Ridiculous fees (Sudan)

One shocking aspect about Sudan involves getting into the country. The visa fee for Sudan is a staggering US$100 and $150 for Americans. But the hidden fees are even more horrendous. The Sudanese government requires foreigners to register within three days on entry and to register again in Khartoum before leaving the country. The fines for not complying are enormous, costing well over $100. But there is a catch for visiting the immigration offices on time: you need to pay $43 at the port of entry and $10 more in Khartoum. How can ordinary people afford to lavish on such an exorbitant expense?

The Islamist regime knows full well that visitors to Sudan are normally foreign aid workers and businesspeople who tend to fork out the ridiculous sums without question. Due to the destruction of two civil wars, the NGO and IO presence in Sudan is among the highest in all Africa: many westerners and UN soldiers go to Sudan to maintain the health and security of the volatile South. Moreover, Chinese investors are scurrying to Khartoum to partake in the oil and construction bonanza. The Sudanese government, it appears, is merely exploiting the situation. According to Transparency International, Sudan ranks 156th out of 163 countries on its Corruption Perceptions Index. The visa and registration fees for foreigners are only the tip of the iceberg in a country ruled by a hugely inefficient, corrupt government.

The Good and the Bad (Sudan)

Sudan somehow draws you in. Despite the barrenness and inhospitable climes, there is something about the land of the Nubians that can leave you feeling touched, humbled, delighted, saddened, frustrated, and exasperated at the same time. And yet the trials and tribulations of traveling in this extremely deprived and remote part of the world can invoke rewards that far outweigh the troubles encountered along the way.

When you least expect it, Sudan unleashes powers so overwhelming that they put you on a soul-searching journey, mold your worldview, and entice you to leave your baggage, both emotional and physical, behind.

*****
Wadi Halfa is a dusty, rundown port of entry whose only purpose is to serve as a temporary waystation for businesspeople, returning expatriates, and occasional visitors. The entire town's activity revolves around the weekly ferry and its passengers, people stopping only so long as to wait for ongoing connections to Khartoum, the South and even as far as Ethiopia. When the train and minibuses depart, the village recedes into silence once again, with nothing more to suggest of its former grandeur as a commercial capital thriving on trade with el Norte--Egypt.

Wadi Halfa, however, is a place I must stay for a longer time than most others. The headache and diarrhea I caught from eating salad washed with Nile's water while on the ferry forced me to sleep in for hours at the unkempt lokanda that had neither fans, electricity, tap water, nor locked doors. But at least it did shelter me from the sweltering 50-degree heat. And after two days without shower, the buckets of murky water collected straight from the Nile did offer some measure of comfort to the body, even if the stench from the makeshift loo hole was very shocking.

Much of two days I spent in Halfa involved the drudgery process of getting registered with the police, paying exorbitant fees, exchanging money, and finding a way to leave Halfa once and for all. It was then that I realised what it was meant when westerners utter the words, "This is Africa." In this part of the world, things run much more slowly and you simply cannot rush or expect "efficiency" to prevail. Much of the "African curse", of course, stems from the glaring absence of governance and accountability on the part of governments; ordinary Africans are not to be blamed for taking things slowly as they simply lack the means to speed things up. The dearth of development, compounded by bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, and political repression have created nightmares for many Africans struggling to make ends meet on a day to day basis.

As a traveler, you only encounter small jigsaws of these puzzles. But the frustrating entanglements of red tape can be so physically draining that you sometimes lose track of the wider picture of their underlying causes.

(To be continued...)

Culture shock (Sudan)

Sudan proved to be a huge culture shock.

Although nurtured by a surge of foreign investors scurrying for oil in one of the world's fastest growing economies, Sudan's infrastructure falls surprisingly far short of its economic potential--at least compared to the rentier states in the Persian Gulf. Large swathes of towns and settlements outside Khartoum remain underdeveloped, with no roads connecting Sudan and its important trading partner, Egypt, to the north. This is all the more surprising, since Egyptian cultural and economic influences on Sudan are strong, if not pervasive. Many food and industrial goods consumed by Sudanese households come directly from al-Misr (Egypt), not to mention the Egyptian soaps that are watched eagerly by Nubian and Arab families across the largest country on the continent.

While it is comprehensible at first glance that the North and the South should be less developed than the densely populated capital, the disparities seem to arise more from political machination than a dearth of resources. Roads had only been paved or graveled to the extent that allowed for the exploitation of petrol and the conduct of maritime trade through Port Sudan, although the country is now expending Chinese funds to construct roads from Dongola to the border town Wadi Halfa (the roads east from Dongola to Karima, and from Karima south to Khartoum, thankfully, are now sealed).

For decades, Sudan had been engaged in a protracted civil war between the Arabic-speaking Islamist centre and the black Christian/animist periphery in the South, long before the Darfur conflict had emerged. While it is common to speak of the Arab North as the instigator of the war and the black South as the victim of political and economic repression, the North technically speaking had been outside the purview of the pernicious power struggle that had left at least 2 million dead and millions more homeless. The North is, in fact, largely populated by the Nubians--a famous people who had developed a rich indigenous civilisation as old as Egypt's Pharaonic kingdoms, harking back five millennia. Yet, this same proud people have long been ignored by the British colonial and Egyptian regimes as well as Khartoum, with the result that much of Nubian turf remains impoverished in spite of Sudan's booming economy.

The South governed by Sudanese People Liberation Army (SPLA) had also been denied political access, but the two civil wars that combine to stretch nearly half a century ended Khartoum's monopoly on power with the signing of a peace treaty in January 2005. The South today enjoys relative autonomy and boasts a substantial number of appointed representatives to the central government, though relations with Khartoum remain unstable.

In short, the infrastructural gaps, the lack of tourist-friendly facilities, along with the tense political times could pose quite a major shock to travelers who had never set foot on Africa. In the days that followed my arrival at Wadi Halfa, I would not see very much of what Sudan had to offer, but would experience life in a way that I never would have had anywhere else.

On logistics and friends (Sudan)

Sudan felt like another Libya, Syria or Iran--full of mysteries and anxieties for the uninitiated traveler to countries on the "Axis of Evil."

After two months in North Africa and the Middle East, you'd imagine you had gotten used to the region's cultures, languages, customs, food, transport and accommodation. Conceivably, previous journeys in less developed countries would prepare you for travel elsewhere. But while I knew sub-Saharan Africa was far from similar to its northern neighbours, having gathered first-hand accounts on Sudan from four travelers and researched countless times, nothing could fully prepare me for Sudan.

Sudanese visa formalities, for one thing, were an unusual experience. I was required to hand in a letter of introduction from my country's embassy in Cairo. Taiwan, of course, had no diplomatic representation in the largest capital of the Arab world; I had to ask for one from the semi-official Taiwan Trade Office, tucked away in the massive City Stars shopping complex in the al-Misr suburbs. It wasn't easy to locate the mall by bus, as everything was labeled in Arabic, but a friendly 25-year-old local man and three trendy women graciously showed me the way on separate occasions.

There was no guarantee that my letter would work, however, as Sudan could deny my entry simply because of the "China factor"--the anti-Taiwan regime is the largest investor and arms supplier to Sudan at a time when the oil-rich country is shunned by the international community for the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

It was also discouraging to know that Americans and those who visit Israel are routinely refused visas. I held a US passport and had recently been to Jerusalem and the West Bank, so my US$ 100 payment would slip down the drain if it was found I had violated the Islamist state's stringent tourism codes.

The second inconvenience involved the actual process of reaching Sudan. Apart from the plane, the Aswan-Wadi Halfa ferry was the only way to cross from Egypt to Sudan. But the ferry ran only once a week and had to be booked days in advance. Although I had arrived three days before the scheduled departure, second-class tickets had already sold out.

The wait in Aswan lasted a week, during which I befriended a Spanish teacher Fernando and a French cyclist Clement who shared the same dodgy, 5-pound-a-night hostel room as I. Luckily, we were all headed for the same destination, and had successfully attained Sudanese visas. So we decided to give it a try on Monday, hoping to obtain seats in the event of no-shows.

Clement was an interesting fellow. When you're traveling, you'd often meet exceptional characters who take travel to the highest level: cyclists, wheelchair users, walkers, and hitchhikers (the full-out type, not just the occasional hitcher). Clement was a 27-year-old cyclist who rode down to scorching Egypt all the way from the Middle East, and he was about to take on the next challenge: crossing the vast desert terrains in the largest African country where summer temperatures range from 40 to 50 degrees centigrade. For him, it was an alternative , inexpensive and eco-friendly way to see and feel the world at its basics.

His project was impressive, not the least because he was cycling alone in an underdeveloped, almost primeval, world. There were lots of risks and determination he had to take in making his epic journey. At times, he nearly fell sick to dehydration and ran out of drinking water amid the uninhabited desert. He told of many touching encounters where amiable locals helped him along the way and probably had saved his life. For the courage he showed, I held a lot of respect for Clement. Despite our very brief encounter, it also felt awesome to get to know someone as friendly and cool, especially when you hadn't seen and talked to a traveler for weeks.

As for thirty-year-old Fernando, he was also unusual in his own way. Teachers, in general, tend to be stereotypically conservative, or at least less receptive to events outside their realms. But Fernando didn't fit this popular image; rather, he was an open-minded adventurer at heart. Having backpacked to Iran before, Fernando felt that as someone charged with molding the impressionable minds of future leaders, he needed to make an effort to understand other cultures beyond the negative news portrayed by Western media. What better way to achieve this objective than to travel and interact with the people for himself?

Fernando said his pupils had been impressed by his photographs and stories of kids and cultures in the developing world. His goal in the current East African journey (Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania) was simply to show, through photo stories, his students how their counterparts fared on the other side of the globe. This was crucial, he asserted, not only because Spaniards were among the worst traveled Europeans and could gain a lot by venturing outside their comfort zones, but also because his students were growing up in an increasingly global world where an understanding of other cultures would be of paramount importance.

The two days I spent with the two special people made me look forward to our group journey from Egypt to Sudan. We would be able to learn more about each other and share each other company. So early on Monday, we took the local train to the docklands near the Nile's First Cataract. Beneath the scorching sun and amid the large home-bound crowd, we waited anxiously for ferry seats to free up and head for the land of the Nubians.