Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I would have walked through the night to reach Khartoum, anything to be rid of this
endless expanse, but memories of Matt Power slowed me down. Pushing Moez too hard
might have been fatal - but, by halving my pace, I doubled my frustration. Every slow day
was a half-day, and a half-day wasted; half a day that I could have been closer to the fin-
ish, closer to home. I woke every morning, feeling sick to the stomach at the thought of
the long months of nothingness, of endless dunes and unchanging horizon. The comfort-
ing greenery of the jungle was far behind - the variation, the hills, the wildlife that had
kept madness at bay. With so much to see, it had been easy to be distracted, but here in the
wasteland of Sudan, it seemed all I had to look forward to was an endlessness of searing
heat and sleeping in roadside shacks amid piles of rubbish. The desert wasn't supposed to
be like this. I'd had romantic notions of sleeping under the stars against a backdrop of an-
cient ruins - but all of that lay somewhere to the north, in a very different desert. I had to
get there first.
Conversation, when it came at all, was a laboured thing. 'How long have you been
working with tourists, Moez?' I asked, and had to force myself to listen to the answer.
'Since 2001,' he said. 'I like the tourists here.' He winked at me, with the look of a
devil. 'Especially the Japanese ones . . .'
'Oh, yes?'
'They have skin like the waters of the Nile, so smooth and soft,' he said dreamily.
Moez might have been a teetotaller, who bookended his days with prayer, but it seemed
he had an eye for different things as well. He had trained as an artist, studying at the
University of Sudan in Khartoum, and the paintings I had seen hanging in his office were,
in fact, his own creations. He had also travelled widely. Somehow, he'd convinced several
former - female - clients to show him around their home cities in Europe. 'I even went to
China once,' he began, 'and to Libya. We went over the border illegally, looking for gold.
And prehistoric rock art. It's amazing, the things you can find.'
'Do you know,' I said, 'you might be even more opportunistic than Boston.'
'Who?'
I pushed on up the road. 'He was an almighty blackguard,' I chuckled, and Moez just
smiled.
There were imperceptible changes in the landscape. The villages we passed were no
longer the thatched round houses of the south, but all adobe mud with high compounds.
The men of these villages all wore white
jellabiyas
and the women - what few could be
seen - wore the
hijab
, or the
niqab
. It was my first real reminder that Sudan is an Islamic
nation. Indeed, this was the reason South Sudan had fought so long and hard to secede - to
gain self-determination for the Christian and Animist peoples of the South.
I woke, that morning, as I did every morning: on a string bed, at the side of the road,
listening to the morning traffic - Nuer refugees fleeing the South for the inner-city ghettos
