Sudanese Impressions

Two weeks in a country isn't nearly enough time to learn a lot about it, but we felt that after running around Khartoum for that amount of time we were able to get a decent sense of what life is like at least in the Khartoum area. It was also more than enough time for us to be impacted by some of the characteristics of the city that stood out to us and form some impressions that we will remember for quite some time.

First of all, Sudan is the first country we have visited that is not really a tourist destination. A lot of people, for instance, dream of visiting Egypt or Morocco--and even Jordan--but never have we heard anyone speak of a yearning to visit Sudan. We like to do a little bit of basic research before going anywhere, but there is no "Lonely Planet" Sudan travel guidebook, and surprisingly the Internet doesn't provide much information either. Even finding a map of Sudan--when we were in Sudan--was difficult. That Sudan is not a travel hot spot--and that the government doesn't seem to care that it isn't--in itself made our trip different from others we have taken.

Sudan is also the first country we have visited that can really be called "developing" in every sense of the word and which is developing in every part of the country. This is different from a country like Jordan, which still could perhaps be considered a developing nation, but only in parts of the country and not in major cities like Amman. Jordan may be lacking in some of the amenities that we are used to back home, but it is far ahead of Sudan in terms of things like standard of living and infrastructure, particularly in the two capital cities. Seeing this difference made us realize how much we have here, and how much easier life is here.

What else? We noticed that vehicular traffic in Khartoum wasn't bad for a city of 6 million people, which perhaps was so because most of those 6 million were instead walking. We did a lot of walking in Khartoum ourselves, and everywhere we went the streets were full of people walking. Mobs of people, walking everywhere--on some streets only occasionally disturbed by a car or truck--probably because most people there don't have vehicles. This continued after sunset and into the evening, at which time we were always further impressed by the strange experience of walking with thousands of other people in the downtown of a large capital city in the dark. Of course it wasn't pitch black--some shops had dim lamps and cars would occasionally drive by with lights on--but there were no street lights downtown, which meant that at night Khartoum turned very shadowy.

We were also struck by the number of dirt streets in Khartoum. Since Khartoum is a large capital city this was a surprise, especially coming from Amman, which is a fully concreted capital city where even the parks sometimes have more pavement than grass or dirt. Some of these dirt roads even had big potholes or random mounds of dirt that cars needed to maneuver around. Also, the city is so dusty that even some streets that were paved had been overtaken or were being overtaken by dirt, as if nature was reclaiming what people had tried to claim. To be sure, We did see many nice paved roads, but in the heart of downtown it seemed that there were more dirt streets than paved. These dirt roads definitely told us we were far from home.

Finally, we found Sudanese people generally to be friendly and open. We also found many to be quite tall. Relations between men and women also seemed to be a bit more free and relaxed than in Jordan. Men and women seemed to interact more together, and I even shook the hands of several women when greeting them, Muslims included. Not only that, but those women shook my hand in a manner that indicated it was not something they were doing for the first time, as I usually feel here on those rare occurrences when a woman extends her hand to greet me. So in the future whenever I think about our time in Sudan, I guess my dominant memory will be of a lot of tall, smiling people, walking everywhere, shuffling along sometimes on dirt roads, sometimes in the dark. They better know where they're going, because no maps are available.