Shots Across the Water, page 5
The sun had only been up for an hour and by the time we set off it was already very hot. I wore a scarf on my head covering most of my face, as did everyone else. One of the men showed me how to tie my small rucksack on to the ropes on the top of the sacks and how to get comfortable sitting on a sack with my legs over the side of the lorry. I held on to the ropes with both hands and it was surprisingly comfortable. Once we started moving it was cooler.
About an hour into the journey we were driving through desert when the lorry ground to a halt. The fan buckled and split the radiator. Aziz and Kazim, who were clearly excellent mechanics, removed the radiator. There were a number of lorries driving in both directions so they waved one down and Kazim hitched a ride carrying the broken radiator. Aziz waited with us passengers.
This would clearly take some time so everyone climbed down from the top of the lorry and walked around a bit. About 30 minutes later there was a commotion and everyone slid underneath the lorry. I quickly followed, wrapping my scarf around the whole of my head and face, copying what the others were doing. That was just in time as within minutes a cloud of sand encircled the lorry and swept through the underside where we were all gathered. I lay on the ground taking short breaths, trying not to inhale the sand as it swirled around. It was a sandstorm and all I could see through the gauze of my scarf were bodies covered in sand.
It felt like a long time but after an hour the storm passed. Everyone emerged from underneath and we moved away from each other and shook ourselves and our clothes until most of the sand had fallen away. After three hours Kazim returned with a replacement radiator and he and Aziz took another hour to put it back. By now it was late morning and approaching the heat of the day, but despite this they were very efficient and appeared to enjoy their work. They kept asking me and other passengers to come and observe their impressive mechanical skills.
Once the job was completed everyone climbed back on to the top of the lorry and we set off through the sandy desert punctuated by only the occasional withered shrub. Every so often there was a shout from one of the drivers and the lorry stopped. We climbed down from the top of the lorry and dug the wheels out of the sand. There was no road as such, just a track in the sand that other lorries had used, but there were areas of soft sand slowing the journey. No one seemed at all concerned about this and I found myself questioning why I was always in a hurry back home. Each time we stopped Kazim got down one of the jerrycans of water and topped up the radiator, taking no chances.
After some hours we rejoined the bank of the river and passed through green scrubland and many small villages. Then we were back in the desert, although this time there was some vegetation. It reminded me of parts of the Australian outback, where I’d travelled four years previously. I saw beautiful geese, quail and some very large birds whose name I did not know.
There were stops on the way with small cafés and places to sit in the shade. I was eating ful pretty much every meal. Occasionally the cafés would serve meat, which was very popular with the drivers and the majority of the passengers, but ful was what I liked. There would be many times over the rest of the journey when I would dream of a plate of it.
We carried on driving after sunset and finally arrived at Rabak at around 9pm. Rabak is a town on the banks of the White Nile which at the time had a population of around 25,000. It is now a small city of over 150,000 and an industrial centre. After a long day mostly driving through desert and the occasional village, it felt quite different to stop in a town this large. I was tired and settled down to sleep under the lorry.
I loved travelling through Egypt and the north of Sudan, but this was the first day I felt like my overland travels had truly begun. I had spent the day with a group of Sudanese travelling the only way that was available to them. It was hot, bumpy, often uncomfortable and slow. I was the only Western traveller on the lorry and saw no others. I spoke rudimentary Arabic and some of my fellow passengers spoke some English. They had told me about the people in the villages we had passed through, how they made their living and more. I was perceived as unusual as a Westerner travelling in the same way as local people travelled. As a white man from a wealthy country I was – and am – privileged compared to everyone I met on my journey. What I found was the more I travelled, ate and slept with the people I met, the less of a barrier there was that this privilege often creates.
I woke up early after a good sleep underneath the parked lorry, wedged in between fellow passengers. The next day I enjoyed even more. The view from the top of the lorry was spectacular, passing through many small villages with round homes made of straw and mud and sometimes the smoke from a fire. Most of the people I saw farmed cotton and reared cattle, goats, water buffalo and sheep.
Despite the intense heat, travelling on the top of the lorry was cooler and I learned to sit comfortably on sacks for hours at a time. The minute the lorry stopped I’d immediately feel the 40-degree heat. I needed my headscarf, making a mental note to buy a second one as backup. I wore a thin long-sleeved shirt and trousers. My co-passengers wore light cotton djellabas, the long, loose-fitting unisex outer robe or dress with full sleeves worn across much of North Africa. It’s extremely practical in the heat and I needed to get one of these as soon as possible.
In mid-morning I saw the first of many refugee camps. It was small and although we did not stop there, I was told that the people were mostly Ethiopians who had fled the seemingly endless wars in their country. The Ethiopian Civil War was fought between the Ethiopian military junta and Ethiopian-Eritrean anti-government rebels from 1974 to 1991 with the result that huge numbers of people fled to neighbouring countries and eventually across much of the Western world. At the time I was in Sudan the country’s refugee population was officially estimated at 460,000.
After midday we arrived at Renk. We parked up in the lorry park where Aziz and Kazim would unload the food aid before returning to Khartoum. Aziz had a few conversations with other drivers and then came to me saying, ‘I have arranged a ride for you to Juba with another lorry.’
I said goodbye to Aziz and Kazim and the passengers. There was much wishing me good luck for my journey from all of them and as much appreciation from me as I could muster in my limited Arabic.
I was beginning to understand that people wanted to help me on my journey and the more I talked about it the more people were interested. I had become another traveller on the top of a lorry, sharing food and water, hiding from sandstorms and hanging on to stop falling. And I had been told a few times that it was good that I didn’t have a camera, that this was respectful.
Survival
I met the new driver, Mohmadi, whose English was good. I sat with him and some of his passengers at a shi stall inside a smoky bamboo hut with two women serving from a large pot sitting on a charcoal stove.
‘Do you know where Idi Amin is?’ asked Mohmadi.
‘I have no idea,’ I replied.
‘I’m sure that the British Government knows where he is,’ he responded.
‘If they do, they haven’t told me yet.’
He laughed and we carried on talking about Uganda. When I told him I planned to go there he was horrified. ‘Uganda is very dangerous – you must be careful.’ Mohmadi then changed the subject, telling me that it would be a three-day journey to Juba. We set off later that afternoon.
This lorry ride was different from the last one. The baggage was piled very high, well above the top of the driver’s cabin. I perched on the edge of two sacks and most of that afternoon and evening was terrified that I would fall off. Survival took up all of my mental energy. Due to the height I felt the bumps in the track a lot more; it was a mostly rutted track so the lorry shook much of the time. I gripped the ropes very tightly and got blisters on my hands. My body was numb, which was perhaps a good thing as I felt less.
At around midnight the lorry stopped at a town called Paloich in a tiny lorry park. I was really relieved as the last few hours had been an ordeal. Given the shifting around of my fellow passengers I wasn’t the only person struggling to find some form of comfort on this journey. Over time I began to get better at sitting on a bumpy lorry for hours on end. But most of all I felt that I was finally sharing the experience of Sudanese travellers. It was an exhausting, exhilarating and humbling feeling.
At sunrise we set off again, with a short stop at a tiny village for shi, essential for everyone on the lorry, especially Mohmadi and his co-driver and mechanic Ahmed. The lorry was incredibly tough, which it had to be due to the rough and mostly rutted road. Steel formed the suspension with solid blocks of timber on top. Resting on the timber there was a metal casing and frame which rose about 15 feet above the timber and all the sacks of grain packed tightly inside this with ropes over the top to hold them in. And us passengers sitting on top hanging on for dear life. The engine was large and built to last. Mohmadi and Ahmed told me that they drove down to Juba one week and back to Khartoum the next, doing this pretty much all year, even during Ramadan. That’s 1,144 miles each way, so about 60,000 miles a year. That might not sound much by UK standards, but on dusty, rutted tracks it was an incredible feat for that lorry and those two amazing drivers.
Little did I then know that within a year I would be driving a lorry and doing about the same mileage per year, albeit on motorways and tarmac roads. Whenever I complained about traffic and other hold-ups I would remind myself of Mohmadi and Ahmed.
This was another tough day of travelling. I kept having to shift my body on top of the sacks just to stay comfortable. Sometimes I had cramp but obviously couldn’t walk around, which would be the usual remedy. I had to find a way of staying in the same position. This was a largely mental exercise that some years later I would have called meditation, but at this point it was a form of survival. Maybe this is why I have always struggled with meditation.
The drive from Paloich to the Malakal ferry took about six hours. It was incredibly bumpy. But it was also incredibly beautiful. I’d left North Africa and entered the centre of the continent. There were more villages and I saw, and sometimes met, mostly very tall male hunters carrying spears and shields and tall women typically carrying loads of firewood or water for long distances. These were Dinka people, an ethnic group native to South Sudan and making up 40% of the population. Most of the men and women had closely cropped black hair, sometimes with scars on the head, and wore clothing from the waist downwards, usually a piece of fabric. Men’s average height was six foot four inches, women’s six foot. My fellow passengers on the top of the bumpy lorry included an old man with white hair and a blind woman. There was a pride about these people that I had not experienced before. Meeting them was humbling and I realised that I needed to stop feeling so self-absorbed. I had an easy and privileged life and made the choice to travel as I did.
As we approached Malakal it became clear that there was an election, with posters up in all the villages as we got closer to the town. These were typically stuck on to almost every tree, particularly the ‘village tree’ that sat in the middle of each of the tiny villages we passed through. We arrived at the Malakal ferry in the mid-afternoon and crossed the river. Surprisingly there was hardly any wait for the ferry to arrive for the short, slow crossing. Mohmadi drove on to a small flatbed barge that took two lorries at a time with a tug tied alongside that powered the barge across the river.
Malakal was the site of a tragic ferry disaster in 2014. Two hundred women and children drowned when their overloaded boat capsized on the Nile as they scrambled to escape fighting in the town. With hindsight, I realised that I had been travelling in a time of relative peace, although there was obvious tension between the northern and southern parts of Sudan, which I picked up in snippets of conversations.
The next morning was the fourth day of the journey from Khartoum to Juba. A lot had changed for me in these four days. I was travelling with Sudanese people, eating with them, sharing discomfort and learning about their country and lives. I looked at my map that morning and worked out that I had travelled about 2,200 miles since I’d left the Jordan Valley. I sat on the top of the lorry feeling more comfortable as my body adjusted to the shapes of the sacks and the bumpiness of the road. I had a great view of the country we were travelling through but at the same time had to watch out for overhanging trees when all passengers would duck down and lie very close to one another until we had passed them. A branch could knock one or more of us off the lorry – or worse.
A great honour
Around midday we stopped in a small Dinka village comprising three huts, about 20 people and millions of flies. Trying to stop the flies landing on me was impossible. The men and women each wore a single piece of cloth tied over one shoulder and hanging right down almost to the ground. Most of the small boys running around wore no clothes at all, with their bodies streaked with dust. They seemed impervious to the flies. Mohmadi announced that we would stop here for a couple of hours and despite my instant panic at the thought of two hours sitting in a cloud of flies, I found that after a while I noticed them less and allowed them to sit on me and get tangled up in my hair.
There was some food being cooked for us, which enabled the villagers to earn some money. The smoke of the fire helped keep the flies away and I moved closer to it. Mohmadi was speaking to a small group of men from the village and came over to me.
‘The village has never had a Westerner stop here on a lorry,’ he said. ‘They would like to speak with you.’ Of course I said yes. Mohmadi told me he would do his best to translate, which he did. The village elders wanted to know all about where and why I was travelling. I told them I was heading to Swaziland to visit a friend. They did not know where that was so I got a stick and drew a map of the African continent in the dust and showed them the route of my journey.
There was much talking among the elders and by now others had arrived, including some of the women and children. Eventually the elders spoke with Mohmadi again and he told me, ‘They are keen to offer you a special delicacy with dinner. This is a great honour and you must accept this.’
I was instantly anxious. I have had a lifelong hatred of eating meat and although I had eaten some from time to time, I always felt ill afterwards. But there was nothing to be done. I asked Mohmadi if he knew what this delicacy would be and he replied that he did not.
Dinner arrived, which was goat meat and beans in a stew. I could manage beans and so far on the trip no one had been offended by my eating just the beans from a stew. However, before the main meal could be eaten, the elder came up to me and presented me with a very small, steaming item. It was a sheep’s eye. I have rarely been so horrified in my life and hoped that it wouldn’t show. I had to smile, say ‘Thank you’ and somehow eat the eye, with the whole village looking on. It was slimy, fortunately very small, and I shut my eyes as I placed it in my mouth.
To this day I don’t know how I managed to do this without throwing up, but somehow I did. I feel sick just thinking about it more than 40 years later. I washed the eye down quickly, drinking the entire contents of my water bottle. There were a few moments where I struggled to avoid vomiting and retain my composure and then I bowed to the elders. They smiled and there was again much talking. I felt like this was some rite of passage but clearly it was a great honour. No one laughed; it was all very serious. I felt a certain respect from my co-passengers. Mohmadi was clearly pleased. I reached into my bag and solemnly handed a postcard of Tower Bridge to the Dinka elders, the only item of any value that I had to offer.
Water and famine
After the honour of the sheep’s eye, we drove off again, passing through dusty land with more trees as we went further south. Many of the trees looked red due to the bark peeling off in the heat. The palette was a mixture of green, brown and red.
As darkness fell there was a bit of a fight on the top of the lorry. I tried to stay out of it but that was difficult. The long journey and the general discomfort were getting to everyone. But mostly the lack of sleep. Everyone, including me, was finding it impossible to sleep at night because it was too dangerous to let go of the ropes. And we had not been able to top up with water anywhere since lunchtime and were all dehydrated. Tempers were fraught but survival vital on a moving, bumpy lorry so after a few minutes everyone calmed down.
At around two in the morning the lorry drew up at a waterhole, which was surrounded by a crowd of maybe 100 people. I started to climb down and tripped on a side rope and fell. It wasn’t a huge fall but enough to wind me and give me a few bruises. I was so tired and desperate for water, but so was everyone around the waterhole. ‘With this many local people trying to get water from the well, we don’t stand a chance,’ said Mohmadi. ‘We will stop for the rest of the night and see how things are in the morning.’ So although we could not get water, we could get some sleep, and I joined the rest of the passengers as we lay on the ground underneath the lorry.
The next morning I woke with the sun and went to the waterhole with my empty water bottle. There was still a large crowd of people gathered around it and as far as I could see there were people walking here from all directions. It was clearly the only functioning waterhole for miles around. I was standing just outside the crowd, looking forlorn. I was about to turn away when a small boy came up to me and gestured for me to give him my water bottle. I decided to trust him and handed it over. He disappeared into the crowd and was back about 10 minutes later, handing me my bottle full of water. I was speechless but thanked him as best I could, reaching into my backpack and offering him the remains of the large bag of peanuts I’d bought in Khartoum. It was all the food I had but I reckoned that it was a fair exchange. He was thrilled and with a smile dashed off with the nuts. I shared my water with everyone on the lorry, each of us having a small sip. It was just enough.
