border formalities on the Ethiopian side.  On the Sudan side, we had to do the usual immigration stamping in.  Much more of a simple relief that I thought, when I went through all the hassle to try to get my Sudan visa in Kenya. And Part II of the Sudan visa hunt in Kenya.

Then we had to go to the local police station and sign some register.  No apparent reason – it wasn’t like they had a computer to input it into to track us – just the first glimpse that we were in a police state.

Then we got on the Sudanese bus.  The first mode of transport I had taken in about two months that left without being full.  Not even close to full.  It was a full-sized bus and there were probably only thirty people on board.  I had two seats all to myself.

And it was air-conditioned.  Air conditioning.  Mmmmmmm.

Sean and I both tried to remember the last time that we had been blessed with air conditioning.  Ethiopia?  Nope.  Kenya?  No.  Uganda.  Tanzania.  Zambia.  Namibia.  Nope on all fronts.  It was South Africa.  Four months ago.

The bus took off.  Well, we didn’t make too much progress, the first police check was about 10 minutes later.  The bus stopped and a guy got on board and checked everyone’s ID.  This was the first of seven such stops on the way to Khartoum.

The fifth such check was a personal highlight.  The guy came onto the bus.  Checked everyone’s ID.  Got all the way back to Sean and I sitting in the last two rows.  I handed him my passport.  He said something and pointed to my small backpack, obviously wanting to look in it.  I opened it up and showed him that I wasn’t smuggling in liquor, or dirty magazines, or U.S. imperialist propaganda documents.  He pulled out my copy of Crime and Punishment and proceeded to slowly flip through it.

You never know what I might be hiding in there.

I would have given it to him – he seemed quite interested – but I have promised myself (and ya’ll) that I will finish it before I get to St. Petersburg.  A possible détente moment in U.S.-Sudan relations passed by on account of my book greed. . .

One last highlight of this trip.  And yes, I realize that this blog has devolved into ‘immigration agent’ and ‘bus’ stories – but you try traveling around the world on the ground and tell me what strikes you.

As I said, Sudan is a strict, very strict, Muslim state.  Sharia law is not to be scoffed at and by all accounts, they take everything, mostly their religion, seriously here.  The woman are all fully cloaked up.  Alcohol is prohibited, strictly (we know – we tried to find some).  The government censors the internet – there are a number of websites that are banned.  Police checkpoints.  A government permission document is even needed to take a single picture inside Sudan.

The memory I shall take from the bus ride, aside from the police checks, was the selection of videos playing on the TV’s in the bus.  First, there was a really horrible 1970′s Hong Kong kung fu movie that was dubbed into English, with Arabic subtitles.  Fine – crappy entertainment seems par for the course on buses around the world.

But after that – in very straight-laced and Muslim Sudan – four hours of DVDs showing World Wrestling Federation championships.  O’ and don’t be mistaken.  These weren’t just any championships.  This was WWE: WrestleMania XX – the Women’s Championships.

Four hours of very scantily clad women throwing themselves around a ring and doing everything short of pulling off each other’s clothes, in an effort to amuse and entertain Bubba out in the live audience.  One of the competitions was between two former Playboy playmates – both of which stripped off their costumes to wrestle in . . . well, about nothing.

Sean and I looked at each other simply amazed at what we were seeing.  I had figured that if I had this sort of stuff on my laptop and the police found it – I’d be doing five years hard time in some Sudanese prison.

The kicker: the Muslim women on the bus were loving it.  They were pumping their fists and rooting on their favorites.  I wanted to tell them that I could introduce them to some guys they might like back at home, but. . . well, another moment of possible U.S.-Sudan reproachmont went by the wayside.

I’d be a horrible diplomat.

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this is to Khartoum, Sudan from Gondar, Ethiopia from Overland Travel Adventures from Go, See, Write - overland travel, RTW travel, adventure travel

I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. Horrible internet in Ethiopia sapped me from blogging. And basically in the 3 days I’ve been in Sudan, I’ve just laid around and done nothing. Problem is. . . tomorrow morning our overland truck leaves Khartoum to head to Wadi Halfa on the Sudan/Egypt border. We will be on the road for 4 or so days, camping in the desert. Then two days in Wadi Halfa and then one day on the ferry to Egypt. Pretty sure there isn’t going to be internet at all for that week.

So my laziness the last couple days is likely to mean no blogs for a while, which is the best way to lose readers. Damn it. Will try to write a bunch while traveling, but likely to have a similar problem — no way to recharge the computer. I’ve heard about this pen and paper thing, but it seems way too new-fangled for me to deal with.

Sudan has been quite nice, at least in comparison to Ethiopia. For the most part, no beggers, especially no children begging. That was one the many things that really got me down on Ethiopia: constant begging by kids for money. The power works here. The internet has been quite good. Normal bartering and such with taxi drivers, but not too bad. The food has been pretty good and it is a completely safe city — something to do with it being a totalitarian, Islamic, police state.

But damn, it is hot. Africa hot. 43 celcius a few days ago (that’s 109 to us back in the States). Only 35 or so yesterday. I’m assuming it will be 40+ every day in the desert coming up. I probably should go get another buzz haircut this afternoon. I won’t be taking a shower most likely for a week and its much easier to deal with little hair in that situation.

I am hoping to just sleep beneath the stars. I don’t think mosquitoes are going to be a problem out there and I’d rather not sleep in a stuffy tent, if I can avoid it. I’m hoping for some amazing star-filled nights in the middle of nowhere-land. And some small pyramids and ruins that few others visit.

We’ll see in a week or so. Then it will be Egypt, where I assume I can much more easily upload pictures and such. My friend, Dave Roberts, is flying down from Germany to meet me in Luxor on the 31st for a whirlwind tour of Egypt — he’s flying out of Cairo on the 5th.

O yea — I should add this. The route we are taking goes pretty much right up the Nile. Totally and completely safe. The unsafe region is Darfur to the far west (you might have heard of it in the news. . .). I will be far from there. In fact, you can’t even get government permission to travel anywhere near it — not shocking, considering what this government is doing over there.

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this is Brief update from Sudan from Overland Travel Adventures from Go, See, Write - overland travel, RTW travel, adventure travel