Darfur - Day 4

Please note that any opinions expressed in this blog are those of Chip Duncan and do not represent any other organizations or individuals. Darfur is a place of constant change and any statistical references are approximate and may change rapidly. If you are reading this after January, 2008, please verify any information with up-to-date and verifiable resources.

Day 4 – January 4th, 2008 – It’s a Friday, the holy day in Islam, and the city is especially quiet. Our clearance for flying to Darfur has come as quickly as we had hoped and our departure will be Saturday morning. That’s good news, but it leaves us with a full day in Khartoum with little to do.

Dr. Wali greets us at noon for a sightseeing trip through the city. It’s a hot, sunny day and people are out and about in city parks or lounging near their houses. We drive a bit and it’s quickly easy to see that Khartoum is a city of significant contrasts. There’s an oil boom in Sudan and that means an influx of new money. There are new business interests here from all parts of the planet, especially from China. There are several new high rises around the town center offset by numerous old buildings from the British colonial period.
Most of the roads in the city are paved but there are very few traffic lights and the turnabouts (another British relic) are often ignored. In other words, traffic moves in a very haphazard way – though compared to most large developing world cities, it’s not terribly overcrowded.

On our way to drive by the presidential palace we pass a Christian church that is very old and sits on prestigious land near the Nile River. I’ve read that while Sudan is an Islamic state, there are no restrictions on religious practice.

The presidential palace is like all of them – big, huge lawns and tall trees, overwhelming security. We stop at the National Museum for a look inside but it’s closed for the holy day.

The highlight of the drive is the bridge that overlaps the confluence of the two great rivers – The Blue Nile and The White Nile. Khartoum is where they unite into one to form the Nile River that continues northward to Cairo. The drive along the river’s edge is quite pretty and there’s almost no development adjacent to the river. It strikes me as a great spot for some outdoor cafes, though that doesn’t appear to be a big aspect of Sudanese social life. There are a few fishermen on the river and the water, from what we can tell, is unusually clean this far upstream. Given that there’s little industry to be found between here and the source of each river, I shouldn’t be surprised.

We have lunch near the airport again, then make a visit to what becomes the highlight of our day – the Hamad El Niel Mosque. It’s here that Sufis come on Fridays to celebrate their faith in the late afternoon. For more than an hour, we’re treated to the upbeat and beautiful practice that includes the famed “whirling dervishes.”

As the sun sets, we return to the guesthouse to prepare for our next day’s early morning flight to El Fashar in North Darfur.

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Thanks for following along on The Road To Darfur. Please visit again tomorrow for Day 5.