Biking The Nubian Desert

I rode out of the tiny out­post of Wadi Halfa into the fad­ing light and into the Sahara desert of north­ern Sudan. I had no map, no guide­book, no sun cream, no insect repel­lent. A lone man stopped me on the out­skirts of the vil­lage, his head and body robed and wrapped in loose white cot­ton which flapped in the brisk even­ing air. “There are wolves in the desert”, he warned me. “Wolves!!! Do not stop! Do not camp!”

But I car­ried on rid­ing down the slick, empty tar­mac. It stretched far into the dis­tance, where it dis­ap­peared amongst huge dunes of golden sand and black, broken rock. Alone, star­ing out into the vast silent empti­ness as the sun sank below the hori­zon, I exper­i­enced a rare moment of incredu­lity. What the hell was I doing? Where the hell was I going? I cackled at my seem­ingly ridicu­lous cir­cum­stances and tootled my horn into the empty night.

Almost at once, a pack of dogs appeared from some dis­tant aban­doned build­ing and charged across the sand towards me. “Fuck”, I said to myself. I ped­alled harder, but they kept pace, evid­ently quite hungry. After a couple of minutes of flat-out sprint­ing my legs were about to give in and I read­ied myself for a good old-fashioned brawl, with stones and yelling and everything, but evid­ently I had exited their ter­rit­ory just in time as they had fallen back and were non­chal­antly sniff­ing around in that embar­rassed way dogs do when they fail to catch whatever they are chasing.

Flop­ping in the sand just below the road, I put up my tent and slept. I was nervous about the jour­ney ahead. I knew it was pos­sible to ride across it to Khar­toum, and that there was a place called Don­gola some­where before­hand. I had heard it involved great hard­ship and great hos­pit­al­ity. Apart from that, I stuck to my usual philo­sophy of research­ing only the prac­tic­al­it­ies and leav­ing everything else to the pro­cess of discovery.

Next day the tar­mac ran out. It would only appear again sporad­ic­ally and for such short dis­tances that the effort required to get to it from the nearby dirt track wouldn’t often pay off. This track was rough and cor­rug­ated from years of occa­sional truck pas­sage, but it was solid enough and the route through the rolling waste­land was usu­ally clear. Being an occa­sional mountain-biker, and rid­ing a bike I had built spe­cific­ally to deal with con­di­tions like this, I actu­ally found myself enjoy­ing it. It was a nov­elty to be con­cen­trat­ing so hard on the ground in front of me, and I’d never been so appre­ci­at­ive of big tyres, good sus­pen­sion and a won­der­fully well-handling trailer car­ry­ing my extra water.

Occa­sion­ally I came across groups of road work­ers, blast­ing their way through the rock or pound­ing the red­dish found­a­tions or lay­ing the fresh and pun­gent tar­mac. They always waved and shouted greet­ings when they saw me boun­cing along the track in the dis­tance, and hap­pily invited me in for big bowls of bean stew or glasses of tea, even accom­mod­at­ing me for the night in one of their camps.

I think it was in this camp that I drank some water that didn’t agree with me. The next day, between rid­ing, I spent a lot of time dash­ing for crevices of suit­ably human size or lar­ger. The sud­den onset of intest­inal dis­ar­ray left me groan­ing and sweat­ing and weak, and I was thank­ful to reach the vil­lage of Wawa later in the after­noon. I shuffled for­lornly between the low houses and court­yards to the main street, which was noth­ing more than a par­tic­u­larly wide pas­sage between the houses. Elec­tri­city cables trailed across the ground towards a dis­tant gen­er­ator and the occa­sional vil­la­ger strolled past in the dis­tance, but it was oth­er­wise eer­ily quiet.

Mak­ing for what looked like a tiny gen­eral store, I met a young man who was just leav­ing. His name was Nashradeen. In fal­ter­ing Arabic I explained that I was ill and look­ing for a place to sleep for the night. Amidst hil­ar­ity at the unex­pec­ted man­ner of my arrival, I was ushered through a bright-blue pair of metal doors into one of the com­pounds that housed my new friend and 3 of his col­leagues. They were civil engin­eers from Khar­toum, work­ing on the new road, and they would be my hosts for the next 2 days. Such, I dis­covered to my delight, was the abund­ant and straight­for­ward hos­pit­al­ity of the Nubian people.

Nashradeen’s place was typ­ical of the Nubian vil­lage dwell­ings. Enclosed tra­di­tion­ally by a thick high wall, built of mud yet entirely robust in the unfal­ter­ing heat and dry­ness of the desert, the houses were spa­cious, with little dis­tinc­tion between indoor and out­door areas, win­dows and arch­ways and pil­lars carved from the mud, some areas roofed with palm branches and trunks and all brightly painted in white, yel­low and blue. Appeal­ingly simple and uncluttered in appear­ance — like that of the people and meta­phor­ical of their way of life, I thought.

The vil­lage was typ­ical in that it sat on the fringes of the fer­tile land that reached down to the banks of the Nile a few hun­dred metres away. This land was dot­ted with stands of tall date palms and cul­tiv­ated with wheat, beans, and for some reason opium (the effects of which were anim­atedly demon­strated by my host and his friends) and was fed by big rusty diesel-powered pumps that were occa­sion­ally fired up to fill the irrig­a­tion chan­nels. Local trans­port con­sisted almost exclus­ively of don­keys and donkey-drawn carts, with Mit­subishi pickups and big old buses used to take people on long trips to dis­tant places (such as the next vil­lage along).

I recovered my strength in Wawa, shar­ing each meal with a con­sor­tium of local men, some of whom spoke a little Eng­lish. With my small Arabic text­book, between us we man­aged to com­mu­nic­ate pretty well. I had bought the text­book in Egypt, the idea being to grasp the basics of Egyp­tian Arabic, being the vari­ety most widely under­stood due to the pleth­ora of Arabic films eman­at­ing from Cairo. Meals appeared on big round metal trays bal­anced on small boys’ heads, con­tain­ing dishes of stewed fava beans with cumin, lemon, onion, chilli and oil; green bean and tomato stew; a kind of bread rather like a huge, thick and dense pan­cake; and another, thin­ner bread made in a sim­ilar way to a crepe. All fresh, simple and deli­cious, from field to stom­ach in just a few hours (and back to field a day or so later).

Con­ver­sa­tion often quickly turned to Tony Blair’s for­eign policy antics and I quickly steered it else­where. Thanks to the easy avail­ab­il­ity of satel­lite TV, Brit­ish polit­ics has just as bad a repu­ta­tion in the Middle East as the vice versa, and is such an intric­ate sub­ject that I hes­it­ate to elab­or­ate fur­ther, other than to say that the primary cause of resent­ment here (other than the near-impossibility of vis­it­ing the UK, USA or Europe) is not a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion as to who was right, who was wrong or who did some­thing bad, but the very act of West­ern med­dling itself.

Sudan is a prime example. As I write, the polit­ical classes of the world are hound­ing the cur­rent Sudanese pres­id­ent Omar al-Bashir for war crimes, prompt­ing some of my friends to remark on my san­ity to be trav­el­ling here, evid­ently unaware of the fact that (as Andy suc­cinctly put it) 99% of the people are actu­ally too busy drink­ing tea and hav­ing fam­il­ies to be caus­ing any trouble. Just like the rest of the world.

On the road again, I picked my way through half-finished road found­a­tions and tracks in the sand of vary­ing con­sist­ency, remem­ber­ing a delight­ful after­noon swim I’d had the pre­vi­ous day and won­der­ing what was on the other side of the Nile. (Noth­ing, accord­ing to Google Maps.) After a morn­ing of pleas­ant trundling and tea-drinking in shady vil­lage shel­ters, I decided that the world needed trail­blazers and that I would go and find out. I spent the after­noon gath­er­ing intel­li­gence in the small town of Faaka, which was most enjoy­able as it involved sit­ting in an open-air cafet­eria for sev­eral hours eat­ing fried fish and chat­ting to any­one who wandered past.

“There is noth­ing over there”, said an Egyp­tian tele­coms con­struc­tion man­ager who pulled up in a van for lunch. “There is no boat to cross. It is a wild place. No people. For at least 100 kilo­metres there is just sand.“
His super­visor, a Sudanese engin­eer from Khar­toum, real­ised I was ser­i­ous about get­ting over there. “Well, it is beau­ti­ful over there,” he admit­ted. “There are a few people. Small villages…”

But he seemed to think I was going to suf­fer badly on a bicycle. Another man nod­ded in silent agree­ment. By this time, how­ever, I had heard enough to con­vince myself that I was going to travel the rest of the way to Don­gola on the west bank of the Nile. I was sure it would beat another few days of road­works in the desert heat.

The trouble was that here in Faaka I would have to arrange my own cross­ing. A little  invest­ig­a­tion revealed that some­where there could be found a local man, a cer­tain Mr. Abud, who had a small motor boat. He was tracked down by a net­work of loc­als as I chat­ted away in the cafe and a couple of hours later I was clam­ber­ing down the steep bank of the Nile with my bike and lug­gage. Mr. Abud eyed me with a mix­ture of curi­os­ity and sus­pi­cion as he star­ted up the little Yamaha out­board motor and we sped off across the wide green river. What an adven­ture Sudan was becom­ing, I grinned to myself!

On the other side I pushed my bike up the bank and through the palm trees and unex­pec­tedly found myself in the square of a tiny vil­lage in the sand. I hooted my horn expect­antly and sure enough the first local to peer round their front door smiled and wel­comed me unhes­it­at­ingly to camp under a par­tic­u­larly fly-infested tree. I set up my tent and ran away from the flies to explore. Shortly I met another man who said it was bet­ter to sleep in the small mosque where the insect pop­u­la­tion was less zeal­ous. On return­ing to my tent I found a little sil­ver tray with a small glass, a bowl of sugar and a pot of tea wait­ing for me. What a delight to be amongst these people!

I didn’t see a scrap of tar­mac, or even the slight­est hint that any­one had ever con­sidered maybe build­ing any type of actual road here, until about 20km before Don­gola, which I reached 3 days later. The track threaded through the dunes and rocks of the desert along the fringe of the Nile, and was defined simply by the route most people had gone through the sand before. Some­times it was too churned up for my tyres and I would come to an inel­eg­antly abrupt halt as my front wheel sank into a fur­row. Then I would drag my bike off the track into the pristine desert, rid­ing cross-country, whoop­ing occa­sion­ally at dis­tant don­keys and col­our­ful flap­ping fig­ures as I rolled across the dunes, hop­ing the wind-swept hard-packed sur­face wouldn’t give way. It was beau­ti­ful. I’ve never enjoyed the act of cyc­ling itself so much since the moun­tains of Romania in 2007. That was nearly two years ago… blimey. Two years. What a trip!

One morn­ing I dug out the piles of bread I’d bought days before and found it to have gone mouldy. I do not exag­ger­ate when I say that I pre­pared myself no more than 3 or 4 meals since I arrived in Sudan, the entire remainder being sup­plied enthu­si­ast­ic­ally but without the remotest fuss by the Nubian vil­la­gers. Nobody I spoke to on the west bank had ever met a bicycle trav­el­ler before, but if any­one was sur­prised, they didn’t show it; they simply helped me on my way. I was never a stranger, always a guest, as one man said. I was wel­come to knock on any door, sleep in any home, eat with any fam­ily or group of work­ing men. His were not just beau­ti­ful words — they reflec­ted my exper­i­ence exactly.

This man, Mr. Taj, a teacher in the vil­lage school, was one of the only people I met here who had a good grasp of Eng­lish, so I ven­tured the ques­tion: What was the weather like when you were young? Was it any different?

“The weather…” He pondered for a few seconds before con­tinu­ing. “The win­ters were cold! Not like now. Now the win­ters are almost as hot as the sum­mers.” It cer­tainly was hot — much hot­ter than in Egypt, although I sup­posed that the Sudanese defined ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ dif­fer­ently to, say, the Eng­lish. It was mid-March, and I would rarely be rid­ing between 2 and 4 in the after­noon, as the heat would become unpleas­ant — besides, it was a good chance to loll about in the shade and drink tea with old men. But it was the rel­at­ive dif­fer­ence in his story that was import­ant. It reminded me of sev­eral anec­dotes I’d heard in other parts of the world — in France, Tur­key, Armenia — from people who’d been liv­ing in the out­doors for long enough to know what they were talk­ing about.

Plans are being laid by Sudan and China to build another dam across the north Sudanese Nile to sup­ply elec­tri­city to the area. While sus­tain­able hydro­elec­tric power beats filthy diesel gen­er­at­ors in the long term, dam­ming the river would des­troy numer­ous Nubian vil­lages in the area. 4 people have already been shot dead by their own mil­it­ary in this area for mak­ing their protests heard, such is the man­ner of gov­ern­ment here. What con­fuses me is that if ever there was a prime can­did­ate for pro­duct­ive solar elec­tri­city gen­er­a­tion, it is here! It never rains. Sun­light from dawn to dusk except for the occa­sional dust storm. Reli­able, low-maintenance, afford­able and clean elec­tri­city for all. But with the UN hell-bent on destabil­ising the country’s polit­ical situ­ation even fur­ther, options like this are simply not even going to be considered.

“When a coun­try is ruled by a mil­it­ary man, it is not ideal”, con­tin­ued Mr. Taj. “But it is worse for the people if he is sud­denly taken away by for­eign gov­ern­ments on the other side of the world.” Yes, ima­gine if the Arab League nations called for the arrest of George Bush for waging illegal war in Iraq. We would scoff at the idea, whether or not we thought Bush was a nincompoop.

With the first demo­cratic elec­tions in 20 years com­ing up, if the Sudanese want al-Bashir to stay they will vote him in. If they vote in the oppos­i­tion, it makes no real dif­fer­ence whether or not he stands trial. But when the UN jumps in to deliver its self-proclaimed ver­sion of justice, the sys­tem falls apart.

This morn­ing I rode into Don­gola, a buzz­ing town where rick­shaws com­pete with don­keys and crowds of Nubian people for space on the roads, with men and women buy­ing and selling cook­ware and beds and fruit and eat­ing fish and felafel amidst a lively chorus of beep­ing and holler­ing. Sud­denly everything is avail­able, stacked high and neat in little square com­part­ments that line the walls of the little gro­cery stores. Soap, cus­tard powder, instant noodles, even, for some strange reason, a copi­ous sup­ply of those famil­iar shiny green cans of Lyle’s Golden Syrup (par­tially inver­ted), all with tacky and col­our­ful plastic pack­aging that I will later find adorn­ing the scrubby plain or lying in smoul­der­ing heaps on the out­skirts in the com­plete absence of waste management.

From here I am plan­ning to cut across the desert to Khar­toum, but I don’t plan to linger there. The road is long in Sudan, the biggest coun­try in Africa. I have only a month to cross it, and I have a wed­ding to attend this sum­mer. (More on that later.)

The Sudanese have delighted me, not only in their gen­er­os­ity and sim­pli­city, but also in their tend­ency to take tea with milk and not to hes­it­ate to dunk bis­cuits in it. As an Eng­lish­man, you can ima­gine the feel­ing of fraternal close­ness that this activ­ity has generated.

Enjoy the pho­to­graphs, and write to me if you want. It’s always nice to hear from you.

Thanks for read­ing. You might also like these recent articles:

• South­ern Ara­bia And The Troubles Of Yemen
• Hard Days in the Sahara
• Across The Desert To Palmyra