I'm at last off to Sudan! This has been cancelled and rearranged, I think 5 times because of first COVID and then the coup. There still seem to be problems there but it's apparently easily avoided as long as you know what day of the week it is. I said this to the doctor who is operating on me when I get back and he said 'oh, Tuesday you get shot, Wednesday you don't, ha ha' and when I said yes, that's right, he looked at me as if I was insane.

I was originally camping for a week in the desert, then on a yacht snorkelling for a week, but as no-one else wanted to go, I swapped to looking at pyramids, markets and the all-important Nubian wrestlers. Then surprise, surprise! Just a couple of weeks before I'm due to go, I get the opportunity to go snorkelling on a boat for 3 days with dolphin nurseries and manta rays 😀.

I'm going a day early as usual to have a poke about Khartoum. On my list of things to do are gazing at Kitchener's rusty boat for maybe 35 seconds, going to a camel market which is sure to traumatise me and wondering around getting lost. My Arabic book came out of the attic a couple of months ago after my disastrous time trying to learn it in the summer. I had grand plans of wondering round markets with Youssef in August buying lots of things in fluent Arabic - what happened was he tried to teach me 'left' and 'right' when we were driving, did a typical Ween of looking amazed at my incompetence and gave up after less than a minute. I also haven't been able to get a visa - rules changed the day before I went up ( only in London, not Dublin, Paris, Washington.....) and I didn't have the right stamps on my Letter of Invitation. So I was dismissed with a casual wave of the hand. I was unwell on the train back which turned out to be covid, so let's hope I infected the sods.

The Sudanese are supposed to be the friendliest people there are - Janjaweed/ police/ military/ London embassy excepted - so I shouldn't get into too much trouble. Even after being thrown in prison here, the lovely Charlie has been telling me how great the country and people are. Looking forward to seeing your cell from over the river Charlie xx