The Sudan - 23

The sweat is running down my back into the crease of my bum - this is hot hot hot weather. Even the welcome breeze feels like your sitting in front of a hairdryer... and they tell me this is not as hot as this time last year.

The Journey from Khartoum to Kassala took 9 hours, including stopping for breakfast, prayers and checkpoints, and right now i think the exhaustion is probably acting as a useful numbing of the senses; If i had my full faculties right now i might well look around me and want to get the heck out of here.

As we left the metropolis that is Khartoum it becomes clear that there isnt much going on outside of it, the commercial buildings turn into industrial buildings, the industrial buildings into workshops and huts, and then nothing - absolutely nothing. Just grey dust - the only thing that brightens the place up is the millions of brightly coloured plastic bags that have been blown into the dry spikey bushes that edge the road - in a way its quite a beautiful sight in the sunshine. This place is flat - and i mean flat - you can see for miles in all directions, the road is straight, and if it werent for the endless convoys of double articulated trucks carrying bales of cotton, you would be able to see there the road disappears to its vanishing point.
Every now and then you come to a small community of huts and tarpulins - pots are drying in the sun along side skinned goats hanging from hooks. There appears to be two sort of goats around here; one, the normal sort of goaty looking thing, and the other black with a shaggy coat , a curled up tuffty tail and furry legs that make them look like theyre wearing flared trousers - in goat-terms, they really are quite cute.
We press on, our driver not speaking English, but clearly knowing the roads and avoiding most potholes - I swear we had all wheels off the ground when a bump took us all by suprise. Where a bit of road was in particular poor repair, a young man would stand beside it would stand as you approached and point at the hazard (was he paid to do that? - and how did he get there to do the job? we were in the middle of nowhere) Every now and then you would see a goat herder out in the dust leading a bunch of manky looking goats, the image is as standard as the images you see on tv or in oxfam adverts, but you had to beg the question, where on earth has he come from and where in hell is he going?
The land in fact is agricultural land, and whilst you cant see it now it is sectioned off into workable fields, but this is the dry season and the ground is dry and cracked. Come July the "rainy season" will be here and people will be working in the fields. If its a particularly heavy rainy season then the flat land will flood and the thin top layer of soil will be washed off the heavy clay subsoil. This place invented the expression "famine or fast"

Breakfast is typically big. we pull in at a truck stop. Truck stop food has to be good otherwise truckers wont come back. We are given half a roasted chicken each, two bread loaves each, a bowl of Fuul and a bowl of fried blue-nile fish. You eat with your hands and you have to hope that the washing water is better than the grime on your hands. there is a water machine with half pint mug under the tap - people all drink from the same mug as they stand at the machine (fortunately there is some bottled water, and some cadbury chocolate if you want) - Water in Sudan is a touchy subject, there are people at war over water. if you want to piss off your neighboring tribe, you put a snipers bullet through thier delivery tanker. In some places kids cant be educated because they are required to do the daily 4 hour trip to collect a bucket of water for the family. There are places that wont serve you water unless you are buying a cup of coffee or tea. Fortunately we have water where we are, and needless to say i dont eat everything, partly out of concern for hygiene and partly out of consideration of the next 5 hours cramped in the back of our toyota landcruiser. We are ust about to pull out of the truckstop when our host suggests tea, he orders his driver to stop and get tea. We remain in the car while the driver dutifully goes and gets us each a glass of minty tea, and we sit in the air-conditioned car drinking it. In all our stops we never once switch off the engine - presumably to keep the aircon running. I worry about the emissions, and the cost of the fuel, but at about half a US dollar per liter, i dont think they really care about that.

At most checkpoints we get a simple wave through. Our car has our agency logos on the doors and we are respected and welcomed (unlike, according to Wikipedia, the UN). Checkpoints are a funny affair, often maned by a couple of youths in civi clothing standing under a makeshift shade supported by a couple of truck tyres. As we enter Kassala state we are asked for our travel documents and copies of passport and visa. Theres a lot of negotiating going on, and they take several of our pre-printed copies. Lord knows where they put the things as we leave. It was only a couple of years ago that foreigners weren't allowed into Kassala, and even Sudanese were curfewed, so maybe things arent so bad

As we travel onwards we see an increasing number of little settlements. Near Khartoum, the buildings are flat-topped, cube-like mud dwellings, nearer Kassala they are round mud Yurt type things with grass roofs. And scattered in between are the nomad dwellings of skins and tarpaulins. Kids are playing with a ball in the dusty expanse, a father squats laughing as he bathes 3 little children, women are wandering around with things on their heads - every one appears busy and happy (?)
It prayer time and so we pull over by a mosque - when all the land is so dry and hard, everywhere becomes drivable and so its difficult to see how the area is organised. there is the mosque, some huts selling stuff, some shipping containers, some odd brick built builds, and a petrol station. It appears that no-one else thinks it odd when a man pulls onto the petrol forecourt on a donkey with a rickety cart in tow. When the donkey over-shoots the pump by a few feet, the man reverses it to the right position, dismounts, walks round to the back and begins to pump fuel into the tank of his donkey-drawn cart. It was the strangest of sights. I suspect he was collecting some fuel for his smoke belching Lister or Cummings stationary engine somewhere.
We waited under the shade of a netting, enjoying the opportunity to stretch our legs while our host and his driver went to pray. Today is Friday. Holiday. So prayers are a bit more elaborate and as watch hundreds(?) of men flock to the mosque (taking a pee on the way and washing their hands and feet with water from little plastic bottles, we were deafened by the mosque loud-speaker on one side and the power generator on the other.


The railway here is in disrepair (though they do run goods along the single track apparently, and despite Kassala having its own little-used airport, we see a fleet of Dutch bi-planes ready for spraying cotton crops. I wonder why we dont see things like microlights - they would certainly be a quicker way to get around here and there is an awful lot of take-off and landing space. I wonder if i should be concerned as we pass a little community of mud huts and two army tanks - i couldnt see any identification on them so presumed that the owners were either collectors or rebels

Everything is remote. Villages are remote. People are remote. You can drive for an hour before finding someone at the roadside alone sitting under a bush. How did he get there? and more importantly, why? Everything that moves has a plume of fine dust trailing behind it.

Finally we arrive in the city of Kassala. It appears to be quite a pleasant place. We are driven to our guest house and office for the week (which is opposite).
This is now my home for 5 days