Gary and I walked out of the hotel in Khartoum to try and find some water and goofy little snacks. We walked through a few broken down blocks before we determined that the grocery store on the map was not, in fact a grocery store in reality, but rather some rubble and shoes. We doubled back and crossed the street. The gas station had a sign advertising their little quick-stop shop, which as we approached turned out to be a dusty and very empty room with broken windows. Huh. We doubled back yet again and this time did find a little hole in the wall shop full of beet juice and Oreos. We stepped back out onto the street, beaming with accomplishment, when it suddenly dawned on both of us at the same time that we had no idea where the hotel was. Ah, shit.

This way? We walked up the block and suddenly there were soldiers in the street yelling at us. We can’t go this way? But our hotel is over there, we pointed. The soldiers argued for a minute and then relented and let us cross the street. We walked a block further down before realizing that nope, our hotel definitely isn’t over this way. We doubled back and were yelled at by the same soldiers again. Sorry guys! There are only four directions the hotel could be in, and we’re one down! They angrily let us cross the street again, back the way we’d come.

Oh hey! Our hotel! We’d walked right past it. Right at that moment our guide walked out of the front door.

“You guys probably want to get inside before four o’clock, when the protests start. Last time they shot tear gas onto our hotel.”

Oh, that’s why the military was barricading the street. We headed into the hotel and up onto the roof to see what was going on.

A couple of blocks over, a haze of tear gas was rising up from the street. I squinted. Oh shit, there are a ton of people over there. Tear gas canisters were arching up in the air, smoke trailing behind them as they dropped back down in to the crowd.

BOOM. BOOM BOOM.

Is that gunfire? Or just the tear gas firing off?

Late last year Sudan had a coup, where the military took over the government and deposed Sudan’s democratically elected government. This kind of thing is sort of ho-hum in Africa at the moment, as nearly all of the countries in this region had had some form of coup within the last year and a half. But the locals in Khartoum still weren’t happy about it and were taking to the streets. Apparently on a strict schedule.

Some kind of police cannon sprayed red paint into the crowd.

More tear gas arced up and down. BOOM. BOOM BOOM.

One of the bellhops from the hotel joined us on the roof. I looked at the clothes hanging from a nearby clothesline. Oh, I think he washes his clothes up here. I looked around a bit more. Oh, I think he lives here.

“Around 6pm the military wants to go home so they start using the real bullets,” he mentioned casually.

OK so maybe we won’t be going to dinner at six as originally planned.

Tear gas smoke drifted across the city, creating an eerie fog. I went to my room and listened to the BOOM. BOOM BOOM outside. Eventually night fell and the sounds of rioting were replaced by the howls and barks of stray dogs roaming the streets of Khartoum.

Driving for hours across the completely empty desert, we began to encounter signs of the rein of the Black Pharaohs, Nubian kings who ruled the whole of the Egyptian empire in the 8th century BC.

One particularly well-preserved temple stood in sharp contrast to the ruins we'd visited elsewhere.

Other spots we stopped at featured carvings of the cow goddess Hathor and surprisingly untouched unground tombs.

The most impressive site however is Meroe, where the pyramids of the black pharaohs rise up incongruously out of the otherwise empty desert. Nearly all of them are missing their tops, thanks to early 20th century “archaologists” who destroyed them from the top down while searching for treasure.

Though perhaps less grandiose and well-preserved than the similar sites in Egypt, the Sudanese pyramids had the advantage of being much less heavily touristed, giving you the feeling that you’re seeing something not many other people get to see.

We were camping on the sands a short walk from the pyramids. The wind whipped through the camp, putting out our bonfire and sending unsecured tents tumbling across the dunes toward the horizon. Sleeping was sporadic as the wind caused the sides of the tent to beat against my face all night long.

In the morning we were up early to see the glorious sunrise light up the pyramids.

Sudan has, perhaps, not the cleanest food supply in the world, and by the third day two members of our group had fallen out with food poisoning. I took a bite of almonds during the drive to Meroe and instantly regretted it, my stomach letting me know I’d really fucked up this time. I bowed out of lunch, then standing in the hot sun by the second batch of pyramids my stomach sent up the “final warning” flag and I managed to walk a considerate enough distance from the group before I barfed lusciously into the sand.

That night we slept in the “Nubian Guest House,” in beds strewn along the hallway like an overcrowded hospital. On one side of me, our guide Nick snored at his dependable loud cadence, while on the other side my roommate Eduardo added to the stereo effect with loud gasps and sudden aggressive snoring, as if making up for lost time. Burning acid crept up my throat as my stomach informed me that it would hate me forever now. Then out of nowhere I began to hiccup. SNORE hiccup SNOOOOORE hiccup! SNOOOOOORE. Oh God. Nobody is going to sleep in this house! HIC. I went and sat outside in the moonlight for an hour, reminding myself that this couldn’t possibly last forever, until the hiccuping mercifully drowned in the cauldron of fire bubbling inside of me.

Eventually everyone came down with Sudan Stomach, which I just decided right now this is called. Much effort was expended trying to trace the malady back to a singular cause, a rogue sausage or falafel, but I think the honest truth of it was that all the food was dirty and we all, at one point or another, ate food.

We watched as locals rode donkeys in a loop, pulling water up out of a well. They seemed to be just as fascinated by our curiosity as we were in trying to figure out what they were doing.

A boat ride up the Nile took us to the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, which join together to become just the Plain Old Nile. Our boat captain insisted we wear the child-sized life vests he provided in spite of the fact that there were only about six of them for thirteen of us. We began to joke about how you share a life vest (two to a vest, with one arm through each, or maybe chain them together like a barrel of monkeys?) and ultimately decided we would just have to take turns drowning.

A visit to the Ethnographic museum treated us to many Egyptian-eque relics and what our guide described as the nastiest Men’s room in the entire world.

The bathroom couldn’t hold a candle to anything in Tibet (but please do light a candle anyway) though I was greatly amused that Nick relished in subjecting us to this horrible shitter and then promptly began retching himself and had to run outside.

A spin through the local bazaar treated us to the kind of nonsensical children's clothes I cherish and the smokiest shoe store in over 100 miles.

Outside, all of the taxis in existence waited patiently for a small child's dream to wish them into the world.

Our visit to the camel market was dampened somewhat by the sand storm that hit as soon as we arrived, but it was still fun to see the motley assortment of camels, and the sand in the air gave the whole experience a sepia toned ambiance.

In Khartoum, the military boat the British had used to apparently single-handedly conquer Sudan was on display, strangely, and Caroline and I climbed up into its rotting innards to gawk at the exercise equipment incongruously piled inside.

The highlight of Khartoum was our attendance at an elaborate Sufi ceremony, where we were warned that shit might well go off the rails, and if it did we could be beaten with clubs and whips. Sadly, none of this manifested, but it was still entertaining to watch the ceremony build as the Sufis danced to the music and our friend Dan got pulled into the middle of the fray, his eyes wide like a deer in headlights. The second this happened, the rest of us turned to each other and nodded knowingly: “Human sacrifice.”

During our free last day in Khartoum we took taxis out to the nicest mall in the city, curious to see what a nice mall in Sudan is actually like. The answer was weirder than we could have expected.

Inside there was a fake ice skating rink, where you could skate on some kind of white plastic:

Nearby was the mall's baby daycare center.

This was all flanked by billiards, an empty bowling alley, and the quietest and saddest arcade I’ve ever seen in my life. The food court treated us to ten counters of cuisine, nine of which turned out to be pizza. Downstairs, the deceptively large mall contained a mosque and a gym. Dan and I talked our way into the gym and were treated to the sight of the skinniest guys I have ever seen in my life, pumping iron to the thundering sounds of Eminem.

The mall also featured a fascinating grocery store, where I took in the weird and wonderful products of Sudan.

While we’d been sailing the Nile and tempting the fates with our insufficient number of life vests, we’d noticed people sitting in chairs in the shallow waters of the river and decided this looked fun. Our last night in Khartoum, my friend Irina and I walked across the city to the river, meeting up with Dan & Jessica who had booked a room at the Corinthia, a lavish and very out of place luxury hotel built by Muhamar Qadaffi and known locally as “Qadaffi’s Egg.” We’d had a very overpriced and terrible dinner there the night before, but the hotel served as a lovely backdrop as Dan and I soaked in the Nile and absorbed all the dangerous chemicals and heavy metals this beautiful river had to offer.

The sun set into the sandstorm haze and the air grew cold, even for those of us who weren’t sitting right in the river. Irina and I local-Ubered our way back to our shitty hotel after turning down the Corinthia’s offer to send us back in a limo for only a million and a half dollars.

I reflected back on the trip and laughed to myself. Before coming to Sudan I had been on a tour of Chad with the same tour guide, Nick. The last morning of the Chad tour we took the PCR tests we’d need to get into Sudan. I was a little nervous since I’d had covid in January (for all of the worry from everyone that I know that I was traveling during the pandemic, I had to come back to the US to catch covid) and had still tested positive weeks later when I was about to leave the US for Chad, necessitating a second test that came back negative just in time for me to fly. PCR tests can give positive results for up to three months after you’ve recovered from covid, which is a big deal for someone planning to spend those three months traveling through Africa.

Thankfully, my test in Chad came back negative. Whew! And Nick’s came back… positive? Oh shit. How are you going to lead the tour? After much scrambling around, Nick and the owner of the tour company asked me if I would lead the Sudan tour. Wow, I didn’t see that coming. But it sounded like a fun adventure so I said yes. Nick gave me a briefing about Sudan and all the paperwork to lead the tour. Wow, so I guess I’ll be working two jobs at once? But what a cool thing to have on your resume: I led a tour to Sudan.

I told the Chad tour group and they were virtually all very encouraging that I would do well (the lone dissenter was Yogi, who just said “You?” Thanks Yogi!). After making sure that the early departures all got their transfer to the airport, I was waiting in the lobby for the last airport shuttle when I suddenly got a message from Nick right as the car pulled up.

“Wait up! I got a second rush test and it came back negative!”

And thus ended the shortest tour guiding career in history. I had a good run.

I was a little sad to have missed out on this experience, until Sudan happened and I realized how difficult it probably is to lead a tour when you’re barfing from the bottom of your socks.

The final morning of the tour, Leslie from Wales and I found ourself in the Khartoum airport, ostensibly on our way to South Sudan, but in reality not moving at all and nearly missing our flight as the check in agents took two solid hours to process the six people in line in front of us. Once we finally got through all of this, Leslie passed immigration and then realized that the first of the 20 people checking our paperwork hadn’t given him his boarding pass back. So he turned around, got the boarding pass handed back to him, and went to step forward past the immigration guy, only to find himself stopped.

“Where are you going? I have to check your papers.”

“You just checked my papers. Twenty seconds ago. I haven’t moved.”

“Give me your papers!”

I would spend the rest of the trip laughing that this guy had completely and totally forgotten Leslie within the course of twenty seconds, during which he had seen no other people. He checked Leslie 2.0’s paperwork and waved him through. Thank God. What if only the first Leslie had got through? Then there’d be two of them running around, like a movie about clones. We can’t have that.

Thank you Sudan. I will never forget the- hold on, BRB, gotta barf.