SUDAN: Adventure In Sudan

I never did find out the names of my hosts for breakfast that morning. There were half a dozen of them, all solidly built, with weathered features that spoke of a lifetime of sun and wind exposure. All were wearing imamas (or ‘turbans’) and jalabiyas (‘robes’) that must once have been gleaming white, but that were now stained the colour of sand and camel. One of the men handed me a small glass of tea (with more sugar than water in it) and a bowl of what appeared to be porridge mixed with cement. We crouched in the sand to eat, while a hundred camels gurgled and grumbled around us. We were on a flat, sandy wasteland outside the small town of Ad-Dabbah.

Just visible a few kilometres to the north was a ribbon of palm trees that indicated the Nile. These desert-hardened men were following the so-called Forty Days Road. It was early winter, but ‘winter’ in Sudan is a relative term. The temperature, at this early hour, was still more than 30°C and I was desperate for some shade. “I assume you only travel this route in winter, when it’s cooler?” I asked. “No, we work all year round,” replied one of the men, “but in the winter it’s too cold. It’s better to travel in summer.”

The Forty Days Road is a generations-old trade route that leads from western Sudan to southern Egypt. In days long gone, the ‘road’ (which is actually several paths rather than one) used to bring wealth to the Egyptian bazaars: ivory, ebony, gold, ostrich feathers, slaves and camels. Lots of camels. One witness to an 18th-century caravan moving along this route described 24,000 of them crossing the Sahara in one army-like mass. Today the legal trade is limited to these beasts of burden, many of which are now transported by truck.

Until 2011, when the south became an independent nation following years of violence, Sudan had been Africa’s largest country. It was also, internationally, one of the continent’s most misunderstood countries. Even those who had ventured there tended to rush in and out as fast as they could.

For many years the thought of Sudan filled me with fascination, but also fear. It just didn’t sound like the kind of country that opened its arms to tourists. When finally, in 2009, I plucked up the courage to visit, it took only a day or so to realise that the average person couldn’t do enough to make me feel welcome. Had I been asked at the end of that first trip how much a cup of tea cost, I genuinely wouldn’t have known as every time I stopped at a stall, a stranger would insist on paying. I was in the homeland of some of the most hospitable people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Sudan is also one of the most ethnically and historically interesting places I have visited. Where else in the world do you have to brush aside apricot-gold desert sands to get a better look at the detail on a Pharaonic temple you’re certain must contain hidden treasure? Let me give you an example: I had been told by an elderly archaeologist that visiting Sai Island, a small barren mound of rock in the Nile, was like walking on history.

I couldn’t really comprehend what he meant by this until I travelled there, wandering from the leaning pillars that had once been part of a Coptic church towards the tumbledown walls of the remains of an Ottoman-era fort. The pebbly ground scrunched and cracked with every footfall, and looking more closely I suddenly realised that I was walking across shards of pottery rather than gravel. It then dawned on me that almost the entire surface of the island seemed to be made up of the detritus of thousands of clay pots and vessels spanning hundreds of years. This was what the archaeologist had meant by ‘walking on history’.

Sudan had become this man’s obsession. He had cut his teeth excavating Pharaonic tombs in Egypt, but chance had brought him here, where he had uncovered entire temples, removed the sand from buried statues and expanded the world’s knowledge of ancient Sudan. When I had met him, he had been busy excavating what he had believed to be a mere house but that he now suspected was an entire palace complex. “Working here as an archaeologist,” he told me, as we stood in the midday sun peering down into a trench containing a history we are only just beginning to understand, “is how it must have felt to have been digging in Egypt 150 years ago. Maybe this is even better. Everywhere you look, there are ancient sites; every time you put your foot down you stand on a fragment of pottery or a piece of ancient brick.”

As I finished draining the last drops of my sickly-sweet tea, I wished my camel-driver hosts well on their epic journey along the Forty Days Road and climbed back into my jeep. While they were travelling north for trade, I was moving east to sit on the throne of the ancient gods of the Nile, the summit of Jebel Barkal (meaning ‘holy mountain’ in Arabic). This peak is believed by the ancient Kushites to be the home of the god Amun, the King of the Gods.

On the sheer summit, I looked down to the collapsed columns and pillars that surround the cave-like Temple of Mut. To my right were about a dozen pointy-tipped pyramids glowing like gold in the setting sun. Straight ahead, I could see the River Nile slipping gently by, and beyond, in the desert haze, were dozens more pyramids, palaces and temples built to honour long-forgotten deities. I thought about how if you were the King of the Gods, you could, presumably, choose to make your home wherever you wanted. Amun had chosen Sudan. And if Sudan had been good enough for the immortals, it was good enough for me.

Safari Planner
• Getting there Lufthansa flies to Khartoum. You can also enter the country overland from Egypt or Ethiopia.
• Logistics Sudan is a complicated place to explore. To obtain your visa and travel permits, book through a tour operator such as The Italian Tourism Co, one of the country’s only top-quality tour companies. International sanctions mean that ATMs and banks do not accept non-Sudanese bank or credit cards, so travel with plenty of euros or US dollars. Travellers’ cheques are also of no use.
• Safety The north and much of eastern and southeast Sudan is relatively safe. Avoid Darfur and the west, the Libyan border, the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan. Check the FCO website prior to travel.
• When to go From November to March is ideal, when the days are hot but not overpowering, and the nights are cool.