I pick Tarbouche House based on raving online reviews about its close distance to the waterfront, and its helpful owner and manager. The man is in a bad mood when I arrive and greets me by launching into his house rules: My door and windows must always be closed when the air con is on, I must put my soiled toilet paper in the basket provided for this purpose, the gate must always be locked and anyone who isn’t a paying guest is not allowed onto the premises. He disappears to his office to make copies of my passport while I fill in the checking-in form. It lists the rules and warns that anyone who breaks them will be kicked out. I discover two days later that this is not an idle threat.
The strict rules don’t match the town’s relaxed atmosphere. Even though it’s predominantly Muslim, Dahab carries itself like a real coastal town. The dress code in the business centre features tunics and burkas but clothes are optional at the waterfront and the streets around it. Hot guys with sun-kissed brown skin walk along the promenade topless, flexing their gym-honed bodies and groomed poodles. Women are in bum shorts and bikini tops, and divers turn heads with bodies that look like marble sculptures under their wetsuits.
It’s not a walk at the promenade without people who own perfume and curio shops making a sales pitch that starts with invitations for Bedouin tea that’s made with dried wild sage, cardamom pods, cinnamon bark and black tea.
I follow a Bob Marley song, ‘Zimbabwe’, to Planet Café, where I park myself on a lounge chair next to a young couple who’s either kissing, puffing on a splif or sipping on beers. The people in the water swim with their dogs and hang out at the water’s edge to smoke hookah and joints; Dahab’s relaxed to the point of being hedonistic.
The night-time bustle comes from seafood restaurants with names like Nemo, Shark, Fresh Fish and Ali Baba. Their entrances have page-by-page displays of the menu, while their ingredients – lobster, tuna, crab, red snapper, calamari and a host of other species I don’t know – are displayed on ice in glass containers at the door. They’re weighed and sold per gram. My dinner of two hundred grams of lobster starts with a meze of a brinjal dip called baba ganoush, tahina sauce and hummus served with warm puffed pita bread dished from oven to plate. Mains are lobster with salad, grilled vegetables and a subtly spiced rice cooked in tomato paste called sayadeya. Dahab’s plate is local and international, with a choice between several Indian, Korean and Thai dishes. The selection covers vegans, diner-style menus and a German bakery.
Like other tour companies, King Dahab Safari sells its business on placards and boards with pictures pinned on them of the highlights of the many experiences on sale. Most of them have a day trip to the Dead Sea and a hike up Mount Sinai. The desks in King Safari’s office have albums with frame-by-frame photos of their tours and activities. The walls are also covered with pictures of people trekking up mountains on camels, divers surrounded by exotic fish, exhausted but satisfied hikers walking down rocky mountains, on 4x4 adventures in the desert, sitting around a bonfire. The message is clear: It’s always playtime in Dahab. My playtime starts with the realisation that the town doesn’t know how to keep time or its word.
Exhibit A: King Safari insists on picking me up at Tarbouche House at 8am for a snorkelling trip to Three Pools. My trip starts at 10am after many unanswered calls make me walk to their office, only to find it locked. I bang on the glass door until someone comes out from the back of the room.
‘We forgot about you,’ he says coolly while we wait for a driver who shows up in a bakkie.
When we get to Happy Life Village, where the pools are, the private instructor who is supposed to snorkel with me turns out to be non-existent.
The white lies become part of my Dahab experience. Exhibit B is the trip to Jerusalem. All companies say they go there once a week, another says they make daily trips and I can still go even though I have a single-entry visa, says Salim the tour guide. He swears that he knows the border officials and they will not stamp me out of the country. When I try to book, he tells me that they only travel with a Russian group, so essentially I will just be coming along for the ride. I decided to give it a miss.
I book an overnight trip to a Bedouin village in the mountains with Salim for a night of traditional food and music. The mountains turn out to be the rocky escarpment close to Happy Life Village; the village is a beach with camping facilities, dinner is the fish we buy in Dahab and roast on the fire with tomatoes, potatoes and carrots. He sings folk songs his grandmother used to sing for him when he was young when I ask about traditional music. He smiles and chain-smokes the night away, waiting for the sunrise.
Staying up all night under the stars watching Saudi Arabia shine so close to me, I revisit my wish to one day travel there to follow Prophet Mohammed’s footsteps. It makes up for my improvised night in the mountains.
When I book my snorkelling trip to Ras Abu Galum, I know that what I’m paying for is not what I will get, so I’m happy that the private trip includes four other people and become even more excited when we collect a group that makes us travel in three bakkies to Ras Abu Galum. However, I’m shocked to discover that all the snorkelling gear that’s included in the money I pay for the trip is old. My flippers have holes at the toes and my goggles are held together with strings and rubber bands.
The biggest lie anyone tells me is that it’s easy to hike up Mount Sinai. I book a trip and stock up on water and energy drinks. Our 11pm departure to Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of the holy mountain starts after midnight, and we arrive there with less than four hours left before sunrise. The ‘easy’ climb to the mountain top is up almost four thousand steps. I finally face my fear of camels, and spend my trip praying silently that I don’t topple over and fall down the mountain whenever it walks on the edge of the rocky path. The camel’s minder scolds me when I ask him to make it walk in the middle of the road. ‘This is not a car, you can’t control it.’
He tells me to lose weight when I point out that his camel is so slow, others that start the journey after us catch up and disappear from view. ‘You’re too fat,’ he says.
‘Please repeat your words when I’m back on solid ground so I can smack some respect into you,’ I tell him.
My group of two Cairene friends, five American students and a mother with a son and daughter, who is dressed like her in Juicy Couture, wedge heel sneakers and fully made up faces have already started their final climb to the spot where Moses collects the Ten Commandments when I arrive at the camel’s final stop. The only way up from here is up seven hundred and fifty steps. Our guide Aziz is annoyed with me for being slow. He sizes me up before saying, ‘You won’t be fast enough. I’ll find you here.’ He takes my phone. ‘At least you’ll have pictures of the chapel,’ he says, running up to rejoin the group. I’m not fit but, given time, I can keep up. It’s the late start that steals my time. If the trip didn’t start on African time, I’d be able to take in sights like a chapel built on the spot where Elijah spent forty days and nights waiting to meet God.
‘You’re lucky I know that the sixth commandment says “thou shall not kill”, otherwise, I’d bury you with my words,’ I hiss back at him to have a last word in the conversation.
I know by now, after nine years of travelling the continent that, ‘this is Africa’, as seasoned road hags love saying. In my case it means inconvenience and things that are annoying always precede incredibly rewarding experiences. In this case, it’s the perfect peace that overcomes me sitting on a stoep, watching the darkness disappear and camels munching on watermelon while their minders nap inside the café.
The group returns with minor scratches and a twisted ankle for the mom; she looks wild with runny makeup and her ironed hair has become frizzy. I walk down on foot and still too slow to catch up with the group and other people who walk past me. One of the camel minders stays within view to help me make my way down.
Often when we talk about Islam and Christianity, it’s about conflict, and although it’s true that religion has caused havoc in Afric
a, I also stumble upon places that remind me to never take anything at face value, especially when it’s about Africa.
Saint Catherine’s Monastery stands as a testament of harmony between Christianity and Islam. The story of its origin dates back to 530 CE when its grey granite walls went up. They’re still standing. Islam and Christianity have always been entwined at the monastery and, at one point, the monks turn to Prophet Mohammed for protection during invasions. The Prophet has also been to the monastery, and the mosque that was built in medieval times still stands on the grounds.
Aziz is in a hurry to end our trip and runs us through the visit, taking us to the tumbling green plant that’s believed to be Moses’ Burning Bush and into the church. He says he’s doing us a favour when I complain that I need more than ten minutes here. The group complains that they’re tired and the majority wins; we head back to Dahab. This moment is the reason I prefer travelling alone; places have different meanings to all of us and the person who doesn’t have numbers on their side gets overruled.
On the trip back to Dahab I think about the few Sunday School classes I went to, and how alive the stories become in Egypt, from visiting the compound where Jesus and his parents stayed in Cairo, and drinking water from the same well they used to drink from, to walking in Moses’ footsteps and the realisation that in the rocky region of the Sinai, it could very well be true that water was drawn from rocks because they are the only things around.
I started travelling to know Africa through its sights, smells, tastes, sounds and textures. I now do it to honour my experiences in West Africa, so that time never turns them into fading memories in other journeys my life takes me on.
XXIV
SUDAN
December 2017
ON PAPER, GETTING A Sudanese visa is as easy as submitting an application form in person or by courier to the embassy in Pretoria and paying R700 for a two-month single-entry visa. I hate travel administration that involves more than showing up at borders, and getting a Sudanese visa is tedious: I need two recent passport pictures, proof of flight reservations, confirmed hotel bookings, a copy of my passport, a three-month bank statement, a letter of employment and a yellow fever card. I buy my ticket to Khartoum on a whim six weeks before my travels and only apply for a visa a week before my date of departure.
The application form is rather amusing, with the usual questions about nationality, gender and passport number, where and when it was issued, when it will expire; and questions I have never encountered before, like my blood group, my mother’s name and my religion, which I answer as none. I’m a socialised Christian with a strong affinity for Rastafarianism, slight guilt that I increasingly need to keep a God in my life doesn’t include becoming Voodoo even though Mahu is a feminine spirit, and I’ve been thinking about Islam a lot and realising that I subconsciously travel to Muslim countries, and feel like something is missing if I don’t spend Ramadan in one of them. Writing ‘none’ is easier than ‘it’s complicated’.
I submit my paperwork with an email asking for the application to be fast-tracked so I don’t miss my flight even though, as I discover, I’m supposed to book a flight after the visa has been granted. I pack my tears in case I need them when I get a call saying the counsellor would like to meet me. I shouldn’t have bothered because, as it turns out, the Sudanese people, including officials, believe that guests should feel at home, no matter who you are.
Mr Masjeed’s first question is about my religion. I tell him the complicated story, he assures me that even though his country is predominantly Muslim and conservative, people with and without religions are free to express themselves. He wants to know what I want to experience and whether I have a host, then gives me his friend Bashir’s number.
Bashir is a Sudanese-South African, so I will not feel like a complete stranger. ‘It’s a pity you are arriving two days after his son’s wedding; I’m sure he would have loved it if you were also there.’ I show off my limited Arabic when I drink tea with thlath, three sugars. The ambassador also wants to meet, to offer me bissap tea and let me know that he knows I’m not being honest when I say I’m staying at one of the most expensive hotels in Khartoum.
Even with travel apps and Google, it’s hard to plan my logistics and when I call the cheap hotels I find online, receptionists don’t speak English. He refers me to a cheaper hotel he knows and tells me to never turn down an invitation, whatever its nature.
‘You’re going to be pleasantly surprised by Sudan, even with your experience. The Sudanese people are very different,’ he says. I’m already off to a great start because officialdom usually wants to meet to ask questions that leave me wondering why I’m so attached to a continent that’s not always the easiest to travel.
The eleven-hour flight from Johannesburg to Khartoum includes a stop at Bole International in Addis Ababa, the city of my dreams and nightmares. I arrive in Khartoum switched on to the person I become on the road, greeting the uniforms with ‘salam alaikum’, thanking them by saying ‘shukran’. The first person I ask for directions to the ATM points towards the door. The next person says there are no ATMs and the third tells me that there are ATMs but I can’t use them because Sudan is still under sanctions that keep them out of the Visa and Mastercard networks. I’m screwed.
I have no money other than a thin stack of Kenyan shillings and Egyptian pounds left over from my trips there at the beginning of 2017. I exchange them for enough Sudanese pounds to tide me over the Christmas holidays at home. My plan to get money via Western Union falls flat when my cousin Oageng discovers, at the third outlet he goes to in Pretoria, that they don’t transfer money to Sudan. My partner steps in and calls a Joburg-based outlet first to find out if they send money to Sudan, only for the story to change from “yes we do” to “only if it’s going to a resident”. I’m really screwed now.
Plan B comes from Mahlatsi, who offers to ask his network of Somalis to transfer my money from South Africa. For now all I can do is wait. I use the time to visit the confluence of the Nile Rivers at sunset, to peruse the main shopping districts in Khartoum and in Omdurman, the country’s second largest city, and to take evening joyrides that end at the restaurants along the river bank, from where I watch the city lights twinkling on the Nile.
Plan B fails. My sister takes US$1000 to Mr Masjeed, who sends a Khartoum-based banker to my hotel with a suitcase filled with Sudanese pounds. It’s not the ideal way to access cash, but it becomes yet another way I’m made to feel at home.
I have been wanting to come to Sudan for years, but I’ve been afraid that being here would rattle the ghosts I buried. Before my trip to the mass graves in Rwanda, visiting Sudan was about going to the pyramids in Meroe and exploring the ancient Nubian history that predates that of Egypt. After my breakdown in Ntarama in 2011, a trip to Sudan needed to feature Darfur as part of the instruction to write wars and conflict. Unlike the voices that tell me ‘Africa now’ in 2007, the word in Ntarama scares me and I run away from the instruction until 2017 when Sindi, a friend of almost two decades, loses her fears and emboldens me to think about my calling to places like Darfur, Bangui and Mogadishu. I’m now ready, and even though this trip doesn’t include travelling to Darfur, I use being in Khartoum as a start; forming social networks with people who live or work in Darfur.
Being in Sudan feels like a sigh of relief. My spirit is light and I find the simplicity of life here restorative. Other than waking up to the call to prayer and hearing the muezzin bounce around the city five times a day, I feel transported back to a gentler, more innocent time when trusting strangers was second nature instead of a dance with danger.
I’m at Lisamin Safari Hotel in Al Amarat. Flags of Sudan and Kenya wave at the entrance and the lobby is decorated with swathes of kente cloth. The wall behind the receptionist has a mural of two minions, only they’re dressed traditionally in a purple hijab, and a tunic and turban for the male minion. Being in countries that are authentic to who they are is one of my greatest joys of
travelling.
The receptionist refuses to tell me how to use public transport to get to the national museum. She doesn’t want me to get lost or be frustrated by the language barrier and doesn’t care that getting lost is part of the magic of being in a place. I hang around Street 41 looking for someone to help me, but it’s too early and the restaurants, ice cream shops and kiosks in the dusty square behind the hotel are still closed. Only the mechanics and old women with simple coffee stalls are open for business.
I go to the old woman hidden behind zinc sheets put up around a construction site, and sit under the tree with her greasy, mechanic customers for my morning cup. Her quiet grace draws me to her. She sits on her stool under the baking sun with a toothless smile glued on a face shrouded by a delicate black cotton wrap. She wears thick socks with flip flops to keep the dust off her feet. Her work station is a small red wooden table topped with jars of sugar, coffee, cinnamon, star anise and ginger powder. It also has short drinking glasses. The rest of her equipment includes a small brazier, a small plastic bag filled with coal, several kettles and a plastic bottle she’s cut in half and uses to rinse used glasses. We can only talk with our smiles and by clasping our hands. It’s a pleasing way to start the day.
I relent and go back to the hotel for the receptionist to order a ride to Nile Street on Tirhal cab app.
Despite being on the Cape to Cairo route that has inspired adventurers for generations, Khartoum treats tourism like a side event, even with talk of rising visitor numbers. Signs are in Arabic and there is scant information about its attraction or the artefacts at the museum. It makes what should be an enlightening time at the double-storey building underwhelming; leaving me with more questions than answers about the ten thousand leftovers from ancient empires. Instead, I hark back to my visit to the Cairo museum, recognising the granite columns, statues and remains from the temples of Kemma, Semma and Buhen by the details I associate with ancient Egypt instead of information plaques. I’m the only tourist among different groups of school children and sparse families on a Sunday outing.
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