From Bahir Dar to Khartoum

Following is the first of a series of installments about the journey through Sudan, which I now have time to reflect on and summarize during a pit stop in Cairo. Sorry for the silence while in Sudan. There will be much coming to compensate for it, rest assured. Ahem:

November 5, Khartoum

I've been reading a bit about Sudan's wars, Sudan's tribes. Scarcity and ferocity. Riches and rapacity. Theories of superiority propounded with a sly what me smugness of a cat with feathers and bones clinging to its whiskers. Khartoum is like this cat, the blood of its conquests and extractions feeding the growth of a city convulsed by cranes and scaffolds to truss gaudy dreams.

The riotousness is belied by a tranquillity, maybe a languorousness, that is inherent in the heat. There may be bandsaws and piledrivers and pneumatic drills and generators running apace, but all of this is submerged by the thick waves of heat and in the languid streaming of the Nile that has outlasted every civilizational fever that has ever gripped its banks. It is an atmosphere, I think, that lends itself to delusions, visions, fancies and fallacies. Which may take the form of an 'Oriental contentment' or the harsh precepts of shari'a law.

A quick jog through the way here from Bahir Dar. Just after the All Saints Day post, we got on the road and made north for Gonder. We detoured into a little farming valley to see if we could take the waters of a hot spring featured in the guide. When we arrived it was into the slavering maw of Ethiopian parasitism. Passing though the village before the spring, our wake filled with sprinters hoping to vie for custom when we stopped. We pulled into a little clearing and were thronged by young Ethiopians crying out various different admission prices. After seeing that the pools ran to no more than a foot in depth and that they were filled to capacity with local bathers, and after discovering that the waters were tepid, we left. As usual, every child who spotted us on the way burst into a wild litany of 'you! you! you! give me money!', their hands extended in full mendicant articulation. The Ethiopian impulse to beggardom is astounding.

One phrase has it that the Ethiopians look like aristocrats who have pawned the family silver. But the fallen Abyssinian noblesse exists side by side with an 'other half'--the one that never had silver and which is content to mortgage its last scrap of dignity at the merest glimpse of a white face. The impulse among children is near universal. The country is a confusing and shocking mix of great superficial beauty and deep spiritual crisis. The fact that it continues to sell itself with some success on the strength of the former and in the face of the latter should tell you how confused the typical western tourist is when it comes to matters of human dignity.

After the attempt on the spring we drove five hours through majestic and strongly relieved green scenery to get to Gonder, site of a medieval castle and little else. Once within the courtyard of our new and well-run hotel, we ate. As we did there was a portly Polish tourist regarding us from his doorframe with a towel around his shoulders and his man parts on prominent display in a banana hammock, or Speedo. The night was chilly. I wanted to beg a moment's confidential business with him, to inquire about the meaning of his attire, but settled for a giggle. Pippa and Florent, the frog and the kiwi we had driven up with, let us sample their dinner of ceviche prepared using Tana tilapia, lime, onions, tomatoes and coconut milk. This was the fish we had bought together a few days before in Bahir Dar, when we had walked to a place listed in the guide as the fish market at the end of several kilometers of neglected red dirt track. On the way there we had passed a group of women engaged in various stages of cabinet assembly by the side of the road. Some to fit, some to sand, some to paint. The day was hot, and they were overseen by a small man in an orange shirt who was not sweating. We asked a few times if we were on track to reach the fish market, and the answer was yes each time. At the end of the road we were greeted by a sign announcing the Lake Tana Aquatic Research Center, where at first we were prevented almost bodily from entering a tinwalled warehouse where we could see the catch laid out on tables. Crossing the grounds, we peered in through the window of a cement block building and saw some men in official garb in the middle of a film shoot. Once the film stopped rolling one of them came out to sell us a kilogram of filleted tilapia out of an icebox in a back room. Whole fish, he said, would be available the next day.

Cut back to Gonder. After dinner we went out and had some delicious avocado and pineapple juices. The Ethiopians really know how to make juice. I grew tired early and walked back alone to the hotel, and on my way some inherent sketchiness of mine made me the target of an impromptu sales pitch from a kindly vendor of hashish thinking he saw in me a need for his wares.

The next day we drove over a rough road to within 20 km of the Sudanese border. Over the course of the 6-hr drive, the land dropped from 2,220 meters to just over 700, and by mid-afternoon it was scorching. We pulled in under a stand of trees just off the road and waited out the lunch hour. Then we went to the customs office, where the official in charge had almost no idea what to do with the paperwork Ian handed him. He just sort of looked at the carnet, the scribbled a few things on a page I suspected was bound for the trash. Ian had to prompt him twice to stamp the form and add his signature.

Soon after I began to enter the heat trance in which I've spent good portions of the past few days. Over the next few hours it was all I could do to keep my thoughts straight and attend to campsite responsibilities like pitching my tent and doing dishes. I went to bed no later than 8 and was fast asleep halfway through the first page of the book I was trying to read. The next day we rose with the sun and drove to the border at Metemma.

~

Dozens of women were walking toward us up the road bearing rude chairs and what appeared to be pans for cooking njera, the fermented flapjack and cornerstone of Ethiopian cuisine. The women were darker than any Ethiopian I'd seen. Sudan--land of the blacks--felt near. The border town was chaotic, hot and muddy, but the entry process was fairly straightforward.

The officials at the Sudanese border post were, for the most part, black Africans. Some had Arab features, but there was no one I would have picked out as an Arab in a neutral context. But I digress into ethnography when what I should be talking about are the nuts and bolts. They made us pay more than twice what we had expected for our security registration, but there was little to be done when they had our passports and all the power, so we ponied up. I saw some of the Ethiopians I had waited with in the embassy in Addis, all well-dressed and apparently very happy to be headed to Khartoum. What were their lives like? I was happy too, but I guess my contentment was of an altogether different sort, at once more esthetic and more trivial.

As my travelling companions quibbled about how much we had to pay for our registration (tasjeel), and whether we couldn't perhaps pay in Kartoum, as our demiscient guide advised, I suddenly realized that I could be of use, and interceded with the official to see if it was really as they had said. Indeed it was. But he assured me that the registrations would be honored in Khartoum, and that they would even indicate that they had been issued in Khartoum. Even though my Arabic confab hadn't changed a thing, it brought the illusion of progress and amity, and we were able to pay without too much grumbling.

Stamps and stickers received, we filed off to clear customs formalities, and then to have our documentation inspected by a variety of officials in a succession of different buildings, each officer solemnly executing his duties before sending us to the next building down the line. Two of these officers required a color photograph, which I just happened to have. I shudder to think of how long I might have been in that town chasing down a photo had it been otherwise.

And then we were on the road. In the Sudan. Heading from Gallabat to Qadarif. There were few vehicles on the road. Just a few large trucks and some pickups whose beds overflowed with standing passengers waving at us with a kind of reserve. The landscape flattened and browned quickly. It seemed entirely natural that this hot, flat place should be a different country. At first things remained quite green, probably from water flowing down from the Ethiopian highlands we had left behind; but gradually, as the land lost relief, the dusty green turned to dust entire. Once we got to arounf Qadarif we saw that the land was increasingly given over to agriculture, with large industrialsized plots of cotton or sorghum receding toward the heatbleared horizon on either side of the road. We were supposed to meet Florent and Pippa somewhere in town for lunch, but the road bypassed it to link up with the Bin Laden-group built Port Sudan to Khartoum highway. We nearly hit an errant child passing through the outskirts of town. From what we could see of the town proper, it had been well-irrigated (viz. 'well' as a noun) into a concentration of green. There was a moque or two, but most of the buildings were boxy, single-room dwellings of mud bricks similar to the kind seen in Yemen's Hadramawt. There were also gigantic grain storage silos of the kind you might see in a place like Wichita, Omaha, Duluth or Des Moines. The eyes of black men in Arab garb followed us from where they sat under awnings at tea, dimly discerned in the tremlbing heat. I wondered what the place must be like in July.

The Khartoum highway was quite busy. As we sat pulled by to wait out the hottest hour at the edge of a thorny acacia thicket, we were passed by a long stampede of vehicles hauling grain and cotton and petroleum and people. The busses were gleaming and airconditioned modern coaches, sharply at variance with what you would see in any country bordering Sudan bar Egypt. Many of the tractor trailers still bore the company names of their original German or Dutch owners across the windshield.

through!

Hello readers,

This is to report that we have completed the journey through the
Sudan, and have crossed Lake Nasser into Aswan, Egypt.

Due to the 2-week limit on our transit visas, the majority of the time
in the Sudan was spent in rapid transit through the desert and up the
Nile, and then in a harried logistical exercise to get the vehicle
aboard a pontoon barge bound for Aswan.

We got in two days ago. The contrast between Egypt and Sudan could not
be greater. Even this Egyptian outpost has a feeling of
cosmopolitanism compared to the end-of-the-earth veneer to every place
in Sudan but Khartoum.

I will be in Cairo soon. From there I will be able to gather the
experience of transit into a few comprehensive posts. Till then.

The Sudan!

Hello all.
This is to say I made it in. The border was bureaucratic, but
friendly. The land between there and Khartoum was hot and flat and
dusty but the road was well paved and our view off it was checkered by
irrigation projects and fields of cotton and sorghum. Khartoum is all
abustle with oil money and its physical proofs of shiny just finished
and not yet finished building projects. The weather is scorching, but
there are good juices and the people know how to keep cool. We are
sleeping in tents by the banks of the Blue Nile at a place called the
Blue Nile Boating Club, the briefest of homes to many a thoroughfaring
mzungu. Or khawaja, as they call my kind here. More later, the call to
prayer is my call to eat.

Happy Halloween

Halloween 2007 – Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how
flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
-From Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

I was getting feeling as of hauntedness or spectrality when I
realized it was Halloween. Of course the day is not marked in this
part of the world, but maybe I carry its annual occurrence within me
by dint of long programming, a dozen odd evenings spent knocking on
genteel doors, a gaudy lunatic among many. There is something about
Lake Tana that gives me the creeps. Out of place that there should be
a lake vast enough to suggest the curvature of the earth on its
horizon in the middle of the Ethiopian highlands. Its muddiness also
gives it the look of a river suddenly stilled and septic, or one of
those ghastly gravelbedded ponds you see in latterday housing
developments. Not just that general otherworldliness, but much
specific strangeness as well. The schoolchildren who on seeing a white
face will dare each other to approach and turn a sudden beggar's
trick; real beggars looking like Halloween caricatures of squalor and
maimed depravity. The fact of having been here before, at this precise
hotel in this unlikely faraway place a quarter of a decade ago in a
different season with a different companion and with different
expectations. I am thinking back, to salvage some part of myself as I
was then...what was I exactly?

It is more than fitting that the staff should fail to recognize me,
but that they know how to deal easily and congenially with my kind--we
replaceable transients, often with no inkling of our own
expendability, fungible dollar-wielders with an unaccountable and
inflated notion of self, pretenders to the throne of wholeness moving
flotsamlike through these wastes where (as everywhere) what is human
is not whole; and that I should have no more than a dim and
tendentious recognition of any of the staff, though I might recognize
a certain gargantuan fig leaning into the lake, and the grim
grottolike bedrooms, and that carbuncular shower where on that long
ago and so immediate occasion my companion stood shivering and crying under the cold stream and rinsed herself of the city's human waste in which she had stood up to her neck after a misstep in the dark. What else in the way of specific hauntedness? The buzzards this morning glimpsed circling in the blinding infinite overhead, plumage flashing with black brightness as they wheeled on their stacked isobars of updraft. The cackling of other birds in the canopy over my tent, one of them with a mocking chimp's howl. The dark and deathly beauty of the grounds with their thousands of man-high irises swaying like muted red and yellow flames; beds of bloodshot growth like prehistoric radicchios; papayas and palms twisting and shooting to escape occlusion by the canopies of giant overspreading figs--a riot of green carrying the taint of humus and rot, a walk among which suggests all the slavering predatory forms of an original forest, as if there were a very thin line between tended grounds and a cemetery featuring the friable ruins of what you would never know had ever been a hotel, everything from concrete foundation to sapling's bark to human expression reticulate with the spreading chaos that will claim us all. After which Lake Tana will still be there, ineffably lapping at the shore where stand its new harvest of uneasy beholders. On some Halloween, perhaps, long hence, when we shall have passed and left the way open for new tracks to be made for whatever purpose across these spectral highlands and down into the searing pan below. Happy Halloween.

The Road Ahead

November 1, 2007 – Bahir Dar

If you look at a map of Ethiopia, you will gather that I have successfully obtained the Sudanese transit visa by the fact that I am in Bahir Dar, the city in the northwest whence we will be making our Sudan foray. I flew here yesterday to join the gang after having picked up my visa the day prior. As you might expect, there were shenanigans. They called us in and had us wait uselessly for half an hour. Then they started handing out passports--to everyone but us, the lone wzungu. Ours were among the remaindered items taken back into the office, and I had to run after jean jacket man to ask what the hell was going on. The officials seemed shocked by the notion that our passports might actually be among those in the pile they had not handed out, even more so by the idea that they might contain valid visas. It was high incompetence, and it was not exercised without a certain officious pride. I have since concluded that it was a matter of my passport having no discernible English text, and of my companion-in-waiting having a Chinese face that Africans are simply unable to reconcile with a western passport. But we got them in the end, and other than noting that we were briefly locked inside the embassy gates and unable to leave, I have no desire to pen an account of that hollow pageant of an overtime.

On my flight to Bahir Dar to catch up Ian and Patra the next day, I
could see the Nile gorge to starboard looking like a snaking aperture
into the pit itself. Landing I could see the stripped and rusted hulk
of an attack helicopter off to the side at the head of the runway,
grim relic of conflict. Ian and Patra were having breakfast out of the
back of the vehicle when I got to the hotel. The other overland
couple, Florent and Pippa, were also camped out alongside, and it was
nice to see them. Their plates read, "Victoria—on the move."
At this point we are looking at a drive to Gonder later today. From
Gonder there is a road running west to the Sudanese frontier, and
tomorrow we will drive over that gravel track to within 30 km or so of
the border post, and will stay in a town called Shaheedi in favor of
the border town itself, where rumor has it that overlanders have
fallen prey to brigandage. The next morning we will cross the border
bright and early and start up the road for Khartoum, limber elephant's
trunk on the Nile. We have two weeks in Sudan on our transit visas,
but our effective touring time will be shorter still, since the ferry
into Egypt (there is no road running alongside Lake Nasser) leaves
only once a week, on Wednesdays, and we've heard that travelers with
their own vehicles often regret not getting there three or four days
in advance. So it'll be a quick jab for Khartoum, a day or two long
breather there with an excursion to the Nubian pyramids in the city's
vicinity, and then a drive up to Wadi Halfa, cleaving mostly to the
west bank of the river, with historical sites of indeterminate
interest to be taken in along the way. I am imagining ad hoc river
campsites, reading a book as the sun tends toward the limit of the
desert Cairo-bound Nile at my back. Sudan has many people, but on such nights will we see them? And what will the traffic be like on the road? On the river? I hope to use my camera often.

After which there's old haunt Egypt. To which Patra and Ian have never
been, meaning they'll want to do the whole shebang, which I may not be
up for. I am considering removing to Cairo and waiting for them to
wrap up the pharaonic circuit. Cairo, in turn, represents a fork in
the road. The vehicle may continue up the road toward Anatolia and
then Europe via Israel, Lebanon and Syria; but it in the event of
complications with the carnet or the visas, they may instead elect to
break west and take the trans-Maghreb route and ship the vehicle to
Europe via Tunisia—which latter is a voyage I would almost certainly
want to be a part of. Though of course there are questions of purpose
and direction and finances: My lodestone pulls the needle south toward
Zambia, where I have friends and missions both.

Let us briefly discuss the vehicle. It is a 1983 4-door Land Rover,
completely rebuilt. The engine is a 4-cylinder turbocharged diesel. I
have no insight into its performance specifications, but in favor of
its reliability let me site that it has acquitted itself well over all
the roads from Durban to Bahir Dar, and that Ian is a Formula One
mechanic.

The truck has a roof rack rig that includes a folding tent where Ian
and Patra sleep. The folding tent occupies the front of the rack. It
folds forward over the hood, and its front section is supported by a
steel ladder that fastens to the cattleguard. I have often speculated
on what might happen is a malicious passerby were to lift the ladder
support off the bar with main strength and with sleepers inside. That
has never happened. The back of the roofrack has been configured to
accommodate our trunks, which we use to store the clothes and supplies
that we don't need to get at every day. This area is accessed via a
narrow ladder running up from the left end of the rear bumper. The
trunks are locked, strapped down, and covered by a tarp. Yet there is
nothing to prevent thieves from simply cutting through tarp and straps
and making off with whole trunks. This also has never happened, most
of Africa not being as dangerous as you might think. The vehicle is
painted green, with white trim for windowframes and rooftop. There is
a snorkel to allow the engine to breathe when the grille is submerged.
There are two full-size spare tires. Oddly enough, the four passenger
doors have three different keys to open them, owing to availability
constraints on spare parts to fit the old Land Rover while Ian was
rebuilding it. My key, for instance, opens the right rear door and the
front passenger door, which is on the left, British-style. The fuelcap
cannot be accessed without a key, and there are two switches hidden
into the front console that have to be flipped on before the vehicle
will start--one to activate the electrical systems, and the other to
allow diesel into the fuel pump. Another key on my ring is used to
open the rear, access to which is guarded by one of those shielded and
circular locks you sometimes see on the backs of plumbers' vans in New
York. The back houses our food, our stove, our somewhat ingeniously
concealed stacks of cash, and other chattel we deem too valuable to
consign to the roofrack. Not to mention the tools Ian needs to
maintain the vehicle, as well as a refrigerator that runs off the
battery when the engine is on. Inside, the vehicle seats 4 in
racing-style bucket seats of the kind you might see in a tricked-out
Civic or other ricer. No radio, no other frills. But there is a
handheld GPS unit. And that is my home for the next three or four
weeks. Basta. More from Gonder, parhaps. And then Khartoum.