The truck ride from Wau to Juba eventually entered real, serious forests in the far south of the country, with beautiful big trees. The entertaining troupe finished their journey at Maridi, a lovely clean village. Most of Maridi snuggled in under the most enormous single tree I have ever seen. Later that day we reached the White Nile again, and I got a look at Juba.
There was really not much to see at Juba. It is on an open plain with scattered stands of trees on the west bank of the brown river, and was big enough to have both an airfield and a hotel. There was also a rundown building marked "Tourist Center", but it was eternally closed. The faded red and white painted sign sat knocked over in a filthy rubbished yard, wrapped in multiple strands of rusting barbed wire. It was all so attractive and welcoming that I took a photo of the place.
Juba’s "Hotel Africa" was pretty basic, but still nice. It was essentially a big mosquito-screened porch having lots of steel bedsteads with thin mattresses scattered around the concrete floor. There were a few private rooms, but I signed up for a bed in the completely visible dormitory area for $2 per night.
I met two Dutch vagabonds there who were also waiting for the Nile steamer. They were personable and unobjectionable, and they had a bag of marijuana. We chatted for awhile, and then walked down to the Nile in the evening. The three of us sat with our legs hanging over the steep sloping bank of the brown river, languorously smoking dope as the red ball of the sun sank below the horizon. It was very peaceful and beautiful, and the mosquitoes were not yet out in force.
Very suddenly, without warning, a hippo surfaced about 15 feet away from us, blew bubbles out his nose, looked us over with its little piggy eyes, and just as quickly submerged again! Yowee, all three of us, wild-eyed, looked first to the others for reassurance that we all had seen the same thing, and that it had not been a THC-enabled hallucination !
So I finally got to see a big African wild animal, but only for a few seconds. The Dinka actively hunt and eat the hippos, and it was said to be quite unusual to see one that near Juba.
Every Friday night in a huge field beside the Nile, not too far from Juba, there occurred big dances with all of the Dinka tribes in the surrounding area participating. The young men of each village formed teams, from 6 to 25 strong, all dressed up in their best jewelry, with a common "theme" to the costumes of each contingent. One group might all be sporting kilts of cow's tails and carrying long, flexible branches, with a few leaves at the end. The next team might have leaves stuck in their headbands and each carry a short cudgel. The third perhaps gloried in armlets made of long, flopping cow tails, with strange, narrow gourds in every hand. The next might perhaps have strips of white cowhide hanging from neck collars all around, carrying battery flashlights held under their chins to make their features bottom-lit and terrifying. And each was different and distinct. I heard that in years past the Dinka used to all bring their spears to the dances, but since that custom resulted in casualties every week, the locals decided by popular acclaim to leave all real weapons home on Friday nights.
The first time I went to the dances I waited until after dark, and it was QUITE an experience. On the dark plain, in the still powerful, humid heat, between 500 and 1000 people milled about in the dusty dark to the staccato encouragement of throbbing drums. About two thirds of the crowd were Dinka spectators, with the remainder participating directly in the festivities. In the approximate center of the "dance" scrum was a single big log drum, with one sweating Dinka pounding either end forming two compelling, savage rhythms in counterpoint.
The mass of people was not too claustrophobic or crowded, mostly people milling about in the dark and bumping into one another. Some Sudanese spectators walked around carrying hissing pump-gas lanterns, preternaturally bright, a few folks carried battery lamps, and several teams of "dancers" carried strange torches, burning smokily with an unearthly orange glow. Through this otherworldly throng, seen intermittently lit through clouds of dust, single file lines of the amazingly-attired dancers wound their way at random, chanting and stamping their feet in unison. From time to time the dancing lines would stop and in unison jump enthusiastically up and down in time with the drumbeats. Whenever I stopped moving to watch one contingent snake past, it was certain that shortly another group would unexpectedly issue from the crowded dusty darkness immediately behind me. For sure it was a magical place, supercharged with strange passion and a wild, palpable sexual tension. Transported by the compelling drumming, I flattered myself into believing I could feel the pulse of Africa itself.
A few days into my Juba sojourn another young Californian checked into the screen porch hotel. Paul was pretty laid back, and seemed a good, centered guy, so we bummed around town together. He had been in the Sudan for a month longer than I had, spending most of the additional time in the big oasis area of El Fasher, far to the west, about which place he was very enthusiastic. Paul also planned to experience the Nile steamer.
We Californians were sitting one afternoon drinking tea and writing at a rickety table in the dusty field next to Hotel Africa which doubled as a cafe, . A tall, white-robed man who had arrived at the hotel recently (he had a private room) was sitting at a nearby table eyeing us malevolently. This gent had been drinking arak, solo, and his bottle was mostly empty. Not a good sign. He threw a few muttered English comments in our direction, so I invited him over to our table. He brought his bottle and glass. Conversation disclosed that "Mr. Adawa" considered himself a "high" Sudanese government official, but he wouldn't reveal much more than that to us. He was gruff and suspicious, and quite a disagreeable drunk. After several minutes of failed attempts to lure him into a friendly interaction, the self-important Sudanese government man had suffered enough.
He leaned forward threateningly and said to Paul, in a slurred, gravelly voice, "You think so you are clever man. But I say you are United State Central Intelligent Agent! I am Sudan government Security High Operation ! When I say, in the prison you go!"
We both chuckled, and replied, in effect, "Yeah-yeah-sure-sure, Mr. Very Important Adawa, why don't you just go inside and sleep it off ?." Our casual attitude of disrespect drove the man into a sputtering rage !! He staggered to his feet and played his trump in a loud voice .
"You say I am joke !! I say to men follow you see every place, say to me every time scratch you ass !!" Mr. Adawa then proceeded to spout a list of places Paul had been in the time he had been traveling around Sudan, IN DETAIL: where he slept, what he had eaten, to whom he had spoken, the information just came flooding out! I wasn't impressed until I glanced at Paul and saw that his face had gone tense, white, and drawn. It became very obvious that everything the mean drunk was saying was accurate, and there was NO way he could have known those things unless he truly had people following Paul for the last couple of months!
Yowee !! Mr. Very Important Adawa was definitely no joke!
Paul therefore suddenly changed his plans from riding the Nile steamer to flying out of Sudan at the earliest possible moment !! He bought his air ticket the same afternoon, to Uganda two days hence. Now, why would anyone have to fly to Uganda which was only 200 miles south by road? Well, the Sudanese had a cute little scam going where foreigners could drive INTO Sudan along that road, but were forbidden to leave that way. I'm sure some Sudanese government officials had a big financial interest in Sudan Airways.
By this time, dysentery had established a secure beach-head in my guts. I was cramping and had the squirts pretty badly, doubtless due to ingesting some nasty little bacilli or amoebae. Having dysentery was pretty miserable, as it was my first experience with the disease, but certainly not my last.
In unfortunate addition to the gut-gripes, I had developed some nasty 1" diameter tropical sores on the tops and sides of both of my feet. These were the result of voracious mosquitoes. I had successfully trained myself not to scratch the mosquito bites, at least not while awake. But while asleep, my heels unconsciously scratched the itching bites on the top of the opposite foot, and thus small wounds had been opened which had become septic, and grown into seeping open sores that just would not heal in that climate.
Happily I had convinced myself before I left home, that while vagabonding I would be sick ALOT, so that I shouldn’t be surprised when it happened. I contend that illness is all part of really experiencing the local culture. In Chick’s theory of vagabonding, one travels to a new place, using the local transport, interacts with the local people, experiences the local ceremonies, eats the local food, samples the local diseases, tries out the local intoxicants, and then decides whether or not it is time to move on.
Well, it was about time to move on from Juba.
In theory the Nile steamer ran every week in each direction, from Juba to near Khartoum. In fact, since its route ran through the Sudd, the world’s nastiest swamp, it tended to get stuck alot, and ran rather less frequently than that. I arrived at Juba on the day before the steamer was scheduled to arrive. It actually arrived six days late. Oh, well, another typical demonstration of African time.
The steamer itself was quite impressive. It was double decked, with a massive paddle-wheel at the rear (just visualize the Mississippi Belle with no frills). The upstairs had all of the tiny First Class cabins. The downstairs had some of the tinier Second Class cabins. On either side of this big, powered boat were strapped equally big un-powered double decked barges. The cabins on these barges were the other 4/5ths of the second class cabins, and some rooms for the crew. Then, in front of each of these three large floating palaces were three additional double decked barges, these without any walls, and with a forest of steel poles and hundreds and hundreds of welded steel trays crammed together, making vertical "four decker" narrow bunks. All of these were the third class area !! So, all together, the Nile Steamer covered a piece of river almost twice the size of an American football field !! And it was crammed with about two thousand people on the deck class barges. The size and majesty of it took my breath away when I first saw it approaching from down-river, sounding its deep horn. Then, as it got close to the shore the odor of it reached me, and snatched my breath away again ! All of the third class deck area was one huge latrine. The unsophisticated Sudanese apparently realized that it was too much trouble to walk to the back barges and wait in line to use the toilet seats suspended above the open river, and had been shitting right on the decks between the bunks for the ten-day-long trip. Yipes !! The only saving grace was that most of the human excrement on the decks had been already desiccated by the heat, and was no longer stinking. Then I understood why the "vagabond telegraph" recommended claiming one of the TOP shelves of each four-level bunk set !
One side of the huge floating construct tied up at the riverbank, and four thin planks were balanced between the shore and the gunwale. People just came FLOWING off, carrying all sorts of stores and goods on their heads and shoulders. After a short while, this flow pattern was changed when folks started going back onto the steamer. This made for some interesting traffic jams on the narrow catwalks, with no rails, and folks trying to pass both directions simultaneously.
I stood on the bank and watched until, after an hour, the traffic thinned. I balanced across the gangway, waded into the deep layer of garbage which covered the third class barges, picked out a top shelf, and climbed up there. I used a plastic ground cloth and a short length of rope to secure my claim on this spot. About then a minor steamer official appeared and informed me that I had to disembark. Nobody was allowed on the steamer until 3pm, about five hours hence. Turned out they needed to hose off the barges. Well, that was hard to disagree with. While we were talking, some of the kids who had been following me around managed to detach and steal my ground sheet and rope. Oh well. I went back to the Hotel Africa to wait until boarding time.
About 1 o'clock that afternoon I walked back down to the river to check out the steamer situation. BUMMER !! The whole place was already crawling with people !! Every bunk had already been claimed, and many hundreds of people were streaming on board the now-hosed barges carrying every imaginable load ! I was late again !! I dashed back to the screen porch, shouting for the Dutchmen! We all took our packs and rushed back down to the river to see if the situation could be salvaged.
Not likely. We found some space on the upstairs of one of the barges and sat down on a piece of empty deck. We were soon informed that this deck was for "women only". Oh, well, OK, then. We hustled down and then up another gangway and found a relatively open spot on that deck. Nope, "Soldiers only" on this deck !! Well, I figured I could handle that. I found the highest ranking soldier I could and gave him cigarettes, tried to talk him into letting the three western freaks "enlist" for a short time. Nope, no good. I tried again, questioning why this whole deck could be set aside for soldiers only. He looked meaningfully at his Kalashnikov and wryly informed me, in decent English, that this was "the Law of Soldiers". I knew exactly what he meant. The first rule of overland vagabonding in Africa is "The man with the automatic weapon is always right".
Shortly we found an empty place on one of the rear outside "2nd class" barges, in an area set aside for luggage. The same steamer official I had spoken with earlier came along to eject us since we only had $6-75%-off-discount third class tickets. I managed to finagle an unofficial "upgrade" to second class for only $5 additional each, paid directly to the steamer man. He subsequently scribbled something on each of our tickets, and we had a piece of deck to call our own !! Great ! Of course all of the 2nd class cabins had been booked in advance for several months.
About midnight that night, trying to sleep on the steel deck, with clouds of mosquitoes hovering about, only partially deterred by my rub-on mossie repellent, everything went suddenly to Hades. Hundreds more people came CRASHING down to the river in every taxi, cart and wagon that could move in all of Juba, and all of them were cramming themselves and all of their belongings directly into our tiny luggage area !!! You see, the steamer company had announced that they had outright CANCELED next weeks Nile steamer, so all of the folks who thought they had cabin reservations on that trip now found themselves on the deck for this one ! Aaargh !
Now, finding that I had literally only standing room, with litter and trash already starting to build up around my feet, added to aching guts and other unresolved health challenges, I just could not see myself spending a week squatting here as mosquito fodder. So, for the first and last time in my vagabonding, I copped out. I gave my trip food to the Dutchmen, shouldered my pack, and walked back to the Hotel Africa, giving up on riding the Nile steamer.