A Journey to the Red Sea # 5

-5-

Kassala to Sinkat

The morning of the day of the longest leg of our journey to the Red Sea starts well enough, although we have already noted that it is hot even at six in the morning. What it will be like at midday is anybody’s guess.

Securing a place on an empty lorry looks fine – at first. We have told ourselves that it will move all the quicker for it being empty. We had not reckoned with the fact that no vehicles ever travel empty for very long in Sudan. Soon the lorry is stopping at regular intervals to pick up travelers and their belongings, sometimes it seems like all of their belongings.

Women with children, men with swords (Hadendowa tribesmen), sheep, goats, sacks of who knows what, in fact all manner of household effects is thrown up onto the back of the lorry, so that far from having it to ourselves and being able to stretch out full length on the two sacks of cotton that had been loaded before we got on, we now find that we haven’t even got enough leg room, and there is still seven and a half hours of the journey left.

These remaining seven hours to the town of Sinkat at the edge of the Red Sea hills seem interminable and our three stops for water are welcomed by one and all. Only the sheep and the goats stay on the lorry. Sinkat, we have decided, will be the end of the day’s journey. Port Sudan and the Red Sea are still maybe three hours away.

Our main reason for stopping in Sinkat, apart from the shortening of the overlong and uncomfortable journey is the fact that Sinkat is the town from which transport is available to reach the hill-town of Urkowit in the Red Sea hills, and which is reputed to be very beautiful and cool and maybe, because of this and its remoteness is the haunt of newly weds on their honeymoon. Urlowit the following morning sounds a good prospect. The nearby training camp of the PLO hadn‘t deterred us from our plans to visit this veritable spa in the hills overlooking the Red Sea.

Robert L. Fielding