After the Fusion and Roskilde (I will maybe post some photos later, but Gregor who made much better pictures already posted lots on Spreeblick) I went to Berlin and from there to a village south of the beautiful Bautzen by the name of Kirschau. We went there to visit the ObPhon festival becuase Mary and Alex participated with their Max & Moritz 2.0 installation. (I hope now I have done enough for my link karma for the rest of the year.) That’s also where Christoph shaved my beard. Anyway… enough talk. Below you can see some pictures I took on the exhibition grounds.

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Pictures by Rychard, shaving by Christoph.

Port Sudan is an extremely relaxed town. The city was build by the British in the early 20th century, because Port Sudan was able to serve as a deep sea harbour. Suakin, which had been the most important harbour town until then, is not. Interestingly Suaking is up to today important as a ferry harbour for boats to Saudi Arabia, for migrant workers as well as for Haj. The city centre of Port Sudan  is developed by a grid scheme and in the middle is a beautiful market area. Most of the pictures below show the market.

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Khartoum has a pretty good bus network. It’s actually great if you want to travel long distance and if you travel outside the city centre. If you are in the city centre however, it actually sucks. The reason for this is basically that all busses travel via one central bus station which is on one end of the city centre. So if you are at any place in down town, you can either walk across the centre to jump on a specific bus line –or you can grab any bus back to the central station, then jumble through the masses of other travellers to eventually find the bus line you aim for. I usually pick the first option.

Since I am currently staying at a friend’s house for a couple of days while he is in Finland, the easiest way home is to walk towards Khartoum 2 and then grab any bus at the first roundabout going down towards airport road. Most busses going that direction cost 400 (old pounds, i.e. 10 British pence), but that’s not true for all busses. As I learned today, the bus to “Maju, Sinia” costs between 500 and 700 depending on where you want to get off. But the ticket guys never say anything, they just click their fingers and assume you know the price. So I gave him 400. He looked at me and asked where I want to get off. After I told him, he shrugged, looked at me again and shook his head as if he was trying to say; what a greedy Khawaja, not only is he too cheap to use private transport, he doesn’t even want to pay the normal bus fare. Then he turned around and let me be.

Now it is time to talk about the nature and landscapes between Kosti and Juba. Basically the trip is divided into three sections. First from Kosti to somewhere after the point where the Sobat river splits off. From there nearly all the way to Bor is the Sudd, the large Sudanese swamp area. From Bor onwards the landscape changes again.

From Kosti down to the Sobat the Nile is wide and the river is still crossing rather dry areas. Therefore the vegetation is mostly only around the river itself, it is low with some interspersed trees and palms. Generally the riverbanks are rather dry now, however this area, as all the others we passed through, surely look very different during the rainy season. The first new element in the landscape is only a couple of hours after Kosti, a small town situated under two hill, fittingly name Jabalain (two mountains). Just before reaching Malakal the river suddenly is lined by palm trees. Already at this point and from here onwards for the whole trip, there was big plants swimming in the water. They grow on the side of the river and I presume that they rip off with the seeds, swim further down and then grow again on the side of the river at a lower point. While it seems obvious how this plant moves down the river, I wonder why it doesn’t die out further up the river –especially as the seeds, if my interpretation that this were seeds is correct, are approximately half the size of a fist and cannot be moved by wind. Sometimes the water was practically full of these swimming plants.

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