Richard Stupart

I don’t so much wake up as have the sleep evaporated from me. Morning in the Sudan drifts warm into the room. My bed sags forlornly, too worn to squeal in protest as I climb out of my sleeping bag; packing it and my toiletries into my backpack in minutes. I’m getting good at moving. I’ve been moving for almost two months now. It’s easier to be efficient today, since today is a moving day. Yesterday was not. It was an exploring day. For fifty mornings, those are the only days I have known. Moving days and exploring days. Traveling fast and light is efficient, but can keep you a permanent stranger – someone around long enough to see, but never to understand.
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Nostalgia makes a fine mistress in the evenings. I’ve realised recently that finding interesting bits and pieces on travel blogs about Sudan is actually quite difficult. Searching for Sudan away from the South and Darfur, there is actually not a whole lot out there. So, in the interests of adding to the Internet, here is a short video from my Christmas home in December – the town of Atbara in Sudan.

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For your entertainment and at least partly for my nostalgia, I kept a list traveling from Cape Town to Cairo of various interesting statistics. It makes for a colourful two minute retelling of the course of events.

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A few weeks on and returned and adjusting to life in the small microtropolis of Grahamstown. Of which there is so much to write, so many places I want to go and play with my camera, and so many big discussions to be had in the Rat & Parrot tavern. Those self-important discussions about challenges – about life, direction and meaning – that  universities seem to burst with, fading beyond their walls as responsibilities run screaming into your days like an insistent toddler.

But while these stories brew and strengthen like a fine ale waiting to be tapped, here is an interview on wanderingeducators.com, who caught me even before my flight had returned from Cairo and interrogated me thoroughly on my last two months.

Traveling from Cape to Cairo was, in many places, a very solitary experience. I would be lying, however,  if I said that I was ever completely on my lonesome. Less than a foot high, generally quiet and inedible in Ethiopia and Sudan – I had a partner.

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The flight home was about the only uneventful part of the journey. Two days ago, facing the Giza Pyramids, I couldn’t bring myself to understand, to appreciate, what it means for this journey to have come to an end. Back in South Africa – exhausted – I couldn’t help myself skimming some of the photographs, some of the writing lying in my unpacked bag. Slowly, I am starting to feel the ending.

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Khartoum, Sudan. Pariah state of the western media, with a president indicted by the International Criminal Court for the genocide in Darfur. It’s Tuesday evening and the man in front of the taxi, who is taking time out of his own route, unasked, to find me a safe hotel and make sure I am settled in this strange place, turns to me and asks, “What do you think of my country”.

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Watching Abu Simbel shining in the night sky and surrounded with the dark desert beyond, brought in on the cold winds that cut across the deck of our ferry, I said my silent goodbyes to Sudan. In truth, I had said farewell out loud, in person, the evening before. Standing in the dust beyond the town and watching the white sky turn silently orange, then red, before finally burning out into the deep blue twilight of evening in the desert . My goodbye was presided over by the still slightly veiled moon, saving its face for the next night’s transition to Aswan. There I stood and whispered my goodbyes to Wadi Halfa, to Sudan, to beautiful, kind people met and landscapes that I had only ever been able to fractionally guess at before.

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It’s dark. We left Marsabit an hour ago, by which time night had long fallen, but as I clamber down into the lorry’s cargo hold, the darkness becomes a dense, clinging oil. Occasionally pierced by small torches as the dozen or so others in the small space jostle for enough space to sleep in as the frame of the vehicle bangs and squeaks and unexpectedly leaps into the air.

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It was a gentle sort of love affair. Not the wild, passionate, love-at-first-sight sort of thing. More like that feeling that gently creeps up on you when you discover something underneath a friendship, usually far too late to do anything about it. But I digress. These stories have to start at the point where we are still strangers. Me waking up in the nicest, softest, mosquito net-est bed (nod to the word-maker-upper-in-chief) and deciding to visit some fifteenth century Islamic ruins in Bagamoyo. Not, in fact, Dar es Salaam at all.

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