The ferry to Sudan

The only way to enter Sudan (when did it stop being The Sudan?) from the North is by ship through Lake Nasser (why? Your guess is as good as mine). Some ship. I am confident that the degree of overcrowding will exceed your wildest imagination. Ditto the absence of:
- any vestige of health and safety compliance
- maintenance
- adherence to any principles of seamanship I have ever seen (we docked head-on to the pier. and had to be pulled alongside to the great amusement of everybody except those itching (literally) to get off the boat.
I could go on and, if you buy me beer sometime I probably will.

To call it a rustbucket would be gilding the lily. Every square inch of deck or companionway was covered with humanity, freight or luggage - usually several layers deep. Even the woefully inadequate number of lifeaboats were colonised by those passengers agile enough to clamber in and set up a temporary home. Even with the overcrowding, it would probably have been better to sleep on deck than in our "first-class" cabins. No sheets, just a filthy pillow, and a blanket stiff with dust. On a scale of 0 to 5, Marek rated them minus 2, with the additional obversation that they were "fucking bullshit". The worst accommodation was below decks, from whence an acrid aroma of massed humanity assaulted the nostrils of anyone bold enough to breathe in. The first class toilets were always packed with jostling but good-natured people who seemed to think the presence of Westerners waiting for a trap was highly amusing. Nonetheless it was not a place to linger - especially in view of the two inches of filthy water swilling around the floor, upon which an interesting variety of beetles appeared to be swimming for their lives. Or maybe just for fun. To move around the outside companionways in search of a breath of cool air required climbing over tottering piles of cardboard boxes, plastic bags and items which in an earlier life might once have been suitcases - all stacked high above the guardrails. Even employing the mountaineering strategy of 3 points of contact at all times would not have prevented a man-overboard emergency if any of the piles had shifted.

Enough - I think you get the picture. 300 miles, 18 hours under way. 4 hours to embark. 3 hours clearing on-board immigration before we were allowed to disembark and submit to the Kafkaesque customs procedures. "We had a woman here yesterday. I say 'where you from?' she say 'I am Finnish' I say 'if you finish, you can go' " How we laughed - the first three times. You may think I am exaggerating, but we all ended up with facial rictuses from excessive smiling. Particularly at the scruffy characters with automatic weapons. No doubt they were there to protect us, but it's best not to take chances.

Then 48 hours in Wadi Halfa (don't ask) waiting for the freighter, which was supposed to be there before us, to arrive with our truck. There used to be a town at Wadi Halfa - it was submerged when the lake was created. The replacement settlement is a joy to behold. Dirt roads, piles of detritus, packs of feral dogs (those that weren't lying dead in various stages of decomposition), and concrete hovels - in one of which we stayed for 2 dollars a night. It was not good value. Imagine a Venzuelan prison - there would be a riot if the prisoners were accommodated as we were. Filthy (there goes that word again - any synonyms you can come up with would be very helpful), dirt floors, palm frond roofs - grey and full of dust. Mangy cats limping in and out of our cells, scratching and coughing, water outside in an oil drum. What about the rest rooms you ask. Ha! I reply. The first thing I noticed was the absence of complimentary toiletries, the second was the smell, and then I had to close my eyes. Quick, somebody give me a synonym.

Marek considers that the conventional hotel rating system does not adequately express the subtle nuances of Sudanese hotels. He proposes the following gradings: total shit, major shit, regular shit, shit, shit+1, shit+2. And for the facilities: totally fucked up, majorly fucked up, regularly fucked up, fucked up, fucked up +1, fucked up +2. He says he has borrowed certain principles from the Standard and Poor' s grading system for financial risk, but with greater accuracy.

But the people are lovely. the Nubas (different from Nubians apparently) are as black as you could imagine, tall, slim and lithe, with fine features, noble countenances and a dignified bearing. When they say "Welcome" they do not mean"Come and look at my shop full of sucker bait" - they mean "Welcome". I danced with a barber (scissors still in hand) , chatted with people whose English was all Arabic to me, and had sociable stroll back into town with the driver of an 18-wheeler, whose acquaintance I made as we simultaneously arose from adjoining depressions in the desert doing up our belts. You would not want to expose delicate parts of your anatomy in the fly-blown cockroach-ridden hotel "toilet".

So many experiences are coming at me so quickly that I can't really keep up with recording them. Here are some snippets of things that happened, and weirder things which went through my head:
- Laurenz, a square-jawed Dutchman motor cycling from Holland to Cape Town alone. We first crossed paths with him in Luxor and have shadowed each other every day and every night since. There is only one road South and the frequent army roadblocks provide many opportunties for socialising with other road users.
- Chris and his friend, elderly Englishmen motoring from Dulwich to Cape Town in two 40 year old MGs. Badly bitten by a dog in Egypt and years out of date with his rabies immunisation. Rather then hold up his companion, he is now injecting himself daily, and very painfully, as he goes along.
- The used tissue I found next to my face when I woke up on the Aswan to Wadi Halfa ferry.
- The necessity of improvising with an empty plastic bottle when the first-class toilets on the boat threatened to fall below the Marek rating of "total shit".
- the jostling and shoving on the boat which would have resulted in a punch-up back home, conducted without rancour or complaint, and in which we had to give as good as we got

- Dirt poor Sudanese almost begging me to share their food.
- Burqas: (Apparently that's not strictly the right name, but you know what I mean - those all-covering black things). It is slowly dawning on me that they are an expression of female empowerment, dignity and sexuality. You may need some help in figuring that one out. I'm working on an explanation. If more interesting things stop happening I will give you the benefit of my analysis. There is something strangely tantalising about a pair of smiling eyes, a quiet "welcome' and a robe which clearly says : "There's nothing here for you, chummy, so don't even think about it". Yup, there goes another pre-conception.
- Necrotising Fasciitis: I haven't got it. It was almost a disappointment to be told by Andy, an Australian pharmacist on the truck, that the exotic and colourful thing on my leg is nothing more than staphylococcal infection. For just over the equivalent of one pound, he procured me a sledge-hammer of a remedy, available over the counter here and nowhere else. It works.
- Total shit or not, I am having the time of my life. Do you remember the first time you went abroad, maybe in your teens, and how new emotions and experiences came at you thick and fast? All these spirit-numbing years later it's happening again.