An entirely unprecedented event has occurred. My personal travel permits have arrived, complete with passport photographs stapled to the A4 documents printed entirely in Arabic. A language of which I have absolutely no knowledge. I know that everyone reads backwards from right to left! Even calendars are marked: sun, sat, fri, thurs, etc.
The authorities provide a completely separate document for each area you expect to visit. They all looked identical but I have been informed that photocopies may not be accepted. This depends a great deal upon the mood of the person, or persons, who ‘need to know’. Anyway, it seems that the application was approved in record time so maybe Tony’s visit did some good after all. Of course it may have been my exceedingly fine passport photographs, which spurred the authorities into action!
The journey to Nyala took nearly three hours at a speed of 350 miles an hour flying at a height of 20,000 feet. I suppose, having glanced at the map, from Khartoum to my destination we travelled around 1000 miles. Which, in terms of distance, is around half way across the country; such is the size of Sudan!
Domestic departures, as against International standards in Khartoum Airport, are a complete shambles. The check in area was the size of a postage stamp in which hundreds of people were all trying to get to one of the desks with loads of boxes, parcels, bags and other sundry items all at once. There are numerous airlines running internal flights in Sudan and from what I could see they were all operating at full capacity the morning I arranged to travel. After a lot of shoving and barging I managed to reach the check in counter with my 30kg or so of luggage to be informed that, before a ticket could be issued, I had to pay an airport tax. To a lady who sat some distance away, surrounded by loads of other passengers all of whom were also paying taxes. Eventually all requirements and formalities were completed, a boarding card was issued and the time came for the next stage of the journey.
The departure lounge was a similar size to the baggage hall except that many rows of metal chairs had been randomly set so as to cause the maximum damage to ones legs. In one corner a refreshment kiosk had been strategically placed, right next door to the ladies and gents loo! And that was it! Passengers were everywhere; I was even convinced that some had been there all night, by the look on their faces. It was now 9.30am and I started out at 6am. The airport being only about half an hours ride from my lodgings! The plane was scheduled to leave prompt at 8am. An announcement on the public address system every so often, by a lady with a very loud voice who held the microphone so close to her mouth that everything came out distorted, resulted in many people suddenly getting up and rushing around trying to force themselves out of the door to the runway. The first time it happened I thought we were in for a terrorist attack!
Eventually, I got quite adept at looking for the boarding cards of these herds, trying to decide whether this was my particular stampede. I spoke to one passenger later who told me that he had joined in three of these exoduses and been sent back each time, just because he was trying to catch the wrong flight! We are so used to announcements and television screens giving times and details of flights that when these are not available you have to rely more on gut instinct than anything else.
With plenty of time to ‘stand and stare’ I noticed a rather peculiar thing. At a guess I would say that over 80 per cent of the people waiting for a flight were Sudanese, about 15% were from other African races and the rest were from various other countries worldwide. With what looked like 5 Europeans although they could have been Americans. And there were probably 4 to 5 hundred people altogether in the hall. Though many people were reading papers, looking at boarding cards, etc, only six were wearing any type of spectacles and of those five, four were white skinned of European ancestry. I now wonder whether many here in the UK really need glasses and maybe people are wooed by the constant adverts reminding us that it is fashionable to wear them? Considering that many thousands of people suffer from eye diseases on the African continent and we were in a region noted for its dusty atmosphere, the lack of eye wear was surprising. Maybe they couldn’t see properly anyway, and just couldn’t afford to purchase glasses.
Eventually, the right time came and we boarded the plane. Which was preceded by the usual x-raying of hand luggage, followed by another physical search of all luggage and body. All this for just an internal flight!
The only unusual incident for me during the flight, was that refreshments were offered at all. Of the passengers, only a small handful took up the offer of food as most were Muslim and everyone fasts during Ramadan. Flying, as we did, fairly low down without the benefit of pressurised cabins, the ground for the whole of the flight was clearly visible. In all the three hours we were in the air, and for a thousand miles I saw nothing but desert. Not soft sandy desert of the Sahara, but a hard looking and parched land with only a few scrub like trees, widely spaced, dotted here and there. No people, no roads, no animals, no nothing. Plenty of evidence was to be seen of old watercourses, appearing as nothing but a depression in the sandy soil now that the rainy season is over. Occasionally the odd row of small trees appeared looking as though they could have once lined a stream. Only twice during the whole journey was any standing water to be seen, two small pools that occurred right towards the end of the flight. A thousand miles of nothing. Truly a desolate and uninviting terrain for mile, after mile, after mile. How lucky we are in the UK with our green countryside and ever changing seasons.
Nyala. October 17th 2004
John
P.S. It’s bloody hot and dusty here. Never dropping below 85, except in the middle of the night. The sweat rolls off just doing nothing!
JL.
Posted by webmaster at October 22, 2004 12:31 PM