taking the long way home. almost to the finish line.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

And here we are in bright and sunny sudan. we left aswan monday morning and caught a train to the port on lake nasser. on the way we met up with some more westerners who were bound for sudan with us. so our group of six found our way onto our tiny ferry boat and down into second class, which consisted of a room full of slightly padded, narrow benches, and got to know each other a little. our new travel buddies were: carlos - an italian guy who quit his job to backpack around. he's been at it for two years and wants to go for two more. curtis - a canadian who trades in silver and gold to finance his cheap travel. leslie and eowin - an irish lad and an american girl who randomly met while traveling and decided to join up and go down to rwanda. so now we were six strong. we sat and watched for several hours as the boat was loaded by hand. it would seem to me that the entire undersection of the ferry was filled to overflowing with hostess twinkies and tiger tails. and for the next 24 hours we alternated chatting with terrible sleep and passed around sections of a sensationalist version of joan kennedy's biography. and in a mere day, we had chugged our way up the nile and into sudan. we changed money (which is crazy strong for a cheap traveller - 2 per american dollar) and set off to find a hotel. our stop for the night was wadi halfa, a desert outpost that exists solely to usher passengers from the train to the ferry or from the ferry to the train. it is dry and hot and constantly dusty.
our hotel ended up being a room (sort of) with a dirt floor and beds made mostly of woven string. we took "showers" from a bucket, ate some overpriced fish and lamented the presence of only non-alcoholic beer. cokes from glass bottles worked well enough for washing the grit out of our mouths. the rest of tuesday night was spent steadying our nerves and filtering tons of water for the train ride the next day that was said to last anywhere from 18 to 50 hours. we showed up at the train station the next morning (it had been closed the night before) and tried to spring for some second class tickets. turns out, both first, second and third classes were booked solid. no seats. so we showed back up and bording time to find that a semi riot was going on at every door with people trying to get on for standing room. we wandered up and down the train, looking for a lighter crowd. instead we found, at the very back of the train, an old ratty car with no seats or lights that smelled strongly of fish. we set our new american girl friend to flirting with the policeman outside and we were ushered around back where no one else could see, shoved inside the train car and told to "shut our mouths." we crouched in the dark for what seemed like ages, until the train finally lurched forward and we were off, stowed away like tramps with about 7 other sudanese men.
a few stops later a policeman got on and got a $10 bribe from each of us. we were mad, but what else could we do? get off in the middle of the desert and walk to the capital? so, we rode through the night in our fish car until we were woken up and kicked off the car so that it could be loaded full of twinkies and tiger tails (which is apparently the national food of sudan). we snuck up into third class and found some newly vacated seats for the remaining two thirds of our trip. we filled our time by dangling our legs from the door and watching the desert slowly drag by and trying to sleep on the hard wooden benches. however, even the company of our new travel companions could not keep us entertained for the next ten hours. and when we stopped for 2 hours at a rest stop that was another 10 to 12 hours from the capital, all six of us gave up hope for remaining at all sane and benadryl'd ourselves to sleep, some on benches, some in the inches of dust that had accumulated on the floor. and voila! a mere 33 hours after we had borded the train, we were in khartoum and only slightly close to being certifiably insane! by this point it was friday morning and we had been fairly consistently travelling since monday night. we pounded down hotel doors until we found the cheapest we could and collapsed onto our cots. what you might not expect about sudan is that it is insanely expensive. also, none of the atm's here take foreign cards. so, even though the people here are, for the most part, great people, our next move seems to be hauling ass out of here for the next country on the trip. to cushion the financial blow of sudan, we found a great couple who are letting us crash in their guest room while we are in khartoum. the man is irish and his wife is a kiwi. they are teaching english here and we think that we just may have found the most generous people in the world. and now we are killing time waiting for our ethiopian visas. only this time we are only waiting a couple of hours instead of a couple of months. so the next time you all hear from us we will be sweating our tails off not in sudan, but ethiopia.
ps. i tried to give you pictures, but all the internet in khartoum hates me.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

hi again kids. today my story starts way back on september 23rd, when we originally applied for our visas to sudan. we went to the sudanese embassy and were told to go to the american embassy to get letters of recommendation. of course, the american embassy refused, saying that we should have gotten our visas in america and that they hadnt given such letters since 1997. our explanation that we had not seen american soil in over 2 years fell on deaf ears and we were shoo'd out of their oh-so-nice waiting room to make room for some other poor saps who wouldnt really be helped that day.
so off we went to the sudanese embassy. we turned our applications in, in a crush of other people and were told to wait 5 minutes. 7 hours later they told us to come back in 2 weeks to see how our applications were doing in khartoum. the whole time people stared at us as if we were a sideshow act and asked us repeatedly if we REALLY were going to sudan for "tourism".
in the meantime we decided to go to luxor for a change of pace (and to be honest a change in expenses). we wandered down to the train station around 8 for the 10 o clock night bus. this is one of the only buses that foreigners are allowed to take here. so jenny walked up to the ticket man and asked for two second class tickets to luxor. the man refused, saying that there were only first class tickets. instantly following this he sold 2 second class tickets to the man over her shoulder. when she insisted on second class the man told her there were no tickets at all and turned his back on her, holding up the entire line just to prove his point. one helpful soul saw all of this and tried to buy our tickets for us, but only succeeded in getting the ticket man to refuse to sell him a ticket as well. we waited and watched as our train left us in the station. our new friend tried several more times to secure us tickets on the trains to follow and was finally kicked out of the ticket office by the man on account of us being foreigners. around midnight we took our complaint to the tourist police who took our money, walked around the station for an hour with it and then returned the money saying they could do nothing to help us. in a final fit of desperation we just hopped on the train that was on the platform. we were directed to first class because there were no more second class seats. however, just as we had settled into our luxury accommodations a hoard of foreigners in a tour group got on and told us that we were in their seats. so we were bumped to the ground of the "smoking car" (aka the space between train cars). so we sat on the floor while the men who were getting their nighttime ramadan nicotine fix marveled over the strange foreigners on the ground and ashed in our "seats". eventually the ticket man came around and asked whether we wanted to pay for first or second class tickets for our fine lodging. we asked if we could pay for third, but he was not amused.
Luxor was hot, and there is not much to tell. our biggest adventure was sneaking into the roof pool of the absurdly expensive semi luxury hotel.
after a week or so in luxor we headed back to cairo for more waiting. we went back to the embassy and were ushered behind the scenes to talk to the head man in charge. once we got back there we could see that all of the computers at the stations at which people were so busily working weren't even plugged in. our hopes of ever getting a visa were somewhat dashed and we started planning just exactly how we might sneak in to sudan. back behind the scenes we patiently waited our turn while the biggest jerk in the world yelled and screamed at the embassy. he was a canadian and had gotten his visa that day but was angry that there was handwritten information on it and that it had cost so much. apparently he had never seen a visa before and was really angry that he'd had to wait 4 whole hours for his visa. the big boss, apparently overwhelmed by the assholeness of this man, gave us his number and told us to call on sunday.
and back to the hotel for more waiting.
one night during our seemingly endless stay in our hostel, we decided to take ourselves out to a bellydancing club for a treat. initially we expected it to be some touristy sort of place, but we bargained down the cover charge and hoped for the best. once inside we saw, through a haze of shisha smoke, that we were not only the only foreigners there, but except for one woman and her children (?!) we were the only girls there. the rest were egyptian businessmen, mostly of the middle aged sort. and the venue was a mostly empty old dancehall with a tiny stage and about ten fold out tables. what followed ended up seeming more like a strip club than anything else. occasionally one of the men would get on stage and dance with a girl with a handful of small change. and whenever he was particularly struck by the moment he would throw the bills, one by one, so that they rained down over the girl's head. the effect was somewhat like one of those gameshows where the contestants stand in a plastic box while money swirls around them in a windstorm. and the short old man who was singing into a microphone turned up to the maximum amount of echo would shuffle around the dancing girl and pick up all the tip money. as the night got later the girls got, well, bustier and the amount of dancing on tables increased. all the while, the woman with her children in tow would encourage her own 20 something daughter to get up on stage and shake it for the whole club to see. almost like an audition. the effect was a little creepy and david lynch wouldnt have had to change much to use it in a movie.
so. fast forward past more waiting and cheap food to thursday. we decided to call the embassy man just to remind him of our existence. he told us to come down to the embassy. so we shook off the sleep and hustled down there. one hour, eight stamps and two signatures later, to our shock and surprise, he handed us our passports, complete with sudanese visas. he had bypassed khartoum and just given us the visas because jenn had told him that her father was meeting us there and was getting angry with us. a month of waiting and all we had ever needed was this guy's signature. so, we ran out of the embassy clutching our more precious than gold visas before anyone could change their minds, packed our bags and hightailed it to the train station.
realizing that we were destined for the floor we just settled into our between car seats straight away. and by our seats i mean an empty closet and a luggage rack. only this time, we were ushered by four police into the sleeper car without paying a penny more, because girls apparently should not have to sleep on the floor. however, as they escorted us through the entire train, a policeman on each side and all our bags with us, i am sure that it looked like the poor, dirty foreign girls were being arrested as stowaways.
and that brings us to now. we are in aswan, tickets in hand. our boat for sudan leaves tomorrow and should take about a day. i just hope there is no luggage rack this time.