A slow boat to Sudan

 I don't think i can accurately portray the last 48 hours in words and pictures alone. I knew it would be hard but i could not have imagined it would be like this.

We got to the port in Aswan at 10am to board our boat to Sudan and hundreds of people had clearly been lined up for hours already. We sort of jumped the queue, felt quite bad about it but given it was already 45 degrees we got past that pretty quickly. Once on board we secured our places on the deck - no allocated seats, just bum space where you could find it on the ground. We had intentionally got there early as we wanted to be able to spread out with our roll mats.

Over the next few hours the deck became fuller. We'd been told there were only 70 people on the boat when the group came north in March and they had the deck to themselves (there are three levels - one with cabins, one with general seating like a ferry and the deck). By the time they closed the gate at 6pm (we were meant to have left at 4pm) there were over 700 people on board and it seemed that everyone had brought with them several fridges, washing machines,blenders, flatscreen tvs and piles of rugs. There was stuff everywhere - and still being loaded through windows and manholes as we were preparing to leave. By the time we left the dock things were piled so high you had to climb literally 2 metres high to get over everything if you wanted to get off the deck. No such thing as OH&S over here!

Turns out some of the Sudanese who had become trapped in Libya had managed to escape into Egypt and the makeshift refugee camp that had been established was closed this week so they were all on our boat. So were some Sudanese miners who had accidentally crossed the boarder into Egypt and spent the last month in jail. In the morning we realised some of our fellow passengers on the deck were smugglers, as they began opening industrial sized bags and stuffing other wares in, and others began strapping things to their bodies, such as mobile phones.

The trip, which usually takes 16 hours, took us 30 hours - 22 of travelling plus 8 hours waiting around to leave. The most frustrating thing is that by road it would only take about 4 hours, but there are no land crossing from Egypt so you have to take the boat.

After a few hours in the hot sun we rigged some shades using scarves and clothes line - thank goodness we did as it turns out it was over 50 degrees. There were only 4 toilets each for men and 4 for women - luckily for us the men outnumbered us by about 7:1 but it was rank. Some of our group had come through India and said these were far worse than the toilets on the trains there. Sleeping arrangements were perhaps the most difficult, as by now all the smugglers on the deck wanted to stretch out too, in and around their loot, so there were bodies, boxes and bags everywhere. The guys in our group sort of sheltered us girls as we were the only females on the deck, but it was pretty impossible while trying to protect our belongings too.

When we finally got to Sudan we had to process immigration on board, by which time everyone was hot, thirsty, hungry and exhausted. I was the last in our group to get through and to my dismay the officer began questioning the photograph in my passport. He said it wasn't me, i explained it was 6 years old, and he said "ah, you have got very old". If i wasn't so desperate to get off the boat i might have punched him.

Our truck is coming on another barge which hopefully will arrive today, so we spent last night in this tiny border town. Our accommodation was either a prison or refugee camp in a past life (you can only lock the doors from the outside), and is sparse to say the least. Overnight the temp dropped to about 40 degrees so we were all lying in pools of sweat and had to put towels on our roll mats. It was disgusting. There is no running water, so i 'showered' in a bucket last night which was good for about 5 minutes until i got hot again.

We have 2 or 3 nights of camping ahead of us which will be even hotter if we can't find shade ... we are all now hoping our hotel in Khartourm was purpose-built for tourists and not delinquents.



Queueing to get through immigration onto the boat




Packing the boat involved passing huge loads over everyone and trying to get people and whitegoods through the one small door at the same time



A lot of these guys had clearly done the trip before and can sleep anywhere



Guys were carrying hufe whitegoods on their backs to get them on the ship



Our space on the deck was taken over quite quickly



Packing the boat continued well after we were meant to have left



The deck of our boat. Thankfully our makshift shades helped to secure our areas or we'd have lost space to more packages. Note the men who slept in the lifesaving raft on the left!