Welcome to Sudan.

Atbara, Sudan

 

The ferry from Aswan, Egypt arrived in the northern port "town" of Wadi Halfa, Sudan around 10am on Tuesday morning. There is a passport control on the ferry before you can get off which took an hour or two for the officer to go through each foreigners passport and ask the same question over and over. It was our first indication that while in Sudan, you really shouldn't be in a hurry.

 

One off the ferry, you walk down a long concrete pier towards some unmarked buildings to clear customs, which really just involved some Sudanese officer looking at me and then placing a sticker on my backpack. From there, all the foreigners have to wait in a rather large waiting room for the passports to come from the ferry to the passport control office on shore. As word got out that the passports had "arrived", I felt like I was back in Egypt as everyone was scrambling to get into line, cutting to the front and just in general complaining about how long it was taking and the bureaucracy! I mean come on people! We're in Sudan! We just took an overnight ferry through a man made lake and now find ourselves in the middle of no where and you're complaining about bureaucracy and how long it's taking to get your passport back! Crazy!

 

With passports back in hand and customs cleared, you head out the back of the ferry building and into the arms of about a dozen taxi drivers who all drive Land Rovers. But just as your about to start engaging the taxi drivers, you get ushered into a tiny little office that has barely enough room for a desk and a photocopier. For some reason, we had to make photocopies of our passports and our visas here, before we got into town. Of course, you pay someone to operate the photocopier and for the copies themselves.

 

The ferry building is about 2-3km from "town" so most people just hop in one of the trucks. However, a group of us decided to save a bit of money and just put our bags in one truck and walk into town. We sent out bags a head with another traveler, then Mark, Lee, Maurice and I just walked to Wadi Halfa, which was actually a little farther then either of us thought and probably took around 30 minutes to reach the police station, where our bags had been taking.

 

In Sudan, you have to register with just about every security department upon arrival so even though we had cleared customs and passport control, we now had to "register" with the local police. The process of registering involves visiting 3 different rooms and getting numerous stamps, signatures and forms. You go from room 1 to room 2, then from room 2 back to room 1. Then room 1 sends you to room 3, who sends you back to room 2, then finally back to room 1. It actually goes quite smoothly, but is causes you to roll your eyes at the paperwork involved. Oh, and they charge you around 33$US for all this, so add that to the 100$US cost of the visa itself. Where this money goes is any ones guess.

 

After about two hours of this, most people had registered and it was time to decide out next plan. The three guys from South Africa, however, had some problems registering since they didn't know about the 33$US fee and didn't have adequate money on them. Without any banks or ATM's in Wadi Halfa, things looked a bit dire until they found some local who would exchange Euros for US dollars at a decent rate. In the end they got registered, but it took a few hours of "negotiating" with the local police, who wouldn't budge on the registration fee.

 

Wadi Halfa is a desert town, there's not much there to see and do. It exists as the northern entry point into Sudan for the ferry. Except on the days when the ferry arrives or departs, which is weekly, the town is pretty dead. For some reason, the town is spread out over a huge area given the population. For example, the "market", is several kilometers away from the residential area, which in turn is several kilometers away from the port. For some reason, the train station just sits in the middle of no where, seemingly waiting for people to build around it. Between everything is open desert, with a few low lying rocky peaks thrown in for good measure.

 

My original plan had been to arrange transportation from Wadi Halfa to a town called Dongola, which lies on the Nile river several hundred kilometers south of Wadi Halfa. Mark and Lee were in to that idea as well so we set off trying to find a ride. In Sudan, there are 4 modes of transportation: train, bus, truck or boksi, which is just a pick-up truck with a bench in the rear bed. There is no train to Dongola, neither is there a bus. So that left truck (or lorry as the locals call them) or borksi as our options. We couldn't find a lorry that was heading south and failed to find a boksi that would go either. Since we couldn't arrange any transportation for Tuesday out of Wadi Halfa, we headed over to the local "Nile Hotel" and booked some beds in a communal room. And by beds I mean rope beds in a room with a dirt floor. Cost was around 2.25$US for the night.

 

As for the other travelers, well the South Africans and the Brazilian were hoping to catch a bus to Khartoum put that bus never ended up leaving, even though it got half full with luggage and people, so they ended up pitching a tent in the parking lot of the bus station. In Sudan, you never really know when transportation will leave, if it all, and in this case the bus either broke down or didn't get enough people to fill it to warrant a trip, so it never moved.

 

Those with their own motorcycles or trucks had to wait another day for the vehicle barge to arrive from Aswan, since it is separate from the ferry itself, so those people were staying in Wadi Halfa Tuesday night as well. Everyone else was just waiting for the train to Khartoum which normally leaves on Wednesday night.

 

Other then walking around town, drinking tea and just plain sitting around, there isn't a whole lot to do in Wadi Halfa while you wait for transportation. A few of us climbed a nearby peak to watch the sunset, but for the most part we all turned in early that night and hoped that our transportation options would improve the following day...

 

Kenny