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.