Traveling from Cape to Cairo was, in many places, a very solitary experience. I would be lying, however, if I said that I was ever completely on my lonesome. Less than a foot high, generally quiet and inedible in Ethiopia and Sudan – I had a partner.
The flight home was about the only uneventful part of the journey. Two days ago, facing the Giza Pyramids, I couldn’t bring myself to understand, to appreciate, what it means for this journey to have come to an end. Back in South Africa – exhausted – I couldn’t help myself skimming some of the photographs, some of the writing lying in my unpacked bag. Slowly, I am starting to feel the ending.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The last week and a bit I have been in Ethiopia, drinking delicious coffee, wandering around the ruins of castles I had never known Africa capable of possessing and ruminating on the big questions of life, the universe and everything (yes, I brought a towel). On Monday I am leaving Gonder in the north for a tiny spec of a town called Metema for the crossing into Sudan and the final leg north to Cairo.
I promise to post something before then, but for now wanted to show off the first actual piece of writing I’ve had published somewhere that isn’t this blog.
Glow.
It’s dark. We left Marsabit an hour ago, by which time night had long fallen, but as I clamber down into the lorry’s cargo hold, the darkness becomes a dense, clinging oil. Occasionally pierced by small torches as the dozen or so others in the small space jostle for enough space to sleep in as the frame of the vehicle bangs and squeaks and unexpectedly leaps into the air.
