A Heroic Journey from Kapoeta to Kathmandu

I have received more than a couple concerned emails wondering about the lack of posts for the past two weeks. As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post, for the week of Thanksgiving, we had little to no internet connection. Then, the day after Thanksgiving, we began what can only be described as a heroic journey to attend the wedding of a friend in Nepal.

I’ve alluded to this Nepal trip previously, but had been purposely vague with details because, to be honest, our travel plans really weren’t set until we actually got on the road. The reason: we were waiting for the Indian Consulate in Juba to issue our transit visas and return our passports so that we could leave Sudan to begin our journey. We had hoped that the Indian visas would be issued earlier Thanksgiving week so that they could be couriered to us by Francis’ colleague on his way back to Kapoeta. When he showed up on Thanksgiving, though, without our passports in hand, the only option for us was to hop in the truck and drive to Juba (waiting for the next plane would have made us 2 days late for the wedding).

As I’ve mentioned before, the condition of the roads in Southern Sudan is indescribable. In the absence of any radio stations to entertain us throughout our journey, I instead compiled the following statistics in hopes of trying to illustrate what we experienced:

Distance traveled: 290 km (180 miles)
Elapsed time: 9 hours
Average speed: 32 kph or 20 mph (about 15 mph faster than possible during rainy season or probably wise)
River crossings: 38 (about half of these were on wooden bridges. For the rest, the road led directly across the riverbed. Thankfully, it’s a dry season and so 4WD was only required twice.)
Herds of beasts blocking our travel path: 11 (roughly equal numbers of goats and steers)
Armored tanks rusting on the side of the road: 3 (likely many more were present, but camouflaged in the weeds)
Monkeys!: 10 (some are probably better described as baboons)
Times my head hit truck ceiling: 5 (even though I was wearing my seatbelt)

For people planning to take this journey in the future, a couple helpful tips to make your journey more comfortable:
1. Drivers and passengers alike my wish to consider drinking before taking the journey to relax your muscles. Careful, though; there are no flush toilets along the way.
2. While a motorcycle helmet would be overkill (and hot!) a Green Bay Cheese Head or similarly padded cap is recommended.
3. Ladies, do yourselves a favor and wear a sports bra.

So, at the end of the 9-hour Leg 1, we arrived in Juba on Friday night. By the time we arrived, I was so exhausted that I had completely forgotten that I was SERIOUSLY craving ice cream after 3 weeks without, and instead passed out at a Juba hotel (I woke up with some sort of rash all over my left arm which can’t be directly linked to the hotel, but we can’t come up with any other explanation than some sort of bed bug—yuck!). Since our visas had thankfully been issued on Friday, we were able to continue on our journey on Saturday. Leg 2 involved taking a normal-sized airplane to Nairobi, where we checked into what looked to me like one of the world’s most beautiful hotels. Now, since I’ve been roughing it in Sudan for over a month, it is very possible that even a Days Inn in Peoria would look luxurious (hot water! Air conditioning! A padded desk chair!). However, the Fairview Hotel in Nairobi really is a beautiful place with pretty gardens, lots of wood paneling, and five restaurants including a wine bar, pizza kitchen, and ice cream parlor! We spent most of Saturday and Sunday basking in the glories of a place without dust, eating all of the fresh veggies and dairy that was so lacking in Sudan, and catching up on work (Francis) and preparing a couple job applications (me).

On Sunday afternoon we headed for the Nairobi airport for the final 3 legs of our journey that would take us through 4 national capitols in 24 hours. Leg 3 was a flight from Nairobi to Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). The hub for Ethiopian Air was actually much nicer than I expected, with a terminal that couldn’t be more than 10 years old. The real surprise was that there were no periodicals (magazines/newspapers) available ANYWHERE in the airport—even the Juba airport sells newspapers! Leg 4 was an overnight flight (6 hrs) from Addis to Delhi (India). It was a good thing that we got the transit visas because it bought us a stay in the main terminal rather than Indian Purgatory, the transit lounge where we were trapped on our return trip. I think this is the appropriate place to insert that, though I am generally eager to travel to almost anyplace (hello—I live in Sudan!), this trip has completely turned me off to India. Not only did we have troubles getting (expensive and ridiculous) transit visas and suffer the isolation of purgatory, the Delhi airport also has a ridiculous baggage screening process (the baggage screeners didn’t put a tag on my purse which I learned was necessary right before we boarded the plane, so I had to return to the xray machines and go through a full-body pat down all over again). Additionally, the airport has the loudest and most obnoxious announcements (a final boarding call for each flight was given about 15 times) , especially when heard at 2am. Alright, back to the journey. The final and 5th Leg was from Delhi to Kathmandu (Nepal). There is so much to tell of Nepal, that it deserves its own post.

Random take-aways from the journey:
1. Nairobi is a great introduction to Africa or “Africa-Lite”; international standard creature comforts, mostly English-speaking, beautifully green.

2. Logic puzzles must be an American thing. I had complete the GAMES puzzle magazine that Francis found for me (and completely got hooked on the “paint by numbers” puzzles), and have looked everywhere for another, but to no avail. Books of crossword puzzles or Sudoku are available, but no logic puzzles. Sadness.

3. India sucks.