Sudan: Pyramids, Permits, Porridge

The police officer grabs my arm roughly and tries to drag me behind him. Being Arab, rather than African, he's extremely short in stature and I tower over him. I resist. He shouts roughly in Arabic - I don't catch the exact meaning, but the sense is clear. He squeezes my arm tighter, so tight I can feel his nails digging in and drawing blood. For a second I consider smashing his face with my fist - perhaps wisely, I restrain myself. He pulls himself up to his full height, around 5 foot 5, and brings his face very close to mine. I mime as if to bite his nose, and he backs off, cowering in fear. "Inta mejnoon, inta mejnoon", he shouts in Arabic - "You are crazy, you are crazy", and unmistakably mimes a handcuffing maneouvre. My German travelling companions, Peter and Tariq, laugh contemptuously at him. "There's nothing he can do, we have done nothing wrong", says Peter, grinning. For all my external bravado I don't quite share his optimism, in fact I feel quite frightened. We are, after all, under arrest in Sudan.

Ah, Sudan. In his epic account of the British reconquest of the Sudan in 1898, With Kitchener to Khartoum, the Victorian journalist G.W. Steevens memorably described the country as "a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever". The ancient Egyptians knew it simply as "Kush" - "the wretched"; both are descriptions with which I have more than a little sympathy. In many ways Sudan is exactly as might be expected: very big, very hot, very dusty, and very poor. The roads are awful. The hotels are awful. The food is awful. The bureaucracy is simply staggering. Barring a few broken down pyramids scattered across the desert, there isn't even much in the way of things to see. And yet...

When locals engage travellers in conversation, which they do with an incredible regularity, one of the first questions they ask is invariably, "why are you here?". This is usually followed by a verbatim regurgitation of the country's well-publicised ills: poverty, war, government-sponsored genocide, famine and the like. The question is quite a difficult one to answer - and one I have asked myself regularly in the last ten days, usually following a muttered exhortation of "fucking Sudan".

Yet Sudan is charming. It might take ten hours to travel 100 miles, it might be impossible to eat anything except felafel and laughing cow cheese, and it might need two hours a day just to negotiate the bureaucratic jungle of travel permits, photo permits, security registration, and army checkpoints, but... Sudan is like a woman who plays hard to get. Coquettish, manipulative, evasive, sometimes downright unpleasant, but every so often, just as all patience is finally being exhausted, she does something so beautiful, alluring, and beguiling that she reels you right back in again.

And so it proved with the saga of my arrest in the exquisitely-named town of "Dongola". The town itself sits on the west bank of the Nile, while its bus station is on the east; the two are linked by a small ferry. Upon arrival at the bus station the previous day, I had simply boarded the waiting ferry and crossed. After a couple of hours jumping through hoops at the town's security office, I had the requisite permits to stay in town, and was able to check in to a hotel and go about my business unmolested. Leaving, however, was a different story. A jumped-up little man with a moustache (why do third world government officials always have a moustache?) demanded a permit. Sensing a scam - aside from the previous day's successful ferry crossing without any such permit, he wore no uniform and carried no identification - I ignored him and boarded the ferry.

Enter another jumped-up little man with a moustache, a hugely umpleasant-looking growth on his cheek, and the light blue uniform of the Sudanese police. I was in no mood to cooperate with him, and his aggressive demeanour and physical man-handling did not help matters. Upon reaching the east bank of the Nile we were hauled off to a nearby police station, harangued in Arabic (which for once I made great theatre of not speaking a single word of) and intimidated by a very public production of handcuffs and a tour of the cells - all the while my assailant bristling with indignation in the margins, strange growth quivering with unrestrained outrage.

Finally an English speaker was produced. This man was not an official, merely a bystander from the nearby market who has been commandeered to act as an interpreter. In full earshot of the assembled police and army officers, who, unusually for heavily anglophone Sudan, did not understand a word, he offered reassurances.

"I am sorry you have been treated like this. You see what we must deal with from our government? You must have a permit to cross the Nile - without it you cannot board the ferry. If you do not argue, accept the permit, you will be released. If you do not, they will keep you here. This will be bad for you I think."

Despite the fact that this would indeed be "bad for you", my German companions and I were not to be placated so easily, however.

"But yesterday we crossed the Nile on this exact fucking ferry, without a permit. So what the fuck are you talking about?"

"Ah but that was crossing east to west. For this you need no permit. Crossing west to east is a different story. For this you must have permit. I am sorry. You must wait here, the man with the permits will come from the office in Dongola, and you will go with him back to the office, to get a permit."

The man duly arrived, half an hour later, permits in hand. Could he not just issue the permit there and then, to save us two more crossings of the river, one with permit, one without? Of course not. That would be unforgivable. We must accompany him back to his office forthwith. Peter, who has not been to Venezuela, took his turn to vent his feelings of disgust at Sudan's Monty Pythonesque bureaucracy:

"This is the worst country I have ever been to. This is just ridiculous. We will return to Europe and tell everyone how terrible Sudan is and no-one else will come here. Why do you victimise us like this?"

Our interpreter just smiled sadly and shrugged.

"This is the Sudanese government, not the Sudanese people"

An hour later, permits in hand, and fresh from a lecture from the chief of police about the extreme danger of crossing the Nile from west to east without a permit (presumably he was not referring to the likelihood of assault by his officers, though that appeared the only remotely dangerous aspect of the crossing to me), we approached the ferry ticket office, muttering curses on Sudan and all its ridiculousness. Our interpretor appeared from nowhere, and in a stroke reminded us of what's so great about this country.

"I am so sorry for what has happened. I have bought your ferry tickets for you. Please do not think badly about Sudan and its people."

How could I disagree?

Sahara

I sit on the crest of a giant hill, watching the far-off orange disk of the sun sink below the horizon. As far as the eye can see, in every direction, is nothing but the purest white sand imaginable, formed into huge undulating dunes like the roiling surface of the ocean. Once again I experience the eerie silence of the desert. Aside from our trusty Toyota Landcruiser, not a single sign of life is visible. This is the largest expanse of sand on earth: 2.8 million square kilometres of vast, desolate emptiness. The ancient Egyptians knew it simply as deshret, or "red land". The Arabs call it Sahara. We use both names: this is the Sahara Desert.

It's perhaps fitting that the generic Arabic word for desert, "Sahara", has come to refer in English specifically to the great desert that spans the width of north Africa. As the British explorer Ralph Bagnold observed in Libyan Sands, the Sahara, and particularly the Egyptian Sahara, is the greatest expanse of desert on the planet: "There are deserts and there are deserts. But the Western Desert, a vast expanse that starts at the western banks of the Nile and continues well into Libya is the desert of deserts."

Like the visceral fear that gripped me as I flew over the endless expanse of green of the Amazon, I find the sheer scale of the Sahara queasily un-nerving. It's disconcerting enough to be unable to see anything beyond the endless repetitious dunes in all directions, but the knowledge that in some directions the landscape continues in this vein for a thousand miles is truly terrifying. I don't stray far from the Landcruiser driven by our affable Berber guide, Ibrahim; though the way he pilots the vehicle up and down seemingly sheer walls of sand does little for my nerves. He laughs at his passengers' obvious concern, and with a couple of silent prayers to Allah we're off again, careering across the sand at an improbable angle, trying to build up sufficient speed to mount the crest of the next vertical dune. I'm starting to understand why it's called the Great Sand Sea, as it's all rather reminiscent of The Perfect Storm, though with sand instead of water, and a grinning nomad in a keffiyeh in place of George Clooney.

I visited the Great Sand Sea from the small oasis town of Siwa, close to Egypt's western border with Libya. Despite its incredibly remote location, Siwa has an ancient history dating back to Pharaonic times, when it was famed as the site of the omniscient Oracle of Amun. After invading Egypt in 525BC, the Persian king Cambyses sent an army 50,000 strong to take Siwa and destroy the Oracle, which had - presciently as it turned out - predicted his imminent demise; in a mystery which endures to the present day, the entire force was simply swallowed up by the vast emptiness of the desert and never heard from again. Following his own conquest of Egypt in 332BC, the legendary Macedonian General Alexander the Great made a personal pilgrimage to Siwa, where he was acclaimed by the local priests as the son of a god. In this respect Alexander was a little more successful than a certain Jesus of Nazareth; unlike the rest of the country, Christianity never reached this remote corner of Egypt. Though it did eventually fall to Islam, Siwa's remoteness ensured its unique culture, religion and language endured.

In many respects Siwa is more akin to Libya than Egypt: the people here are Berbers rather than Arabs, and while most locals speak at least some Arabic (certainly more than me), the Berber dialect of Siwi is still very much the lingua franca. Such is Siwa's remoteness in fact, the oasis was only connected to the rest of Egypt by road in the mid-1980s. In many respects Siwa's isolation allows it to exist in a timewarp of mudbrick houses, donkey carts, and candlelight; a display about local culture in the Tourist Office features the immortal phrase: "before the coming of television in 1988".

Siwa is very much an African, rather than Egyptian town, with a grinding poverty the like of which I can scarcely recall seeing before. Although I have now returned, briefly, to Cairo and the Middle East, my sojourn in Siwa very much set the tone for the rest of my journey: I depart tonight by sleeper train to Aswan, from where I will sail across Lake Nasser, bound for Africa. The Sudan.