Leaving Khartoum

Khartoum, Sudan

 

After three nights here in Khartoum, it's time to move on. I ended up staying in Khartoum a little longer then I first though and not really because there's all that much to see but mostly because I don't like arriving in a new place, spending one night and then leaving the next day. After enjoying some relative comforts at my "swanky" hotel on Wednesday night, I decided to move back to some more budget friendly accomodations so that I could stay in Khartoum an extra day or two. Just down the road from the Central Hotel is a lokunda called the "El Waleed Hotel", which offered me a bed in a shared four bedroom for 800 Dinars, a significant savings from the 6,000 Dinars I was paying the previous night. So El Waleed it was and I spent a good part of the morning just talking with the "receptionist" and a few others in the lobby. 

 

Personally, I'm a bit burnt out of just wandering around big cities and sadly, Khartoum doesn't have much to offer that got me fired up enough to deal with the heat and the dust. I did explore a bit, but mostly I just bounced from one refreshment stand to the next, intermittently ducking into internet cafes to enjoy the air conditioning that many of them have. 

 

Much like in the Middle East, Khartoum is dotted with "juice" stands, that offer glasses of fresh squeezed juice of your liking. However, by far the two most popular drinks are some lemonade like drink and some milky based drink, neither of which I know what to call. At each of the stands, they have big orange coolers packed with ice and either the lemon drink or the milky drink filling the remaining space. You just ask for a glass and they dip the glass in the cooler to fill it up. No bottles, no taps. Throwing caution to the wind, I probably drank around a half dozen of the lemon drinks on Thursday. It felt like one of the more crazy things I've done all trip, drinking lemonade, because it's made with local water and is kept cold by huge ice chunks, also made from local water. Thankfully things seem to be going ok still and I've since learned that the tap water in Khartoum is apparently ok to drink, time will tell. After about my 7th or 8th glass, I learned that the reason I like the drink so much is because it's about 50% sugar. I thought it was sweet but just assumed it was some fruit that I didn't know about. For some reason, the Sudanese love sugar and whether you have lemonade or tea, they but heaps of sugar in it. I was joking with some other travelers that it's probably healthier to have a Coke in the morning rather then a tea...

 

Eventually, I made my way over to the office of the "Ministry of Tourism" here in Khartoum since I had a few questions regarding my visa. As soon as I walked into the office, a women immediately asked if I was there to pick-up a photography permit, which, presumably, is the only reason a tourist would actually go to the Ministry of Tourism. You see, here in Sudan, you need a permit to do just about anything and while no one had asked me to date to see my photography permit, I figured it wouldn't hurt to have one "just in case", and besides it was free so why not. So you fill out another form of personal information, describe the things you want to photography with extremely vague terminology such as "places of interest", "structures", "people" and "attractions", give them yet another passport photo, then get some photocopies made of your passport and the forms. I think the elder lady was hitting on me because she said I looked much younger in person then my passport photo (which was taken last September), but then pointed at the passport photo and said "Very handsome", so I'm not sure how to interpret that but it made my day... With the copies made, you, strangely, keep the original forms and hand over the copies to the ministry. I honestly have no idea where all these forms and information goes but I imagine that somewhere, in a basement in Khartoum, is my passport photo stapled to a registration form, a visa application form and a photography permit.

 

From the Ministry of Tourism, I headed across town to the "Alien Registration" building. Technically, everyone entering Sudan needs to register with the authorities within 3 days of arrival and we all did that back in Wadi Halfa. The questions I had concerning my visa is that there is some confusion as to when it expires. You see, there is a line on the visa called "Validity" with a date of January 29th, 2006 on it. Below that line, is one titled "Period of Stay" with an entry of "One Month". The problem is that at many of the security checkpoints, the officers just look at the "validity" line and assume the visa expires in a few days, which isn't good. The reality is that the validity line is for entering the country, where as the "Period of Stay" line is for after you've entered. Since I entered on the 17th of January, the visa is good until the 17th of February, even though that is well past the "validity" period. So, long story short is that I wanted to get confirmation from someone in Khartoum that that interpretation was correct.

 

I'm happy to report that the immigration office in Khartoum is just as messed up as any other immigration office in the world, perhaps more so. After going from one window to the next, then standing outside some officers office for around 10 minutes, I finally got approached by some plain clothed officer who just looked at my passport and said my visa was good until February 17th. I explained that the "people in the field" didn't seem to think so and his response was simply to not worry and to just tell them that I had had someone in Khartoum say my visa was ok. This seems to be how things work in Sudan... Find someone higher up the chain of command, get their name, then just name drop it to lower ranked officers when things aren't going smoothly. As a fellow traveler said, most security officers here aren't paid to think, they are just paid (if that) to follow the rules. If someone above them says it's "ok", then they go along with it.

 

The weird thing is that at the immigration office another person tried to tell me that my registration in Wadi Halfa was no longer good and that I had to re-register here in Khartoum, that seemed sort of fishy and when he said that the registration office was closed for lunchtime and wouldn't re-open for another hour or so ("Inshallah"), I decided to just ignore that advice and depart with my currently valid visa. If problems happen further down the road, I've got the name and a mobile phone number of someone who can apparently explain that my visa is good... We'll see (or hopefully we won't see, but you get the idea)

 

I then spent the rest of the afternoon just wandering back towards the center of town dubbed "UN Square", which is really just where all the buses and mini-buses come and go. It's a real beehive of activity, with little to actually see other then just other people. However, I did start taking a few pictures which must have tipped off someone because I got yet another visit by the undercover police. This time, I was taking pictures of a pick-up truck loaded with eggs in the back of it. The farmer was more then happy to have his picture taken and we sort of struck up a conversation before getting interrupted by the police. How the locals know who the secret police are is beyond me, because as far as I could tell they just looked like normal people. (Maybe that rules me out from being a spy...)

 

Since I wasn't doing anything wrong, I wasn't really worried at all but I was surprised that the first thing they asked me for was my photography permit! I haven't met any other traveler who's been asked for one and had I not have gone to the Ministry of Tourism in the morning for other reasons, I wouldn't have one either, but it just so happened that I did have a permit, much to the dismay of the officers who all looked somewhat surprised when I pulled it out. They studied it for a few minutes, asked me what kind of camera I had "Film or digital", to which I replied "Nikon", which is what I wrote on the permit, then as quickly as they had appeared they went away, presumably in search of another foreigner taking suspicious photos of pickup trucks loaded with eggs... Maybe my 100$ visa fee goes towards paying all these security officers to basically do nothing... /shrug

 

As night fell, I grabbed some local street fare for dinner then retreated to the hostel to watch some World Cup football with the locals. Unfortunately, the temperatures hadn't dropped that much and with nothing but an overhead fan in the small room, it was a hot night of sleeping. (As in it was hot temperature wise, not sexy or romantic...)

 

Around 6am the following morning, one of the people in the room decided to turn the light on, light up a cigarette and have a conversation with someone from another room. One thing that I've noticed in the Middle East and here in Sudan is the lack of what we'd call back home basic etiquette. There's been numerous times where I've just wondered if the person had any clue that other people were around them, and at 6am in the morning, with myself and two other people still trying to sleep, this guy just decided to have a cigarette and a conversation all with the lights on. Why he couldn't have gone just two feet outside is beyond me (there's even a nice roof deck just one floor up), but maybe I'm the one who needs to adjust to local culture...

 

Friday in Khartoum is dead. D-E-A-D. Friday is the "weekend" for Muslims and there is very little open. With little to do in Khartoum to begin with, it was looking to be a long day until I decided to walk to a neighboring city/suburb called Omdurman, about 7km away on the other side of the Nile. Omdurman is home to the countries largest souq and described as being the nerve center of Khartoum. After almost 2 hours of walking with not much to be seen, the souq was a real let down. I should have realized that even the souq would be dead on a Friday and indeed it was. The other thing you realize while traveling is that after you've seen one or two souqs, the rest just sort of blend together. It also doesn't help that as I've been heading south from Turkey, the quality of the souqs is deteriorating rapidly. Even my steak friendly eyes can only taking walking through a flea infested meat market so many times, and you'll really question your desire to eat poultry or fish after you see where it comes from in the souq... Not pretty my friends. 

 

After less then an hour of wandering the souq, I hoped on a mini-bus back to Khartoum and after much effort, finally found an open internet cafe. I mean honestly, even the internet cafes close on Friday! After catching up on some email, I headed back across the Nile, this time by mini-bus to the Hamed al Niel Mosque. 

 

Every Friday, the local Sufi's put on a festival or ritual that involves plenty of dancing and spiritual chanting and singing. The whirling dervishes, as most Westerners call them, is a popular attraction and one of the reasons I stayed a few extra days in Khartoum. The Mosque and tomb, where the ritual takes place is sort of bizarre as it's surrounded by a large cemetery with humps of dirt representing grave sights. With few markings and paths seemingly going in every direction, I'm pretty sure I walked over a few dead bodies. The cemetery is also packed with the highest density of tea ladies that I've seen in Sudan to date. Presumably they all show up just on Friday to cater to the crowds, but it's rather funny to see table after table setup in the graveyard with each table staffed by one Sudanese women serving tea. Competition is fierce as prices were lower then else where. I went with the tea lady who had the nicest looking stools to sit on.

 

The Friday performance is also a chance for every tourist in Sudan to see every other tourist in Sudan. I'd maybe seen a half dozen other travelers the previous two days in Khartoum, but here at the festival there was probably over one hundred, including many who were on the ferry from Egypt the previous week.

 

The festival itself is interesting, even if I didn't complete understand what was going on. Lots of people, some in costumes, chanting and dancing around in a circle, with the crowd all around the perimeter. At one point, early in the pre-show, I got pulled into a small circle by some excited guy who wouldn't let go of me. I can only imagine what everyone else was thinking as I was trying to dance along with them as my camera gear all hung around my neck.

 

Unlike the rest of Sudan, photography is openly accepted at the festival and you can pretty much shoot away, paparazzi style, which is exactly what I did. One thing that holds true here in Sudan, just like back home, is that if you have a camera that is just big enough and then act like you're supposed to be standing where you are, then people just sort of leave you alone and don't ask you to move back. That was the case with me as I freely walked in the circle, across the open field and basically just went where ever I wanted to go to take pictures, as everyone else tried to see past the person in front of them, I just walked up and took the picture. I don't really know how that happened, maybe everyone thought I was some pro-photographer there (because there as a movie crew and an actual pro photographer) but the end result is that I managed to get pictures from anywhere I wanted, which was kind of fun.

 

After the show, I met up with Mark, the traveler from LA and we headed back across the Nile to grab some dinner at a local restaurant. Mark was staying at a place that had satellite TV so I decided to join him last night for a viewing of the old James Bond movie, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".

 

Today, the plan is to head to the bus station to try and catch a bus south to either Wad Medani or maybe even a bit further to a town called Gedaref. Both are on the way to Ethiopia, my next destination.

 

Not sure what internet access will be like in the next town, so it might be a bit longer before the next update but for those following along on a map at home, from Khartoum follow the main road south and slightly east towards Wad Medani, then Gedaref, then Gallabat, which is right on the Ethiopian border. From there, I think I head to Gonder, in Ethiopia. 

 

All the best,
Kenny