Travelling through Sudan

The sky is enormous. That's a cliché of course, but things generally become clichés simply because they are true. I suppose it's basic physics that if you stand on a flat plain stretching to the horizon in every direction, the greater part of your field of vision will comprise sky. Cloudless, broken only by a blazing sun and with the ground radiating back a blast of heat.

I have endless pictures of sunrises and sunsets but I really only need keep one of each. Sunset especially is always pretty much the same. A shimmering ball, at first too bright to look at but gradually dimming and reddening, slipping down towards and below the horizon - and then giving forth, if I may borrow the immortal words of Bryan Ferry, one last sigh of farewell.

I don't think I have ever been to Norfolk, but if I may adapt the immortal words of Noel Coward, my last word on the subject is: "very flat, Africa."

One morning with a long day's drive ahead of us, we arose before dawn and got a local to take us by boat to a ruined temple. "Another one?" you may say. "Yes, but." I reply, and go on to explain as follows. The tide of Pharaonic civilisation has long since receded from this remote part of Sudan. We were miles and miles from the nearest tourist and this site is rarely visited. The village elders congregated, knobkerries in hand, to marvel at us - rare creatures from a distant planet. Especially in this location, we already feel too outlandish to be called tourists. Someone once said: "Tourists don't really know where they have been. Travellers don't really know where they are going." Good that, innit?

Another Venezuelan prison. That probably already gives you enough information to assign the appropriate Marek rating. Here's a little puzzle for you: try to forget the [synonym required] conditions and figure out how 3 felons, having abandoned all hope on entering here, can arrange themselves upon 3 rope-strung cots configured in a U-shape so that nobody's feet adjoin anyone else's face. Simple enough. But if you have 3 cantankerous old men, at the end of a long gruelling hot day, trying to solve it simultaneously and vocalising their thought processes, it can take a while - or two. Marek cheered up slightly when the electricity eventually came on and he upped his rating to major shit.

Next morning, out in the street, we got eggs for breakfast. This unprecedented feat was achieved by mimicking, with sound effects, a hen laying one. It says something for the communication skills of our audience that we were not directed to the nearest long-drop squat toilet. Even thinking about such a facility nearly negated my appetite for any kind of breakfast.

Another night we camped in a dust bowl next to the river. I don't need to name the river, there is only one - supporting a narrow strip of humanity. I amused myself, but I think no-one else, by asking our Nubian guide (of whom more later) what the name was of the river beside which we had stopped. There was a delay and I could sense his mind racing as he thought how best to answer politely without embarrassing me or displaying his bewilderment that anybody could be so dense. How I laughed as I explained. He smiled politely.

The male members of a nearby village turned out in force to goggle at us: wild-eyed, unshaven, hair and clothes thick with dust. Us I mean. Scrabbling bad- temperedly in the powdery dirt to erect our tents - suddenly more complicated that a Rubik cube. A disheveled group of people most of whom, me included, a few short weeks ago would have sub-consciously considered ourselves the superiors of these elegantly robed and be-turbanned dark-skinned people, who ritually wash themselves five times a day before prayers. One of them, a boy of perhaps 15 in a spotlessly clean white robe and turban, was quite simply the most strikingly beautiful human being I have ever seen (with the one exception of my dear wife who I might say was often encouraged in her youth to consider a career in modelling). He didn't seem to realise it.

Later, tents erected (sort of - you try and get a tent peg to grip when the ground is just thick dust) we swam in the river. Why is it that little boys who normally keep a respectful distance feel entitled to mob us once water becomes involved? Like a can of brown slippery tadpoles.

The nearby wadi was baked into a regularly-fissured expanse of mud, baked nearly as hard as marble chippings, shiny, and unbreakable without a hammer. This explains why the mud-brick houses work. I found that the mud needed to be completely immersed in water for a long time, with regular rubbing, for even the very outer layer to begin to soften. So even if it rains, which it never does, the solidified mud bricks would be virtually unaffected.

Yours very truly, and heading South,

Chris