A Journey to the Red Sea # 7

-7-

Port Sudan

We arrive in Port Sudan in plenty of time to get a small room in the Olympia Park Hotel, a rather grand sounding name for a labyrinth of rooms, corridors and stairs that passes for a hotel.

After a short nap and a meal at a nearby café, we head for the dock area and its lines of fine colonial style architecture which is so uncharacteristic of most of the country we have seen so far. It seems incongruous, even in this thriving port, which is itself unlike any other town I have yet visited. The air, for instance, there is something very unSudanese about it; it is humid and quite cool – the presence of the sea can be clearly felt if it cannot always be seen.

Inland from the dock area the streets become familiarly Sudanese again, and only the humidity belies our location. As dusk settles on the crowded streets, which are full of young men wanting to change our dollars into local currency, a stray knot of camels careers out of the half light and sends us scurrying for cover and safety behind the pillars of a building. Half a ton of camel in a stampede is not the sort of thing you feel you want to get in the way of, but our running has not gone unnoticed and we are roundly jeered for our apparent timidity. One boy summed up the hilarity; he said, “Hey, Mister, you afraid of camel?”

The train from Port Sudan to our next intended destination leaves early in the morning; the next one leaving exactly one week later. As we had set out primarily to see the old port of Suakin further down the coast, we decide that the town of Shendi will have to join that category of places to be visited some time in the future. Suakin, after all, was on everybody’s list of places to see and is most definitely on ours.
Robert L. Fielding