I leapt inside as quickly as I could hastily zipping the door up behind to try and avoid a tent full of sand, only to realise that I had been beaten to it - the inside of my tent now resembled a child’s sandpit. I did my best to sweep all the sand into the bottom corner, only to discover it returning quicker than I could get rid of it. It was everywhere!
We headed back towards the road, and peered through the orange haze in the hope of spotting what, on a clearer day, should have been easy to see. As we neared the strip of tarmac, we began to see unusual geometric lines in the distance, standing out against the natural shapes and curves of the surrounding landscape suggesting that something man-made was slowly appearing from the dust; and sure enough after a few more steps we began to see the familiar outline of a pyramid…
About 30 minutes North of Shendi, the bus pulled over at a very indistinct patch of sand, and we realised that we really were in the middle of nowhere, at least it very much felt like that in the dark. The only feature of note was a sad looking petrol station, which one of our fellow passengers pointed at and indicated we should sleep there for the night, and with that the bus drive off into the starry night, leaving us to our own devices in the middle of the Sudanese desert…
If the scenario was frenzied before, then at this request it became absolute pandemonium! The crowd clearly hadn’t thought about this possible development, and the excitement about what I was trying to achieve was palpable! Shouts went out to find a bicycle, and within seconds one of the older guys from the workshop had produced a sturdy two-wheeled beast, not unlike the one which my Great Grandfather was leaning on in the photograph…
Without really having time to process what was happening, the angry man marched me around the corner, and into the yard of a police station where eight other very serious looking men in police uniforms were sat around a boiling kettle making tea. The atmosphere wasn’t welcoming in the slightest, and I began to feel very, very uncomfortable.
As I started to learn more about this man, I discovered a stash of photographs and postcards depicting his life in Khartoum in the 1930s. With this window into the past, an idea began to form in my head, an idea which, as well as matching up the past with the present, would also see me receive a wedding proposal from an old woman, and a brief period of detention at the hands of the Sudanese authorities.
Khartoum is a fascinating city which sadly doesn’t often get a look in as a potential travel destination. Fortunately, this is beginning to change, and in the last few years Sudan has witnessed a significant increase in tourism. With more and more people heading to its capital city to explore and discover it’s hidden delights, here’s my top 5 list of things to do in this off the beat travel destination.
Just downstream from the bridge was a slightly tired looking amusement park, normally this wouldn’t have been somewhere we would have visited, however after spying the ancient Ferris wheel slowly turning towards the sky an idea started to form in our heads, so we paid our entrance fees to the sleepy man behind the gate and made a beeline for the rusty attraction…
Pockets full of cash, we headed deeper into the airport complex towards the alien registration department which was counter-intuitively located in the departure hall. Thanks to a helpful chap who had followed us from the money changing office, we were able to swan through the various security checkpoints with a combination of smiles and elaborate handshakes until we came to the correct office, where we were introduced to a stern looking soldier with a chest full of medals and impressing looking epaulettes…
Our luck had seemingly run out, and it looked like we would be spending our first night in Sudan sleeping on the streets of Khartoum. If I was more of a religious person this might have been the time to send up a quiet prayer for guidance; instead I decided to employ the tried and tested combination of chronic optimism and the genuine belief that the universe has a way of ensuring that everything will work out in the end…
We knew that today’s journey was going to be a lengthy one; not only did we need to cross a potentially tricky international border, but we also knew that in order to get our visas fully validated we would need to get to Khartoum which was over 750km away from where we currently were, we weren’t even sure if it was going to be possible, but if nothing is ventured, then nothing is gained, so with bleary eyes we headed out into the dark streets to look for the first of many of today’s transport types...
They say a picture paints a thousand words, well not this one; after looking at the familiar picture on my grandparents sitting room wall, I was struggling to get into double figures; I had ‘man’ and ‘moustache’ which I had quickly followed up with ‘bicycle’, ‘train’, and ‘silly hat’ (which I was definitely counting as two) but beyond that I was finding it hard to find any words to describe this unremarkable sepia image of a man in a hat – that was until I was told that the silly hatted man in question, was in fact my great grandfather.
explore v. (ɛkˈsplɔː) 1. The action of travelling through an unfamiliar area in order to learn more about it
