0 comments/ 1184 views/ 1 favorites The Tina Trip 03 - Sudan By: risgrynsfisk CHAPTER 10 – THE BIG Y The clit in the crotch of the Nile. We started our time in Sudan with having our first row. It was about some silly little thing, so small and silly that I have forgotten what it was. Or, more honestly, so small and silly that I´m embarrassed enough to pretend that I have forgotten. Tina stomped off. "Don´t you fucking dare following me!" she warned. I didn´t, but I could see her from a distance, for which I was glad. She climbed a small sandy hill and spent maybe twenty minutes throwing small rocks at bigger rocks. I carefully did not use the line about having a crazy wife when worried locals wondered, which they did. Eventually she came back. She gave me a hug that would have broken my back if my back had broken that easily. Which, I guess, is true of all hugs when you think about it. "I´m ok now." she said. "Thanks for giving me space." "Well, it was my fault, too." I said. "I hereby accept forty nine percent of the blame." "Forty nine!" she said. "You turd! It was at least fifty! Remember; I have a lot of teeth." The last part in Arabic, of course. Great, she was my sweet little Miss Cuddlybuttocks again. A Cuddlybuttocks with teeth. Peter, the little dear, had saved two seats for us in the train to Khartoum. We were all supposed to go there, to get stamps in our passports and travel permits to other parts of the country. The journey was long, dusty and hot. We started out in the afternoon and arrived late in the evening the day after, exhausted. Bruno had managed to endear himself to the Sudanese in our compartment by demanding that no one could smoke aboard the train. He even went as far as to take a cigarette out of a guy´s mouth and throw it out the window. Sure, I would have preferred a non-smoking compartment, too, but that just wasn´t the way things were done here. Bruno narrowly escaped following the cigarette out the window and was astounded that we westerners didn´t support him in his fight for The Truth. He sulked in a corner, muttering about non-smoking gorillas. Between Wadi Haifa and Khartoum the Nile makes a big curve. The train goes straight through the desert. That's all there is, a railway, a lousy road going alongside the railway and the desert. Lots of desert. When we were about halfway we passed a man on a bicycle, with a Japanese flag on his pack. He was determinedly pedaling through the desert. He didn´t even look up when we passed him. I hope he had a lot of water. I hope he survived. Finally we arrived in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the junction of the Blue and the White Nile. We staggered off the train, in search of sleep. A few black ladies approached us and asked where we were going and we enquired for the hotel recommended by Lonely Planet. They pointed us in the right direction and it was not far to go, thank God. "Refreshing to meet women who are about by themselves and even can talk to strangers." I said. "Maybe women have a less constricted role here in Sudan than they had in Egypt." "My poor, dear, innocent head-in-the-clouds husband." Tina answered. "Those girls were prostitutes." Which gave me something to think about all the way to the hotel. When we arrived, all beds were taken, but we could sleep on their lawn. Fine with us, and we soon slept the sleep of the innocent. At least me. Innocent. Khartoum was a very big city that didn´t feel like a big city. The streets were broad and sandy, not too many cars. Goats roamed the streets. The houses seldom higher than two stories. One high rise – the Sheraton Hotel. Many travelers went there because American Express had their Khartoum office there. Even more travelers went there to steal toilet paper, since that was not sold in the stores. The grandest building in the city was the main post office, a stately remnant from the colonial days where we could get letters from home, poste restante. My parents sent their regards to Tina and wrote that grand-kids were welcome – cross-eyed or not. They wished us and our relationship well, but hoped we would not settle in Germany. This was a new thought. We felt like we belonged together but for some reason we had not thought about the obvious fact that one of us had to change country. I could see the wheels turning in Tina´s head, too. Think of Khartoum as a big Y. The trunk is the Nile, the left branch is the Blue Nile the right branch is the White Nile. Between the branches is the part of Khartoum that´s simply called Khartoum. To the left of the trunk is Old Khartoum, to the right is Omdurman. Our hotel was in Khartoum, as was all official buildings. That´s where we spent most of our time. But Omdurman was nice. There were big marketplaces and there were more people in the streets. Right where the rivers met was a large Ferris wheel like a revolving giant clit in the crotch of the Nile. We bravely ventured up in the Ferris clit in spite of its rather scary swaying in the wind. We survived and the view was worth the risk. John got sick. We went with him to a doctor, who took him to the nearby hospital. They didn´t have much. John was in a small room where they somehow managed to fit in eight beds. John was a hawadia, so he got VIP-treatment and had a bed of his own. All the other beds were shared. We took turns staying with him. They thought it was malaria, but needed to make a test to be sure. When I was there with him I needed to go to the toilet. The toilet in the hospital. The hospital toilet. If you are easily grossed out, just move on to the next paragraph. When people compete about who has experienced the worst toilet I always win, especially since this was, as I think I mentioned, a hospital toilet. I open the door, I step in and I wonder what I´ve stepped in. Lights on, I see that I am standing in shit. There must have been a clogging in the toilet, which was of the hole-in-the-floor kind, and people had shat on the floor, closer and closer to the door until, now, you couldn´t get in without...what I said. In a hospital! If in Sudan, don´t get sick. It was malaria, by the way. John had eaten his profylactics, but got sick anyway. Happens. Too bad. People were generally un-hurried in Khartoum. Particularly government officials. They were so un-hurried that they almost stuck to whatever surface they were on, leisurely wielding their stamping tools and occasionally actually stamping something. The longer the lines the more relaxed they seemed, like a big bird hovering in the thermals, leisurely looking down on us earth-bound scurriers, perhaps not with contempt but with a profound gratitude that they were they and not us. Waiting with grace was a necessary skill, impatience and anger were frowned upon and slowed down the process even further. You gained a bit of respect if you could wait for half a day to get the stamp that proved that you where were you were and still be courteous when you reached the stampman. Patience was seen as a virtue. Separated the men from the boys. A guy with a big black beard bought me a coffee and wanted to talk religion. Fine with me as he was quite talkable. He was studying to be an imam, and was interested in how I thought about his faith and mine. We eventually agreed to disagree on many points, but we agreed that we could be certain of nothing. Doubt is an important part of faith, it certainly must be important to God (if he exists) since he could have proven his existence conclusively at any time and has not chosen to do so. God seemed to find doubt and the freedom of choice to be essential, including the freedom to mess up and misinterpret his messages to humanity. We parted as friends. One day Bruno was at the please-stamp-my-papers-place. He made his entrance while we were standing docilely in line, playing a game we had invented with a pen, a rubber band and two buttons. Bruno was aggressively waving his aggressive little black beard about, telling everyone how this worthless den of bureaucracy ought to have been organized. Again, I could see his point. Again, I found him obnoxious, as did the officials. Again, he was close to get thrown out the window, which this time I rather hoped for since we were on the ground floor and the sand outside was softish. A little trip through a window might have learned him a lesson in humility. Or maybe not. Another guy who was there was Per, a Swedish engineer. He was very old, I felt – though not as old as I am now. In spite of his age he was fun to talk to and we made friends. He was in Sudan to work on a big dam in the Blue Nile, close to the Ethiopian border. After talking for a goodly while in the non-moving line he asked if we wanted to come with him. He was only going to be there for a few days and then he would go back to Khartoum. Why not? Sounded like fun. CHAPTER 11 – PER´S DAM Cum guzzling creatures and un-kicked balls. With Per, we travelled in a Land Rover with a driver. The height of luxury, except the roads were not what we back home would even call roads. The going was slow but that was fine with us. We watched the scenery, which was a bit boring except for the piece of scenery which was Tina. Her I never tired of looking at. Otherwise the landscape was rather dull. Plains. Occasional trees. No animals. That was rather disappointing. After having seen a zillion films about African wild-life we had expected to see at least some animals other than birds and cockroaches. As yet, though, nothing. Somewhere halfway we stopped to have dinner with some engineers who worked on another dam. They were locals who Per coached from time to time. Very nice meal. One of them had actually been to Sweden. His main memory of his short time in Sweden was when he, at an official dinner, was served chicken and was supposed to eat with a knife and fork – utensils rarely used in Sudan. That had been a rather humiliating experience. Another had been to Italy and was certain that Sweden and Germany had to be warmer countries than Italy, which had been unbearably cold. We slept there that night, in a cot in the workers´ dormitory. Per showed us his dam. He was proud of it. It was big and grey and dammy. Compared to the Assuan dam it was puny, but compared to everything else it was big enough. Close by was a small town and a refugee camp. Ethiopia was a bad country to live in for many. Not that Sudan was all that idyllic. There was a lot of shit going on. There were several groups of guerillas, the government was repressive and there was famine here and there now and then. But it was a reasonably safe country for hawadias to travel in. The most unruly corners of the country were off limit and the ones that hated didn´t particularly hate westerners. It was an Arab north versus black south kind of conflict. The south wanted to be independent and the north, where most of the power was, did not want them to. The dam was funded by Swedish aid, and Per was not the only Swedish engineer involved. We met Anders and Torsten and the fat one who was too drunk to remember his name. I was glad there were no Danes around, they would have been much too happy having their preconceptions vindicated. Per didn´t like him at all, and made no secret of that fact. According to him drunk-and-useless was continuously smashed and didn´t do a lick of work on the dam. Only thing he did was drink and buy sex in the camp, where the female refugees were desperate enough for anything. He himself referred to those activities as his own refugee aid project. Tina was of the firm opinion that there were too many unkicked balls in the world and offered to make it her project to rectify that situation. Per sympathized with her just cause, but told her that it would put the locals in a difficult position. Mr Unkicked was a guest here and guests were sacred, however despicable. We went for a swim in the Blue Nile. There was a place with rapidly moving water that was pronounced safe. Safe from crocodiles? No, from bilharzia. Disgusting parasites that infest a large percentage of lakes and rivers in Africa. They bore through your skin and breed in your liver. May cause blindness, too. This was in fact the only swim we had on the whole trip, apart from the concrete tubs of Bawiti. We now realized that only in the really big cities were we expected to sleep in a hotel. Everywhere else we were guests and if we were not invited to someone´s home we could sleep in any official building. During our time in Sudan we slept in churches, schools, hospitals (one night in an emergency room, kind of weird when a woman was admitted to have a baby in the middle of the night and her husband seemed more interested in us than the birth) and, first and foremost, police stations. All police stations had gardens with lawns and you didn´t even have to ask if you could sleep there, it was taken for granted. Once we were invited to sleep in the policemen´s dormitory. Not here, though, here we slept on the standard issue police station dusty lawn. Tina and I went for long walks. The area was attractive; a bit of forest, the river, lots of birds. We had quite a bit of outdoor sex. I enjoyed Tina´s bush behind a bush in the African bush. We were wary of insects, not knowing which ones were biters and not much wanting to find out. And we had a problem with condom-disposal. You can´t just throw them away, it´s not all right environmentally. Non bio-degradable, and what if an animal eats it. Probably smelled delicious to a lot of them. Carrying round a heap (brag, brag) of used condoms wasn´t the perfect solution, but a man´s gotta do what a man´s gotta do. We emptied the contents on the ground to see who else than Tina was interested in swallowing my cum. Mainly ants as long as we hung around, but maybe there were others, like rodents, who were too shy to make their fetishes public and waited until we left. Now Per was done engineering and wanted to get back. The road was still unworthy of the word road and the wild life was dead or elsewhere. The car broke down a bit, but the driver and Per fixed it. Tina pointed out that it was nice to be around real men who could fix things. I must admit that it stung a bit, although I know it was a joke. I had always had lousy self-confidence in the real man department, as you may have gathered. The only area where my self-confidence was even lower was fixing things. I tried to be cool about it but Tina noticed, like she notices everything. There´s no slipping anything past her. She reminded me that I was the only man she would ever want or need, making her point as empathically as was possible with an audience. No bushes here to hide behind. My male confidence had, of course, been improved greatly by my time with Tina. But a bad confidence is a stubborn thing. I felt fine as long as everything went well, but at this stage it didn´t take much for me to have a relapse. But on the whole I was very happy with my progress and I gave all the credit to Tina. According to her I was good for her, too. She was less crazy when she was crazy – her impulsivity was mainly focused on making me embarrassed because my ears were cute when they were red. I had by now used the line about my crazy wife several times, and as yet no one had gainsaid me. Her depressive periods were better too. Shorter. Grey rather than black. When back in Khartoum we said farewell to Per and Tina kissed him on the nose. He promised to call our parents when he got home, to inform them that we were alive and happy. My mum later told me she got really scared when an official-sounding voice asked if she was my mother. Visions of me eaten by giraffes or something. But she appreciated the call very much. We sent letters home now and then to bring them up to date, but it took a long while for them to get there. Now, they had confirmation that I had been alive just a few days ago. And still together with that girl, whom Per said was adorable. CHAPTER 12 – IN THE GIANT YEAST-INFECTION That hippo had guts. We wanted to move on to the south now. By boat if possible. It sounded nice to travel the White Nile in a river-boat, through the Sudd, the largest swamp in Africa. While standing in line for travel permit stamps someone stole my jeans from the clothes line at the hotel. I didn´t care shit. They were too warm anyway. I was happy they left the rest, two pairs of thin cotton trousers I had had sewn in Egypt. Tina was rather domestic, I found. I don´t know why that was a surprise to me, but it was. She had thoroughly washed our clothes in the hotel sink, using some sort of brown laundry soap they used there. She was pissed that the jeans were stolen after she had worked so hard getting them clean. The last night in Khartoum we went to a fancy restaurant with a menu. We had Nile Perch in a nice sauce and baked potato. This was way and beyond the best food we had had or would have in Sudan. I entertained Tina by informing her about the atrocity of introducing the Nile Perch to Lake Victoria. The Nile Perch is a large, voracious predator which has gobbled a lot of indigenous species to extinction. Tina then told me to shut the fuck up and talk about something more romantic, like herself. I saw her point. Pretty girl. Candle light. Right - the perch will (alas) still be there tomorrow. The north end of the river boat route is Kosti. You could take a bus there. I mention that because it´s an exception to the rule. Generally there are no buses. Most of the time you travel on lorries, sitting in the back on the load. These lorries leave when they leave, there is no schedule and it´s up to you to get aboard. In bigger cities there are truck-stops where you talk to the drivers to find a lorry going in the right direction. In smaller villages, where the lorries generally don´t stop, you just hang around until a lorry passes and flag it down. This could be in five minutes or in five days. In Kosti we met a lot of old aquaintances. We were not the only ones wanting to go south by boat. John, Dieter, Peter, the Danish Girls and Manuela all were there. Not Marcel though. He didn´t have time to go south, Manuela told us with a deep sigh. There were a goodly bunch of other travelers, too. They all camped in the police-station garden and most had been there for weeks. Since they arrived they had been told that the boat would be there very soon and sooner or later it had to be true. We didn´t mind waiting for a while. Kosti was a pleasant place to be. We could understand that they´d loitered here for weeks. It was a lot like what I told you about Khartoum, only more so. Broader and sandier streets, even more goats, even slower pace and lower houses – here they just had a ground floor. It was easy to sit for hours at a café, drinking peppermint tea (chai ba nana) with as little sugar as possible. The Sudanese didn´t understand why we did not want all the sugar we could get. They insisted that sugar was good for you, good for the brain, you think better. It was locally produced, too. Kosti had the largest sugar factory in Sudan. The main road to Kosti was paved with something that looked like asphalt but was actually some by-product from the sugar making process. The goats often came to our little campground to check for goodies like banana-peels. We could not leave stuff lying about as the goats, undeterred by the fact that this was a police garden, were happy to steal just about anything. The stories about the omnivorous nature of goats are not totally exaggerated. We had a favorite goat named Willy Brandt after an old German president. He was not adverse to being petted and we saved our banana-peels for him. Konrad Adenauer was a surly creature who considered himself the Alpha politician and therefore the rightful owner of our peels. We, the voters, did not agree and continued to support Willy. The ladygoats were nameless since there had yet been no Angela Merkel. There was a sleepy, somnambulant feel to our time in Kosti. I had no problems with that, being quite happy to read and drink tea for days, turning to weeks. Or something, it was hard to tell. Tina was more restless than me and wanted to explore. But however far we walked all we found was sandy streets, low houses and goats. She had a depressive episode then, to have something to do, she said. She brooded about the future. The Tina Trip 03 - Sudan "You will leave me!" she muttered. I assured her in all possible ways that, while I sometimes was stupid, I would never be so stupid as to leave her when there was the least chance of her being my sweet sweaty saucylass. "You will so leave me!" she persisted. "You will go back to Sweden and now that you realize what a prize you are you will have your pick of all these tall, blond Regina-like cows. Sure, I believe that you believe that I´m the best, but you have nothing to compare with. It´s different with me. I have a pretty broad base of comparison, thank you, and so I can tell for sure that you are the one for me." "I don´t need to sleep around to know that you are the cleverest, sexiest chick in the world." "That´s easy to say now, but you will start to wonder. Hey, we have to get you a bit of experience. I can ask Manuela, she´s a sweet girl and I know she likes you. Little risky, though – you may like her better than me, she´s so fucking pretty." While at least a part of me was quite interested in this idea – as I am sure that some of the readers are – the main part of me voted solidly against it. "No way! You are the only one I want. If I die having only had sex with one girl in my whole life I can die happy since that girl was you. So there!" "What about where we shall live? I don´t know if I can live in Sweden." "Well, I´m pretty sure I can live in Berlin if it comes to that. But I would like to get a real education and I don´t know if I can get that in Germany. But we´ll work something out, hunnybug." Finally, the boat arrived. All tickets promptly sold out and for a while it seemed that we, and the rest of the travelers, had waited in vain. All compartments were full and it was strictly forbidden to let people sleep on the deck. But, us being hawadias and guests and all that, they let us do just that. We set out a sunny day and merrily went down the river, past metropolises like Malakal and Renk. ALL days had been sunny since that rainy day in Athens, by the way. A group of four Englishmen with binoculars and sensible shoes were ornithologists. Sudan was apparently a great country to watch birds in, having more different species of birds than all of Europe. Or something. One Sudanese man, when understanding that they were seriously interested in birds, broke down laughing. He reacted like someone back home might react if told that people had come there from afar to watch mail-boxes. It had never occurred to him that birds were something that you could be interested in. After a few hours the binoculared crew raised a wild-life alert. Elephants in sight! They pointed to two unevenesses on the horizon which might have been elephants, might have been big rocks. But I believe them and feel that I can claim that I have seen elephants in the wild. And the inside of a hippo. We passed a village where they had caught and killed a hippopotamus, which is said to be very difficult, them having a very thick skin. They had it opened up and there was blood and guts everywhere. And we did, of course, see birds. The most impressive one was the shoebill, the ornithologists were very pleased with that. I looked forward to the swamp. I had seen mangrove swamps on TV and imagined something like that, narrow channels of water between tree-clumps and small islands. Monkeys chattering in the treetops. I fell asleep in a state of high expectation. When I awoke we were in the middle of an endless sea of reeds. That was it. Reeds and narrow, slow-moving arms of water, forming a labyrinth. I really wonder how they found their way. I must admit I was a little disappointed, but I learned that this sea of reeds was home to a very diverse and interesting echo-system with a rich animal life of which we saw zip. Apart from the birds and the bugs. In theory, there´s something erotic about a big swamp. Moist, earthy and smelly, warm, fertile, easy to get lost or drown in. The only sex-related metaphor that felt appropriate in real life was a giant yeast-infection. Smelled like it, too. CHAPTER 13 – THIS IS JUBA COUNTRY Time and nose is out of joint. Our destination was Juba, the capital of the south. The boat didn´t go all the way, though, (unlike Tina these days) and we had to travel the last bit by lorry. This was a lorry specialized in transporting people. No other load, but packed with passengers. If there was a dress-code it was very inclusive. I kid you not when I tell you that there were people dressed in a suit carrying an attaché case and people dressed in a loincloth carrying a spear. On this short trip into Juba we saw several antelopes, almost ran over one too. Juba felt more like a big city than Khartoum did, in spite of there being very few cars. It was busier, somehow, a hustle in the air. Less sand. Fewer goats. We found a funky hotel, or whatever. It was an old park which seemed to be a remnant from the colonial time. A big stage, with a roof. Scattered small gazebos, also roofed. Roofs were kind of important now. We were told that the rainy season was coming. It was not quite there yet, but the first rains were expected any time now. We settled in a gazebo and very cozy it was. Cheap too. We were neighbors with a pair of Marabou storks. They had a large nest in a tree and they looked just like Pterodactyls when they flew. Juba had their own officials and their own stamps. We needed new travel-permits. They made very clear that this was Juba country where it was played by Juba roles. These rules were the same as further north, as far as we were concerned. We waited in line and they carefully considered the most aesthetically pleasing page to put their stamps, asking each other´s opinions. But the pace was a little more hectic, the officials bustled about rather than hovered on updrafts. They were no quicker stamping, though. My original plan had been to get to Kenya and take a plane back to Europe from Nairobi. Kenya was where most of our fellow travelers were heading too. But we had grown increasingly dubious that we really wanted to go that route. Sudan bordered on Kenya but the roads were so atrocious that hardly anyone used them. Most lorries and trucks – which were the only means of transport further south – went to Kenya by Uganda. Uganda was iffy, we felt. There were a lot of weapons and confused and aggressive people. A bit like USA, we smug Europeans agreed. Some travelers had been killed. We did not want to be killed, and going further south seemed less and less appealing. We decided that Sudan was as far as we were going this time. Sudan borders on a lot of countries, but right then there wasn´t a single one of them, apart from Egypt of course, that wasn´t too dangerous. Peter and the Danish girls didn´t want to risk it either. I don´t know if they slept together and, if so, in which combinations. But while awake the three of them were always together and there definitely were sparks there. You could see that the three of them were confusing to the locals. This was not an area where polygamy was done, unlike Bawiti, for instance, where we met one man with the maximum allowed four wives. They were not hostile but a little wary. We, being "married" were less strange and more likely to be invited to people´s homes. Thanks Maud. They frequently asked about children. We were apparently very old to be childless and I had good use for the sentence about soon making babies like crazy that Ali taught me. I had pretty good use for the line about a crazy wife, too. Tina only used her teeth-sentence with me, but the one about my head in the clouds was sadly useful. We had also learned to praise babies, food and houses as well as other handy little phrases. But here in the south far from all spoke Arabic. There were more than four hundred languages spoken in Sudan so there were many to choose from. There was a large marketplace close to where we stayed. This was a fun place to be, but the meat-selling area was...well, a Swedish health inspector (they are known for their excitable nature) would have fainted if he had seen the meat just laying there in the sun, covered in flies. And I do mean covered. The slabs of meat were black until handled and a cloud of flies lifted. Kites were hovering above, waiting for an opening. We once saw the butcher put a piece of meat on his scales and turn his back. BANG! – and a kite was off with it. He just shrugged, used to it. We bought tea. You had to cover the tea with your hand at all times, to stop the flies from getting in. When Tina was halfway she slipped up and some suicidal flies dived in. We watched how her glass, now unguarded, rapidly filled up with flies. A young boy asked her if she didn´t want her tea and if he could have it. He gulped it down, flies and all. Looked happy about it, too. This was one of the many times we were reminded of how much richer we were than the locals. There were dried dates to be had just about everywhere. To us they were cheap, and we bought ourselves some dates when we wanted something sweet. After a while we realized that to most locals dates were an unaffordable luxury. Once, when we were chatting with a guy, we offered him some dates and he reverently asked if it was ok if he didn´t eat them himself. He wanted to bring them home to his kids. Many people spoke English. It was an official language and in theory everyone learned English in school. We met an English couple who were in Sudan for a year. They were teachers in a small town by the Ethiopian border, north of Per´s dam. Apparently Sudanese teachers were in demand in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis paid the wages for English teachers who came to Sudan as sort of subs. Not very large wages, they were in it for the adventure. The school system was different from what they were used to. Big classes, at least sixty people. The teacher put the best pupils up front and ignored the rest. If anyone disturbed the lessons in any way they were sent to the custodian with a note telling how many strokes they should have. He then stamped the note, rather more promptly than the professional stampers. We were very happy with our little gazebo. The walls were made of glass, but it was in a secluded spot and what with the dark nights we felt quite un-observed and were able to explore and expand sexually. The most spectacular time was when the rain finally came. Fucking in a glass-house in the midst of a tropical thunderstorm with ferocious lightning is something I recommend to everyone. I felt small, dwarfed by the majestic thundering. Then, when we really got going, I felt gigantic – like I was part of the storm. Tina was blown away, tossed and drenched by my passion until we came with a roar of thunder. The storm moved on and we slowly stroked each other to sleep, listening to the receding rumble. The fanciest place in Juba was the Greek Club. There, we had a conversation with a Greek gentleman who bemoaned the times we were living in. Apparently this region had once been dominated by Greek landowners, hence the name of the Greek Club. These degenerate days anyone was allowed to eat there. Not be admitted as a member, thank God, that was still restricted. But the sight of black people eating there, and not just serve as waiters, was hard to bear. Us, he could tolerate, if not appreciate, but time was severely out of joint, as was his nose. Guerillas, bureaucrats and uppity blacks were ruining the business for him and his peers and you could not sell because no one was buying. We felt we were done with Juba. In fact, we were getting tired of the travelling thing altogether. We felt that we wanted to sink our teeth into the rest of our lives. Travelling was a great way to get away from everyday life, but since we never had had an everyday life we didn´t have anything to get away from. No hurry, though. We wanted to go a different route back so we decided to go west. There was a lorry going to Yambio, close to the border to Zaire, as it still was called back then. From there you could get to Wau and then to Aweil, where there was a railway back to Khartoum. It was tough travelling a longer distance by lorry. I´ve told you about the state of the roads, and the lorry-drivers were in a hurry. We were bouncing around in the back. It was sort of fun at first, but the further we went the less fun it became. When we arrived I felt like my entrails had shaken loose, been totally rearranged and not liking it at all. I also felt sick, weak and totally exhausted. We were directed to a school-house where we could sleep. Very practical, since it was still a holiday and we had the building to ourselves. Gaining entrance was easy, since there were no doors. It took me a few days to get back to normal. It probably was exposure from sitting in the sun the whole day. It hadn´t felt all that hot when the lorry was moving, but my brain got fried anyway. Yambio was a nice little town, Tina reported. I didn´t venture far from the school in the beginning, but I was entertained by the persistent practicing of a marching band in the schoolyard. They needed the practice, they sounded like crap, but they played with enthusiasm and marched in little patterns in the yard while they played. I became their number one fan and applauded vigorously after each song they played. That was fun, but I was glad when I felt well enough to go for walks. Tina knew the area by now and wanted to show me her favorite spots. The forest was denser here, almost jungle. Lots of mango trees, and they said that sometimes elephants came to eat of the fallen down mango. They also informed us that you could get brained by a falling mango, the trees were high and the mangos heavy. Here, we saw monkeys. Small ones. There was a pretty little lake I would have loved to swim in but we were told that was out. Bilharzia. Surprisingly, a bus turned up. It looked almost dead, but was still moving. It bore the proud name "The Pineapple Express" and it was going to Wau. The driver agreed to have a tea on us and wait while we got our stuff. It was a little sad to miss the official performance of the marching band, but that was in a week and this pineapple opportunity was too good to miss. The trip was hot and bouncy, we pretended we were popcorn and hummed that old early synthesizer popcorn melody until we realized that the rest of the bus felt that we had hummed quite enough, thank you. A few kids watched us with big eyes, looking apprehensive. We knew that look by now. The people round here firmly believed in ghosts and ghosts looked like real people, but white. Quite a few kids, who were unused to hawadias up close, were not quite sure that we did not want to eat their liver. Raw liver was a dish that did not appeal to us, though. There´s an affliction where your body is really bad at absorbing some kind of vitamin. Nowadays they can fix it with a pill, but in the good old days the only way to survive was to eat several pounds of raw liver. Every day. I think I´d rather die. Once you were dead apparently raw liver would be the tastiest thing in the world too. As an apology for the popcorn hum and our literally ghastly appearance Tina went round and treated everyone to dates. There was enough for an extra date to the kids, too. One guy who spoke good English translated questions and everybody wanted to know everything about us. One thing I usually lied about was my job. I worked in a facility for mentally retarded. They had nothing like that here and taking care of "idiots" would have had very low status. So I lied. I wanted to keep it close to the truth, so I wanted it to be in health-care. At the same time I didn´t want to pretend to be a doctor or nurse I case someone wanted help I could not give. So I told them I was an X-Ray technician, who took pictures of people´s insides. Besides job-questions they asked about babies, of course. Some asked about how rich we were, what things we owned back home. Some asked about religion. The passengers seemed to be about one third Muslims, the rest Christians. We detected no sign of enmity. We also asked about their lives. Jobs were very few. There was a lot of small scale farming going on. They had high hopes for the oil prospection that was going on. If oil was found things would be well. Ha! All in all this was a fun trip. Probably the nicest journey we had in Sudan and although the road had been just as bouncy as last trip we were feeling much better when we left our busload of friends forever we´d never see again. CHAPTER 14 – THE LONG WAY HOME Sad and lonesome? Eat it! Wau. This is where we slept in the hospital, by the way. Bigger place than Yambio. In the restaurant we were led into the kitchen to point out what we wanted. There was the usual ful and addes, but also some kind of stew we hadn't had before and both wanted. Tomato salad, not bad. The stew tasted...well not good, but acceptable, the gravy part of it at least. But in that gravy swam like tubes of thick, ridged cartilage. We came to the conclusion that they must have chopped up lungs and boiled them. We didn´t quite know if we were expected to eat the tubes or if they were just there for decoration. We didn´t eat them, but the salad was good. Tina stole the last tomato from my plate. "Hey", I yelled. "I had to", Tina said. "It looked so sad and lonesome." "So, your reaction when someone seems sad and alone is to eat him." "Sure is. Like you. You were sad and alone when we met and you don´t complain at all when I munch on you." "Very true." "Like wolves. If they meet some sad and lonesome moose kid who has lost his mother, what do they do? Eat it!" I wanted dessert. There was none. There had been one place in Khartoum where you could get ice cream. Cones, artificial strawberry flavor. I wished we´d been in Khartoum. Or back in Europe where you could get, not only ice cream but good ice cream. Tina wanted a beer. Shit, I really wanted a beer too. I wanted a big glass of cold milk. Tina really did NOT want milk too. Tina wanted German sausages. I wanted pickled herring. Then we both were dying for pizza. I don´t even like pizza all that much, but right now, compared to my half-eaten plate of boiled lung, pizza seemed like the food of gods. All in all, this longing for the comforts of home was a confirmation that it was time for us to be homeward bound. We talked more and more often about things like toilet paper, showers that worked, sleeping in a real bed and playing music. We had long nerd-conversations about what song we were going to play first when we got home. This changed all the time, of course, depending on current mood. So – we slept in the hospital, experienced a birth, were shaken to the core, particularly when allowed to hold the baby, swaddled in a blanket three times too big. It was a tiny girl, all wrinkled and purple and super-cute. They said they would name her Tina, and Big Tina (a first for her, to be big) was moved to tears as she kissed Purple Tina on her purple raisin nose. We got their address and Tina planned to send gifts. She wanted to be an extra, ghostwhite, godparent beyond the sea and the desert. We hung around in the morning and Purple Tina peed when I held her. She was wrapped up and didn´t have all that much to offer yet, but there was a tiny spot. Tina pointed triumphantly. "Told you! Series of three!" We wanted to go home. Tina was inspired and wanted to do what we had told so many people here – go home and make babies. Like crazy. I was curious about what school I had been admitted to. "Are you sure you´re admitted somewhere?" "Well. Yes." "How? Doctorschools are tough to get into back home and I bet it´s the same in Sweden." "Well..." "You are the lousiest bragger in the world. Humility is all very well, but it´s ok to tell me, your beloved, about things you are proud of." The Tina Trip 03 - Sudan "There´s nothing I´m more proud of than you being my girl. I have no problems bragging about that." "Doesn´t count. Come on; BRAG! You know I have a lot of teeth." "Well, we have these tests for those who want to go to university. A certain percentage of the students are admitted from those who did well on these tests. Day before the test I did a practice version and it was pretty easy. Told my friend that I could see no way I wouldn´t do well on the test. I bragged, happy?" "Good boy, keep bragging now." "I sort of had to eat my words, though." "You did badly?" "In a way. I was there on time – but the day after the test was. Head in the clouds, you know." "Aww, my poor baby. Then what?" "Half a year later I had another chance. This time I was there the right day." "So..." "So I nailed it. Highest possible score. So, yeah, I will be admitted." "Our children will be marvelous! Your brains and my beauty." "At last! I´ve finally found one thing you do badly – playing bimbo." The journey to Aweil was unremarkable. We got a ride with a lorry, sitting on big grain bags. Aweil was unremarkable too, although I guess we didn´t give it much of a chance. We just wanted to move on. That night we slept on the unremarkable lawn of the unremarkable police station and nine o´clock next morning the train to Khartoum was supposed to go. It didn´t, quite, but almost. We left Aweil just four hours late, sitting on the roof of the train. The other travelers going the same way made clear that if you were cool you traveled on the roof. We desperately wanted to seem cool (Ha!) so the roof was a given. It was actually quite pleasant on the roof. There was a little fence so you wouldn´t fall off in your sleep and the train was nice and slow. You could wave to people and you could throw banana peels to goats, donkeys, horses and then we were out of bananas. Sorry Mrs Cow. There was a ladder attached to the side of the train and if you had the guts you could climb down into the trainbelly while the train was running. We didn´t have the guts. If we needed to go we just...didn´t. It was ok, we stopped fairly often. We invented yet another nerdgame. We chose two artists and tried to find the fewest number of connections, a connection being someone who had recorded at least one song with the next connection. To give you an example we could connect Frank Zappa with Norwegian saxplayer Jan Garbarek in five steps: Zappa – Chester Thompson – Joe Zawinul – Keith Jarrett – Garbarek. Get it? Great, right? We slept like soft little logs through the semi-desert night and when we woke up we were in good ole Khartoum again. We still wanted to go home to Europe as soon as possible. We made enquiries about flying from Khartoum and found that it was really expensive, beyond our budget. Tina, ever being the practical one (when not crazy) was quick to see a solution. "Fuck pride!" she said, and called her dad. "Am I supposed to buy a ticket for him as well?" he said. I think he was joking again. I do think so. Yes. "Come on vaterlein, you can´t leave the father of your grandchild stranded in the desert. He must come with me so he can make me an honest woman." While his secretary checked flights and reserved tickets they chatted about relatives and news we had missed and me. "Ok, Hilda has reserved two tickets to Frankfurt, the plane leaves in three days, sorry about that – that was the first available flight." "Don´t worry, Dad. Three days is fantastically fast. We´re not on European time here." "See you soon, dear. We´ll meet you at the airport. I look forward to scaring that Johan fellow." We had ice-cream. It was ok, but not half as good as you imagined it to be when you couldn´t get it. We had farewell-ful from a foodstall. As a goodbye meal it was ok, almost good. I had visions of us in the future, having remember-Sudan-meals, eating ful and addes, talking ´bout our glory days of squalor. Maybe we could find us a lung to chop up. The last night in Khartoum we slept in a good hotel. We wanted to have some good Goodbye Africa sex. And we did. In case you wonder, Goodbye Africa sex is slow, lasts long, smells of swamps, overripe mangos, rotting meat, sun on sand. There´s sadness, poverty, hunger and the joy of being alive. There´s a butchered hippo, the pain of entrails being shook loose on a lousy road and clouds of flies. Bilharzia. It´s vast and we were vast, too. Yes we were vast and now we were going back home, back to Europe. Back to the rest of our lives, our lives together and we would not shrink. Or so we thought.