Richard Stupart

The stories from good travels never really end. There is always a new one, a new gloss on an old one, or simply a retelling to someone who has never heard it before. Sometimes it’s a connected event that triggers a memory. Other times its a photo, a scrawl left on the pages of a journal by an earlier self in the hopes that a later one would come across those pages and be able to remember not simply the facts of an event, but to feel again what it was like to be that person, to be there, then.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

At 10h30 this morning the train from Luxor hissed to a final stop and I popped my tired little head out in Cairo. It’s four days short of two months of near non-stop moving, busing, boating, trucking (or on-top-of-trucking, technically) and one night on a felucca. I am holding out until I have seen the Pyramids tomorrow before drawing a line in my mind to this journey, because that’s always how I imagined it ending. In front of the Great Pyramid of Giza, rather than the McDonalds of Cairo. Maybe I just like the drama of ending at one of the surviving wonders of the ancient world.

Read the rest of this entry »

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”.

Read the rest of this entry »

I left Khartoum early on Christmas morning. You wouldn’t think it was. Absolutely nothing slows in Khartoum. Unsurprising, but strange. Only a sandstone church, alone in a landscape of crescent minarets outside the bus window, was sheltering its flock from the morning sun. Connecting them in spirit to what consumes the place I call home this day. For my part, I had found my way to the dusty chaos of the bus station and on to a bus bound for Bagrawiya.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or not. There is no Christmas in Sudan – not even the bubble-wrapped version where the jolly Santa Claus puts you on his knees and hears your Christmas wishes. No sir. Tomorrow will be another day of bright sun, delicious schwarmas, clapped out yellow taxis and business as usual.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been in Ethiopia for almost two weeks now. It’s been a delicious downtime from constant traveling up to this point – a chance to stop thinking about Cairo, about endings, about the fact that nothing lasts forever. But this morning it will be time to move on. To Metema at the edge of Ethiopia and on into Sudan to write the closing chapters in this journey.

Read the rest of this entry »

Taken straight out of my journal notes. Disclaimer for poor grammar,etc

It’s moving day again today. Somehow another three mosquitos managed to get into my mosquito net and haunt my dreams. I wonder sometimes if it’s not called a mosquito net because it attracts them. I’m not feeling entirely well this morning – almost fluey. Putting it down to the effects of extended travel, I make a note to find some vitamins somewhere this morning. I’m al;so quite thirsty, and realise that i’ve not actually drunk anything since around lunchtime yesterday. I’ve not seen much bottled water on sale here (as compared to, say, Tanzania) and a quick check in the guidebook is silent on the issue of water drinkability. So I chance it and drink from the tap in my room. I’ll know in time if that was a silly idea or not.

Read the rest of this entry »