Having exhausted the historical, cultural, and culinary attractions of Khartoum, I decided that I would ride the Nile steamer north with the flow of current from Juba. It then only remained to discover how I would get to Juba overland. Having assiduously collected information from northbound vagabonds whom I had met, the most likely route seemed to be the Sudanese railway 900 miles out through the middle of nowhere to a dot on the map called Wau, and then trust to luck to find some random transport from Wau over another 500 miles of unimproved dirt tracks to Juba. Yes, the Sudan is BIG ! To look at it on the map it really doesn’t impress, but Sudan is actually larger than all of Western Europe combined !!
The train to Wau originated at Khartoum and ran only twice a week. The railway ended short at Wau due to the fact that the British had not completed the line any farther than Wau when Sudan became independent 20 years previously. Not coincidentally, Wau was still the terminus. Vagabond rumors indicated that the Wau train could be extremely crowded. In advance, therefore, I bought myself a ticket to Wau, fourth class with student discount for about $6, and also shopped the native market for lots of dried dates and other non-perishable food. Two hours before the train was due to depart Khartoum I was on the platform with my pack, ready to fight for a fourth-class bench seat. There were lots of city Sudanese on the platform with me, all having exactly the same intention; excitement was high, and tension crackled through the crowd. About 1/4 mile away, along a curving track, we could see a huge shed with smoke coming out of it. We all expected the train to issue from the darkness inside, arriving with a flourish at the platform in front of us, at which point we would all vigorously scramble into the welcoming carriages, staking out our personal territories.
Well, we had imagined MOST of that correctly.
When the train did finally emerge into the sunlight, 90 minutes after it was scheduled to depart, and moved ponderously towards us, a strange, whispering sigh, almost a low groan, rippled through the platform crowd. The entire train was already BLACK with humanity, people hanging out of every window, and completely covering the roofs of every carriage !! Since the train only ran twice a week, those Sudanese in the know had already been living in the carriages for a day or two! Ouch, I was late again.
OK, by then I was familiar with Sudanese train-riding etiquette. I quickly clambered up onto the crowded roof of a carriage about two-thirds of the way back, forcefully wedged my pack down between the narrow butts of two wild-looking tribal gentlemen, and sat on it. I offered each of them a hard lemon candy and a cigarette in the hopes that they would not challenge my right to squat there. Their tribal facial scars crinkled as they smiled graciously, and I had a seat ! In return they offered me a taste of slippery home-brewed alcoholic beverage, which I tried, and a chew of tarry-looking tobacco, which I politely declined. A few hours later, a coal burning loco and tender, followed by 15 ancient passenger carriages, carrying well over two thousand human souls chugged majestically out of Khartoum, headed deep into central Africa.
We followed the left bank of the Blue Nile south for about 100 miles. The sun, heat, and humidity were intense there in the narrow cultivated strip along the river. In late evening the locomotive turned its nose into the setting sun and rolled steadily across trestles over both the Blue and White Niles, and out into the deserts of southern Sudan.
A note about the geography and climate of southern Sudan is here appropriate. The scenery is very flat and featureless along the rail to Wau, excepting the numerous termite mounds. We started out moving through scrubby desert, which slowly changed over the miles into bushy desert, then into scrubby forest, and finally through patches of dense but cheerless dry forest. The train stopped often, at every little shabby-three-grass-huts-village, and there was always an unconscionably long delay before we started to move again. I soon realized that the train crew were scheduling things to maximize overtime pay, and I am sure that they were successful. According to the official schedule, we should have been seventy-one hours in transit to Wau. In fact we arrived ninety-six hours after our departure. You can do the math. The average speed of the journey was about nine miles per hour. Ninety six hours is a long time to sit on the roof of a railway carriage, especially a crowded one. Lots of folks finished their journey along the route, and lots more joined up along the way, so the density of the throng varied over time. When leaving Khartoum we were so crowded that I could only get a place to sit five feet down from the ridge of the carriage roof. This position had some distinct disadvantages. Firstly, since many Sudanese are addicted to tobacco chewing, spitting is almost continuous. Secondly, such a seat became rather sporting when folks uproof shifted their positions, at times threatening to slide me off over the rounded edges. Fortunately I was bigger and stronger than the average southern Sudanese man, so by digging in with my heels, and the heels of my hands, I could maintain my position, in spite of downroof pressure. After the roof crowd thinned, I claimed a ridge seat, which I never afterward relinquished. Several travelers did fall off the roof during the journey. I could tell when someone had fallen off, because the train would stop, and then back up for a mile or two. Two of those falling off were killed in the process, the others being only injured. My local informants said this casualty level from falling was about average for a trip to Wau.
My fellow travelers on the train to Wau were quite picturesque. An unwritten rule seemed to be men only on the roof, so all of the women and children were inside the carriages. There were several versions of the "typical" man’s costume, ranging from simple cheesecloth boxer shorts, through short sleeved cheesecloth shifts, a few unarmed soldiers in khaki going home on leave, and finally including glorious traditional tribal costumes. The farther south we progressed, the higher the proportion of tribal passengers became, and the wilder and more amazing became the appearance of these local people.
After leaving the Nile, a quarter to half of the gents on the roof at any given time were armed, carrying 3 to 6 evil-looking iron tipped javelins in one hand, as well as an ax or fighting stick in the other. The socketed blades of these short lances were about 18" long, leaf shaped, and no wider than an inch. The shafts ere only about 3/4" thick at maximum so one hand could comfortably grasp a number of them. Deadly looking, they were. It seems the Sudanese carry multiples so that they can afford to throw a few, and still not find themselves unarmed. All of the iron work was locally done, and each spearpoint was hand made. The fighting sticks were made out of ironwood, which is extremely well named, very dense, hard, heavy and unsympathetic pieces of equipment. They were about four feet long, tapering from a maximum diameter of about 1.5 inches to a one inch diameter two-handed grip at the "near" end, and to about a half inch at the whacking end. The axes were unspectacular small-bladed affairs. Strangely, none of the weapons were ornamented in any way. They gave the message that they were "all business". Looking along the roof of the train, it gave the impression of a long, thin porcupine, each sitting man holding his bundle of spears erect.
Sudanese tribals in the south are easily the most interesting and colorful of any group of unsophisticated people I have ever encountered. The major tribal areas through which the train passed were the Dinka, the Nuer, and the Shilluk, (your spellings may differ). Sudan is the place where body-part stretching has passed all reasonable belief. The Ubangi, who stretch the lips of their women so amazingly, live in Sudan, as does the tribe which adds too-many neck-rings to its little girls' throats, stretching them terribly long. Many of the tribesmen stretch their earlobe holes to frightening lengths. I saw one guy who had decorated himself with a yellow quart oil can through each earlobe ! Another more practical man had his sleeping mat rolled up and held behind his head by an earlobe looped over either end. The Dinka wear more jewelry per capita than anyone else on earth. A well dressed Dinka man or woman has many toe rings, followed by ankle bracelets, below knee bracelets, above knee bracelets, a large elaborate beaded girdle, many necklaces, above elbow bracelets, below elbow bracelets, wrist bracelets, and plenty of finger rings, in addition to beaded collars and pectorals, and up to 15 earrings in each ear !! Most of the tribes have distinctive patterns of facial and body scars as a rite of passage into manhood. Top all that off with a beaded tiara or helmet, some feathers, and an occasional pair of dark sunglasses, and you can imagine that they are something to behold!!
When the trip was truly launched, and a routine had been established, an informal local commune sprang up on my section of carriage roof. Soon about 20 of us were cooperating, and sharing food (my dried dates being particularly well received every time they came out of the backpack.) Although I did not have a single word of any language in common with any of my neighbors, I was casually accepted as one of the guys. When climbing back up to our perch, I would hold the weapons of those ahead of me, and pass them up to the owners, and they would in turn wait for me, and give me a hand-up. Also, when some would climb down from the carriage at a stop, others would protect the common luggage, and we made certain that all of the communards still had a good place to sit when the train moved forward once more. I commented thankfully to myself how wonderful it was that all of these men of various tribes were really so peaceful, and so easy to get along with, because they looked SO fierce and heavily-armed and dangerous. Once our commune gelled, life was OK up there on the railway carriage roof.
The daily routine was actually pretty deadening. I would sit baking on the roof looking at the boring scenery passing by, and when we stopped at a village of grass huts, I would climb down to try to refill my 2-liter water bottle, and to stretch my legs and visit a little bit. In visiting, I met a few Sudanese passengers who spoke some English. The water replenishment wasn't too difficult, because when the local boys heard the train approaching their village, some would run to the nearest buffalo wallow, dip up a plastic pail of horrible greasy gray water, and run to the train to sell it for a piastre per fill-up. Other times there was a mudhole not too far from the tracks. Really wasn't too good a situation. Often only a 2" depth of this water was completely opaque, and it tasted bad, to boot, but that was all that was available. It was quite hot up on the roof in the hammering sun, and I spent some of the time being darn thirsty. I did use aqueous iodine to disinfect the water, but sometimes it was not quite possible to wait the whole half hour after treating the water before drinking. I had made up my mind before I left the U.S. that I would spend a LOT of the time on the road being sick, so that I wouldn't be surprised when it happened, but at that point my health was still holding out.
At one of the frequent stops, I met a Bushman at the water hole !!! I have NO idea why he had wandered so far north, but there was no question of his identity. The local blacks were very curious about him as well, and considered him a feature. We "conversed" for a short time, he examined my equipment, and I his. His face was open and friendly, and his skin was a pleasing rusty ochre color, much lighter than the very black skin of all those living in that part of the world. He was carrying well-worn home-made leather sandals and also a little bow and arrows, the only examples of either I ever saw in use in Africa. When he allowed me to open his quiver of nasty little barbed arrows, I asked him using sign language if they were poisoned. He assured me that they were not. The locals laughed at my pantomime.
I have no doubt that I was the first white person some of the children along the way had ever seen. I imagine that white vagabonds ride the train in one direction or the other every month, but even in villages within walking distance of the railway, white skins would have been extremely uncommon. Several times small groups of children, up to about 7 years old, screamed and pointed and hid behind their parents when they spotted me. The parents, on one occasion, obviously understanding the ways of white travelers, waved at me, correctly assuming that I would wave back. This display caused their little ones to scream and hide again, which gave the elders a good laugh.
At one point on the journey, after I had been, in some mysterious fashion, judged worthy, I was granted a short glimpse of Primal Man himself. Yep, there he was, standing on top of a termite mound, gravely watching the train pass by. He stood proudly, completely naked except for a thick uniform coating of gray dust, no adornments, holding in his left hand a short, crude club. I was thrilled to have been permitted to burn his image into my retina.
I will never forget it.
After riding for more than a day, I began to suspect that the train ride on the roof was free, because nobody had demanded a ticket. Late the second day, however, while the train rattled along, the ticket collectors came along the roof for the first time. They were two enormous men wearing Arab robes, and they were punching everybody's tickets, stepping carefully over the passengers and working their way towards the engine. The guy with the ticket punch had a big naked knife in his other hand, and his companion had a cocked 38 caliber single action revolver in his fist and a huge knife in his belt !!! Nobody was giving them ANY trouble, but they looked pretty nervous, their eyes darting around to try to keep as many of my neighbors in view as possible. Yow, that forced me to reconsider my judgment of the nice, peaceful, friendly folks crowded all around me on the roof. If the ticket collectors had to go armed to the teeth, maybe, - - - - - just maybe, - - my fellow communards were not always as peaceable and easy to get along with as I had concluded.
That night I woke about midnight, sleeping wedged between two of my wild companions, my forehead jammed against the shoulder of a particularly smelly gent. We were stopped, which was not unusual, but I could just make out the stack of the locomotive against the horizon, and it was not smoking. The fires had been banked. That had never happened before. I climbed down from the roof to make a necessary hydraulic adjustment, and found that the ground on both sides of the train was covered with people who had climbed out of the packed carriages, and were sleeping there. I stepped over folks in the darkness until I got to the edge of the inhabited area and took care of my errand. On my way back to the train, one of my English-speaking acquaintances, a soldier going home on furlough, popped up and greeted me quietly.
"Hello, mister Chih-kuh."
"Hello, mister Adam. How long do we stop here?"
He informed me that we were waiting for sunrise to go through the next big patch of scrubby forest. When I quizzed him as to why, he answered in a refreshingly concise and ingenuous manner.
"We are afraid." whispered Adam.
"What makes you afraid?"
I watched as he carefully formulated his reply, translating it in his head. "Wild animals and wild people" was the memorable reply.