The final destination of the train to Wau was reached without further major excitement. Wau is not very big, and had no hotel. I found a guest house with four windowless rooms created and run by the Sudanese government, and for the use of government employees who might be sent there. Being windowless wasn't a big problem, because the rooms were open under the eaves to the outside world. I bought more mosquito coils from a shop. I bargained for a room for the night ($2), and had a truly wonderful shower, my first in more than 4 days. It was heavenly, and my pleasure in it was only diluted by the fact that I had to keep the water strictly out of my mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Lots of nasty little parasites in the local water, according to my best information. If you happen to get them inside you they eventually make you go blind, and do even worse things to your innards.
The guest house room did have a string bed, however, which felt extremely nice and comfortable, as it was the first time I had slept in a bed since leaving Aswan more than three weeks previously. Luxury. The room even had an electric light bulb hanging from the rafters !
There were said to be a couple of missions with clinics on the outskirts of town, but I never saw them.. I did see a couple of white folks at a distance in my daily wanderings around town. I don't remember a single paved road in the hot, humid overgrown village. Garbage was pretty much everywhere, and flocks of HUGE turkey vultures scavenged in the streets themselves, walking about proudly, ignored by the human inhabitants. I soon went looking for transport to Juba, 500 miles farther south over unimproved tracks. I talked to every building which had a truck parked outside, and queried everyone who greeted me in English or French, but in truth there was nothing headed south. Oh, well, I needed a few days rest anyway.
So, with no transport south available it remained for me to amuse myself. This wasn't too difficult. A good-sized native market was in progress at the edge of town every day, and I wandered it often. I saw one man sitting on the ground next to a large stack of big roasted termites. Hmmmm - this reminded me that when I began my vagabond's tour, I had vowed to myself that I would eat everything I found the local people eating. I asked the termite vendor using sign language if his bugs were to eat. He agreed that this was the reason they were for sale. A small attentive crowd gathered to observe. I chose two of the biggest termites and began to bargain. After awhile we agreed on a tiny price for two termites. I took them, and handed him one back saying "OK, you eat it now." Everybody laughed. He ate his, and, now assured that I was not being set up for a good joke, I ate mine. It was crunchy, not much taste to it. I had no burning desire to eat more roasted termites, but at least I had kept my vow.
(Historical footnote - the first country in which I spent any time on my vagabond's tour had been Italy, in which I found the local people eating two different foods which I just could NOT force myself to sample, each being infinitely more horrible than roasted termites, but that is another story. Thus I almost immediately broke my vow, but always kept it afterward in all countries EXCEPT Italy.)
There was one cafe in town, called "Unity Garden". It was a few battered, flimsy folding chairs and tables set outdoors in a dusty little square and lit by strings of colored Christmas lights. In one corner was a double statue, gaudily painted, showing a handsome, robed Arab-looking northern Sudanese offering his hand in friendship to a bulging-eyed, grinning, cartoonish black southern Sudanese in a blue T shirt and bright red shorts. Unity Garden was created by the government to unambiguously demonstrate the fact that the ruling northern Arab Sudanese had recently militarily defeated the rebellious southern Christian/Animist Sudanese. I found out later that there was another "Unity Garden" in Juba.
The menu consisted of ful (beans), coarse bread, tea, and sometimes fried eggs and mystery-meat kabobs. There was also a soggy, sticky pasta dish with bright pink sauce euphemistically referred to as "'spaghetti". I ate there every night of my six in Wau because they also had two electric table fans, and a tatty record player with a scratchy LP by Crosby Stills and Nash, which they played over and over again. It had, you see, been a long time since I had heard any western music.
There was one building in town containing a generator-powered ice machine. It sold, not surprisingly, ice. On my second day in Wau I was standing next to a blacksmith's shop, which was really just a series of little reed awnings over a couple of hole-in-the-ground forges all strung along an outside wall, with about a dozen folks working there. The southern Sudanese can make ANYTHING out of metal. They were in process of cutting a truck frame into pieces using only the charcoal-fueled forge and a cold chisel. They heated a section of the frame glowing cherry red hot, then hit it there with a sledgehammered cold chisel a few times, then repeated the process. They cut it completely in two in only six iterations! Others in the shop were cutting shapes out of sheet metal petrol tins and bending them to make all sorts of things out of them using big soldering irons. I was fascinated.
After awhile, an older man, apparently the owner of the blacksmith shop, came bustling up to me officiously, and in a rude and peremptory fashion handed me a small metal bowl, and told me in English to go to the ice store and bring him back some ice water. He then immediately turned away. I could tell that this was some kind of a test, but had no idea what the rules were. So, I walked calmly away, over to the ice store on the other side of town, asked them to fill the bowl with cool water, and brought it back to the blacksmith about 20 minutes later. He seemed pretty surprised to see me back with his water, smiled in an ambiguous fashion, and immediately made me a comfortable place to sit on the ground in his shop, with my back to the wall. To this day I am not sure if I passed the friendship test, or if he had deliberately sent me on a "woman's errand", fetching water, which no real man would agree to perform, and I had therefore failed SO horribly that he was embarrassed into being nice to me. From that moment on "Mister Bojo" and I were good friends, and I spent part of each day sitting in the blacksmith's shop, checking out the amazing craftsmanship that these clever men performed with the simplest of tools. I gave Mister Bojo a pack of good English Player cigarettes, and the next day he gave me a spearpoint, identical to the ones I had seen put to excellent use on the train ride several days previously. I have that spearpoint here now, 23 years later, beside my monitor as I write.
I finally heard about a truck that was leaving to the south in a few days, and bargained with the owners for a ride all the way to Juba. We reached agreement, and two mornings later I was part of a small throng of Sudanese standing around a regular sized stake bed truck, while the four man truck crew loaded lots of luggage in an even layer at the bottom of the 10' by 22' bed. Being a curiosity, I was allowed to board first, and sat on my pack with my back against the cab. Then everyone else boarded. It was pretty crowded, as with most transport in the Sudan. Lots of men, women, and children, all going south for any of a number of reasons. We soon began to motor south, the group in high spirits.
This truck served the functions of both bus and shipping line. It was owned by the operators and had no fixed schedule, going where profit dictated. Since there were plenty of folks waiting in Wau for transport south, that is where it was decided the truck would go. The truck crew were very strict in enforcing their rule about how many people could board the truck along the way. The only rule was "You have to pay to get on". Therefore the standard boarding scenario went like this. The crowded truck approaches an enormous 300 pound woman sitting on two huge burlap bags of peanuts beside the track. Everyone in the back of the truck grimaces as the truck stops for her, and bargaining for a ride takes place. Now, the truck is already COMPLETELY full with people jammed together in the back, so how is the new material loaded? Quite easily. The truck crew actually pair up to (one, two, thREE !) throw the massive bags of peanuts up over the stake rails on top of the passengers, who then, naturally, squirm out from underneath, and the peanuts are loaded !! Then the huge woman climbs up the outside of the stakes and perches precariously at the top above us for a few horrible seconds, while those passengers below her cringe. She launches herself butt-first into the scrum, landing crushingly on a half dozen folks, who, again, squirm out from under her, and, she has a place to sit !! Worked very well in retrospect. At one point the truck was so crowded that I decided to count how many folks were riding in the back. I counted 75, which was SO high that I knew I had somehow blown the counting, and counted again. My second passenger count came up 77.
The truck ride went on for three days and three nights. Most of the time there was a discernible unimproved road, and the drivers were extremely good at choosing a path through the multiple sets of corrugations and ruts with minimum jolting. Some of the time we were just driving along dry stream-beds. We usually stopped for the night at a little village or a lonely trade store, whereupon everyone would get down, fix themselves some food, and curl up on the ground to sleep. Eight of the other passengers turned out to be a traveling performing troupe, on a mission from the Sudanese government to put on shows of acrobatics/tumbling/boxing/bed-of-nails lying/flaming hoop jumping/guitar playing at various far flung villages. They were headed from Wau to a town called Maridi, deep in the southern jungle. Seemed a very strange mission to me, but these young men were quite friendly to me, and I was grateful that they made room for me on their big tumbling mats at night, which was much better than sleeping on the ground. They also "translated" for me, even though none of them spoke English or French. They were rather "modern" gents, wearing European-style clothing, with two of them even having processed straightened hair.
So, with the dearth of shops in that part of the world, what did I eat? Unripe mangos, mostly. For most of two days we drove through HUGE forests of mango trees. From time to time the truck would stop, and everyone would get down and throw things up into the trees to knock down the not-quite-ripe fruit. I ate lots of green mangos, and so did everyone else. Things got pretty sticky. I couldn't look a mango in the face for a couple of years after that trip, having gotten completely sick of them. After one stop, as we drove away, I felt something going on in the crowd behind me. Twisting around, I found a little black kid calmly wiping his sticky hands on my shirt. He wasn't embarrassed about this at all, and his mother seemed puzzled that I would object to this perfectly logical use of my clothing. Another time I had moved a little ways off from the truck to throw rocks into the trees, and was surprised when something whacked me hard across my head and shoulders from behind! Spinning around and backing up quickly, I found a wizened little old man with a big leafy branch maneuvering for another whack at me and cussing me out vituperously in some local dialect !! Some of the acrobats came and got between him and me, and talked him into calming down. Hundreds of thousands of wild mango trees all around, but according to my assailant, I had been messing about with one of HIS own personal mango trees !! I guess he found it necessary to deal firmly with all those dirty mango thieves masquerading as white vagabonds.
The third and last night of the journey I heard a disturbing loud roaring at some distance away. I had still not seen any big wild animals in Africa, though I had been watching for them. All I had seen were some baboons and lots of huge storks and vultures. In the morning I found out from the acrobats that it had been a hippo roaring! I redoubled my big-animal-spotting efforts after that.