Editor’s note: This travel piece was written weeks before two military men in Sudan started battling for power, before hundreds were killed and embassies were evacuated. The Post and Courier feels that amid headlines of war and destruction that it’s important to see inside the country, learn about its people and cultures, and explore what is at stake. 

The best chicken restaurant in Dongola, Sudan, was empty, as if people rose from their seats and walked out. Whole chickens turned on a rotisserie above an open flame, skins becoming crispy, sealing in the flavor of oil, salt and lemon. But there was no one behind the counter to take our order or serve us one of the delicious chickens, cut up over a bed of seasoned rice.

There was only the white tile of the floor, glowing clean under the fluorescent lights of this open-air restaurant.

One man walked up to us and said he was hungry. We promised that when we finished eating, we would give him what was left, as is the custom of that part of the world. He disappeared into the night, and we were alone again.

In the parking lot, there was a cart full of balls of falafel, divided into plastic bags tied with slip knots for quick purchase, but no one there to sell them.

It was Friday. The sun set long ago, and it was as dark as the traffic on the busy road would allow. And as it did five times a day — at dawn, at noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and now at nightfall — the sound of a man’s voice came from a loudspeaker above the mosque next door reciting the call to prayer. When he was done, the notes still hanging in the warm night air, men poured out of the gates, still sliding feet into shoes, and flooded into the restaurant, filling every empty Table. The room was, for a moment, a stark painting of white prayer robes, white tile and red plastic tables. But the evening quickly set into motion as if on queue.

Baskets of flat bread were delivered and huge trays of chicken and rice. Laughter filled the room as men tore the bread and pulled the chicken apart and scooped the chicken, rice and bread into one bite.

The chicken was tender and fell off the bone. It was easy to recognize the taste of lemon and salt, but there were other flavors that were just out of reach, flavors that I’ll spend the rest of my life wanting to taste again. Even as I ate, I knew I would long for it later. So I sat at the table, in this remote part of the world, trying to remember each bite.

Then plates of sugar-soaked baklava were delivered.

Just outside the restaurant was a plastic barrel full of water with a small faucet at the bottom. I opened the spigot just long enough to wash my hands and closed it again. I shook my hands into the night air, flicking the water from my fingers to dry them faster, and returned to the table.

In Sudan, the wind strips you of yourself. The wind is constant and it carries with it a sound that, when you hear it again, you’ll recognize immediately. It blows across the desert, slowed by nothing, a steady, all-encompassing tin whistle wind full of sand you cannot see. The fine grains rub away at you, smoothing the edges of you, quietly grinding down who you thought you were. You are not impressive here. No one cares what you do for a living or what you have.

The skin on my forearms and the tops of my feet started to harden with tiny scratches. I kept my hair pulled back, and I learned the many ways you can wrap a scarf around yourself to protect from the sun, the chill from the wind and the sand that would erode you into a drift if it could and dissipate you across the landscape.

You quickly understand why the men wrap their heads in white turbans with a strip of cloth that comes down over their mouth when the wind or the sun becomes too harsh. You understand why the women dress in layers of draped cloth, protecting their hair and faces. 

When I returned to our table with my hands washed, an American woman was standing there, talking about Sudan.

“It’s beautiful here,” she said. 

I thought about that word for a moment and tried to agree. Sudan is many things, but to say it is beautiful undermines something about it. It’s too fast a word, too overused, too empty for this place.

Instead, I introduced myself — the stripped-down me with just my name to offer.

There aren’t many foreigners wandering the desert of Sudan. But when you meet one, they are usually an archaeologist or a TV host from the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. She was an archaeologist, there to excavate a square of the limitless expanse.

The trope of Indiana Jones — the attractive, adventurous man who lives slightly outside of reach of society’s demands — is being replaced out in the field by a new generation of women. Almost all the archeologists we met were female.

Our guide, Rihab Khider, was an archaeologist and said more than half of Sudanese archaeologists are women. She and Habab Idriss Ahmed — a Ph.D. working on Medieval Christian sites in the country — put their arms around each other as they told me about the freedom the profession bought them.

“As Sudanese women, it gives us the opportunity to travel,” she said. “And we love to travel.” They both had spoken at international conferences, experts in a growing movement where Africans are in the field studying and interpreting their own history.

The woman at our table in the chicken restaurant was Elizabeth Minor, Ph.D. from Wellesley College. She and her team had returned to Sudan for the first time since the pandemic. They arrived that day and would be heading out to the site for the first time tomorrow to see what three years away had done. She invited us to come.

We would stand in the desert and look at the ground. Where I saw sand, moving slowly at my feet under the wind, she saw the remnants of the Kerma state from 2000-1550 B.C.

Kerma is famous for its large-scale human sacrifices — hundreds buried along with their king at the time of his death. Elizabeth has excavated those sites, published and lectured.

But today she was leading a team, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, to look at ancient climate change and the political, domestic and economic adaptations that came as this part of the world shifted from a dense, green subtropical forest to a desert thousands of years ago.

***

Alhamdulillah. It’s used all over the Arab speaking world but especially here. Thank God. Thanks be to God. It’s an answer to the good and the bad. It floats in and out of sentences — a response to all of life’s movements.

“We make life easy for each other in Sudan,” Rihab said more than once.

Along the road in the shade of a tree, there are large unfired pottery jars held off the ground by steel frames. The design allows the jar to sweat, keeping the water cool. Nearby is a cup to drink.

I wonder how many years, how many thousands of years, this travelers’ tradition has been kept alive to make sure there is water in the desert.

It’s an inhospitable landscape kept livable with small kindnesses like this.

We would stop along the road at cinderblock shelters, simple in their design. There was always a small kitchen in one corner that could be used by travelers like us to cook our own meals. Tables, chairs, sometimes a cot or two leaned against the wall for resting.

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Lunch would come out as a heaping platter of rice, a plate of eggplant in garlic yogurt sauce, slices of watermelon, beans, a basket of flat bread.

It was more than we could ever eat. When we were done, as we drank tea — sweetened beyond any Southerner’s imagination — our leftovers were shared with anyone around who wanted to eat. It was not done as a grand gesture. It was done quietly. Of all the things that we experienced in Sudan, this is what stuck with me the most. If you have, you give, always maintaining the dignity of the other person and offered with gratitude that you had it at all. Alhamdulillah.

Since I came back, I’m deeply aware of food waste. I’m ashamed when the server comes to clear the table and we have food left that will be scraped into the garbage.

Hospitality becomes an empty word when I try to describe the way we were treated as we made our way across Nubia.

My favorite way to slow down travel, to make sure that I am not rushing through the experience, is to stop for tea. And there is nothing like stopping for tea in Sudan.

The smell of frankincense is the first sign you are coming upon a tea stand. Women have mobile tea carts, each with the same setup: A small coal stove for heating the water. Jars full of spices like cardamom and ginger to mix into your tea or coffee. And once you are served, a small clay cup is put at your feet or on the little plastic table in front of you with burning frankincense.

It’s to keep the flies away — the byproduct of living in a pastoral place of goats and sheep, cows and camels.

But it’s also a reminder of where you are in the world.

Frankincense is from here, the hardened resin from the Boswellia tree that thrives in this arid landscape, a tree small and gnarled. The fragrance of its resin is a kind of poetry coming from a plant that somehow grows under the hot sun, in sand with little water.

Each time we sat down for tea, we would be told that we were a guest of … and someone would be pointed out among the other customers. There would be a nod or a huge smile, and we would know that not only had our tea been paid for, but that for the time we were there we were under the watchful eye of someone.

At one such tea, late at night by the side of a busy road, we stood up to say goodbye and the woman who owned the tea stand brought me the small clay frankincense pot from our table and a small bag of frankincense. No words, just the gift, and a giant smile. It’s one of the only souvenirs I took away from Sudan, sitting now on the rooftop patio of my home. The nearby church bells ring at 6 p.m. from the steeples of downtown Charleston. I light some frankincense and look out at this beautiful city through the smoke and smells of Sudan.

***

The guesthouse was a compound, like all homes in that part of Sudan. High walls and huge metal doors face the outside world. Inside is a courtyard for spending most of the day. Against one wall were three faucets and a basin the same height and construct you see at most mosques for washing feet and hands and faces.

In one corner was a large shade tree. Otherwise, the courtyard was empty. And the rooms were just as spare, two cots.

We left the compound to explore the village. A woman pointed us in the direction of the sunset and a horizon of date palms. Inside the village, the paths were covered in deep drifts of sand and it was slow, clumsy walking, but the compounds gave way quickly to fields — onions, corn, beans. Then a bridge over a canal — diverted water from the Nile.

We watched the sun go down through the palms and walked back. A car full of teenage boys drove by and waved to us, giddy in their freedom, like every small town evening everywhere.

Otherwise, the village was quiet. The final call to prayer floated through the air, marking the last light of the sun disappearing into darkness.

I heard his voice through the thin walls of the guesthouse speaking American English. It was late — or late for us who slept and rose with the setting and rising sun.

He not only sounded American, but sounded Southern. And not only Southern, but a familiar coastal lilt. Had someone followed us here from Charleston?

By the morning, I’d forgotten the voice and was surprised again when a man showed up at our breakfast table with all the greetings of home.

He was from Savannah, as far from home as us, smiling and stirring sugar into his coffee.

There’s a subtle, competitive dance that happens among adventurous travelers when they run across each other in a dusty courtyard in a village in Sudan.

I read so much about how hot Sudan was — one of the hottest capitals on Earth (temperature) — that I didn’t pack a coat. Thankfully, at the last minute, I threw in a grey linen circular scarf that had enough material in it to cover me from shoulders to ankles. And I tossed in a light scarf I bought in Ethiopia 10 years ago for covering my head if we toured any mosques.

I spent most mornings wrapped in both scarves, because it is cold in Sudan in the winter and the constant wind never lets you forget it.

So I sat at the breakfast table with one hand poking out of my scarves just far enough to hold my cup of instant coffee.

I made a joke about the cold and the dust as a way to greet our fellow traveler from Savannah.

“This isn’t hard travel,” he said.

“Oh, of course not,” I said back, lying just a little.

The man from Savannah started saying the names of difficult places he’d traveled. Tajikistan. Have you ever been? I haven’t, but I’ve been to Kyrgyzstan. In the winter. And we went back and forth like this, smiling and one-upping, forgetting for a moment that the reason we travel is to learn about the world and about ourselves. We told stories — not to bond, but to decide if we were on the same level. Then we hit on a place we both loved. Mongolia. That calibrated us, and we relaxed into a deeper conversation about why we were in Sudan.

The first trip abroad I ever took was to Uganda. I was 22. My dad bought me a plane ticket for three months, and I had $700 that I saved from working on the recycling crew at Grand Teton National Park.

Those three months changed the entire course of my life. I saw the mountain gorillas right on the Rwanda border. I got malaria on an island in Lake Victoria. I made money removing jiggers from the feet of travelers with the Leatherman multi-tool I bought just for that trip. But mostly I listened. I spent hours talking to locals, aid workers and other travelers, and following the whims of the road. I truly saw the world for the first time outside of myself. When I arrived back home, I was not the person who left three months before.

I’ve spent the rest of my life chasing that feeling.

This man from Savannah was the same. But the kind of travel that changes you doesn’t happen at tourist attractions and trinket shops and all-inclusive resorts. It happens in places like Sudan, complicated places where you have to pay attention to take it all in.

***

Call it the spark image. There’s always an image someone paints of a place that lodges it in my imagination and eventually sends me there. While the spark gets you there, in the end it is rarely the thing you remember about the place. It’s just a password to get you through the door so the real journey can unfold.

I saw the spark image that brought me to Sudan nine years ago. It was January. I had just turned 40 and signed divorce papers the week of Thanksgiving. There was still a tan line on my ring finger. And I was climbing Mount Cameroon alone, feeling like a spindly leg fawn getting my balance back as I figured out what was next in life.

Also climbing the mountain was a group of International Red Cross workers. It’s a two-day climb, so we camped together. These guys work in refugee camps, doing some of the most stressful work on this planet. They told me they had to take a week off every five weeks to avoid burnout — and that’s how they ended up here, and everywhere.

One of the men asked me, “Want to see something beautiful?”

He handed me his phone. On it was a picture of dark red sand dunes and pyramids the same color. The sun was setting in the photo, making everything glow.

“Imagine being in this place all alone, in the desert looking at pyramids, just you. That’s Sudan.”

That’s all it took.

That’s how I found myself here sitting on a sand dune looking out on the desert, the Meroe pyramids rising behind and beside us, feeling like anything was possible.

There are more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt. But Sudan has long lived in the shadow of its neighbor from the perspective of Western interest. Archaeologists came to Sudan in the 1900s, seeing it as an outpost of Egypt rather than its own kingdom with its own culture.

As they opened tombs, excavated mass graves and unearthed Nubian temples, the most famous men of the time, like George Reisner, interpreted what they saw through the Egyptian lens. So archaeologists are revisiting some of the most famous digs in Sudan to find what was discarded and never studied or reinterpret what was sent to museums in Boston, London and New York. (Elizabeth Minor, whose site we visited, has an interesting lecture online called “Decolonizing Museum Archives” on this subject.)

The pyramids of Meroe — built in 300 B.C. — are the only place in Sudan that could be called, even remotely, touristy. It’s a three-hour drive from Khartoum, and there’s a resort nearby run by an Italian woman, full of Western-style food and hot showers. It’s the only place in the country I saw trinkets being sold in lean-to stands by the entrance. There were men offering camel rides to the pyramids, which we took.

Even so, we were the only people there.

We sat at the base of these burial monuments to the kings and queens of the Meroitic period, thinking about the need for human beings to leave a legacy and call out to the living long after we are gone.

Though this place was the image that brought me to Sudan and the visit to it was wonderfully photogenic, I barely think of it when my mind looks back at that trip. Something, something, not the destination, something, something, journey.

***

We traveled with all our food in the back of the Toyota Hiace, stopping at the village market every day for fresh flat bread, eggplant, tomatoes.

Our driver, Saleh, is one of those barrel chested, gregarious men who lights up every room he walks in. He makes a living driving for the major mining companies, for the TV hosts, the archeologists and the adventure travelers like us.

His job takes him across stretches of roadless desert. He is the map of this place — filled in by his extroverted curiosity. Every stop, he was a handshake and a cup of tea away from a new friendship.

And that’s how we found ourselves sitting in the makeshift shade with the camel herders of Darfur, chewing the shells off of sunflower seeds and drinking sugared tea.

The camel market outside of Khartoum is every Saturday.

It was Wednesday.

In three days, this large empty field would be full of camels and cattle. Men from Egypt would walk among the fenced-in herds and pick out camels for racing and carrying.

But today, men from Darfur with knives strapped to the back of their arms, carrying hippo hide whips, stood in the dust, moving the camels so that the strong ones didn’t eat all the food.

Some of these men walked with the camels all the way from the west, living off their milk in the traditional way, but most of them loaded the animals in trucks and brought them here by the hundreds. The best camels in the world come from Darfur, we were told.

Which ones are the best? The red ones. How much do they cost? That one will probably sell for $2,300.

The front feet of the camels were loosely tied together so they could move but not run. I had seen a camel tied like that in the desert a few days before. Instead of walking, he hopped until he was close enough to an Acacia tree. He stretched his neck toward the highest branch he could reach and ate the leaves.

After living side-by-side with humans for thousands of years, camels are domesticated but not entirely unwild. In this way, they seem different than other livestock — goats, sheep, cows. There’s something humans have never bred out of them, something that feels a little like compliant disdain.

When the flies and the wind and the sun became too much, and when we reached the limits of my Arabic and the edges of what we had in common with the men, we started to look for Saleh.

He’s somewhere making a new friend, Rihab said. We just needed to figure out where.

Saleh was sitting inside a makeshift shelter in a corner of one of the fields. The walls were built of tied-together sticks and thin logs. The walls were burlap, and a woven mat of straw served as the roof, built to block the wind and the sun but open on two sides to give a view of the camels and a pen full of goats.

Someone’s prayer beads hung at the entrance.

There were two carpets on the floor, and we slid off our shoes when we walked in so we didn’t track in dirt and camel dung. There were two cots inside — for sleeping and for sitting with guests.

Saleh was deep in conversation with three men — young but stern.

We were invited to come in, sit down.