Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A NEW BEGINNING
Sudan, May 2014
T he plane banked out of the clear blue skies above Khartoum, coming to a smooth
landing on the runway below. Outside, the city rippled in the haze of a fifty-degree heat.
I stepped, squinting, onto the asphalt of the runway and sighed. The expedition was now
broken - but somehow it had to go on.
On fleeing Bor, we had returned to Juba, where Siraje and I parted ways. Boston, by
then, was already back in Kampala, his own expedition cut short - and, for the first time,
I understood how he was feeling. The honour of becoming the first man to walk the full
length of the Nile had been denied me, and it hurt. The Sudd had beaten me, like it had
tormented so many other travellers along the Nile, and the disappointment was difficult to
put into words.
Escorted by SPLA security, we had holed up in the airport at Juba until a plane was
ready to take us out of South Sudan. The plan, hastily rearranged, was to reach Khartoum,
the capital of Sudan, and back-track to as close to the border with South Sudan as we could
get. There, the expedition would begin again, north to Khartoum and the Sahara Desert
beyond.
The man waiting in the airport, holding up a sign that read simply 'LEVISON' was to
be my guide from the southern border to the crossing into Egypt, a journey of over a thou-
sand miles. He was also a complete stranger. Tentatively, I shook his hand.
I had been to Sudan once before, four years previously, when I'd volunteered to lead an
expedition driving two ambulances from England to a hospital in Malawi. It had been an
eventful trip, not least because we were arrested in Egypt and detained for ten days by the
secret police, a stop that had left us scrabbling to make up time by driving across the Saha-
ra Desert in less than thirty-six hours. To say that I don't remember much would be an un-
derstatement - those hours passed in such a sleepless blur that I can barely recall crashing
through a police roadblock on the outskirts of the Sudanese town of Dongola, and almost
being cast from the side of a cliff in the ensuing carnage. But one thing that did come out
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