The El Shaabi Hotel
Added on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
In the main square, watching movies
There are aspects of Wadi Halfa, which have not changed in 25 years. Since I was last here it has the same ramshackle line of miserable looking flat roofed buildings selling ad hoc foodstuffs. Sandwiched in between the merchants, were two ground floor hotels, so squalid that a pig would prefer to sleep standing up than book accommodation.
I’d left my tent and sleeping bag on the bike so had no choice but to accept what was on offer with some reticence. The walls were grubby from dirty hands and the plaster had fallen away in chunks. The beds had not been cleaned this year and none of the rooms had ceiling fans nor windows. While there was a desert breeze with some coolness, it bypassed my room, which resembled the ‘black hole of Calcutta’ more than coaching accommodation for travellers and river mariners. The courtyard of El Shaabi Hotel was dirt, which in the rains would be a quagmire. There were toilets, which routinely stinking of pi** was occasionally so concentrated it would bring on ammonia psychosis, which on a sliding scale of how poor accommodation could be, this might be thought a blessing.
Outside, the main area was devoid of any architectural presence or charm. Just then, I was unable to think of a town to which I had travelled that was more forlorn than this. Yet, and yet; the hospitality of this small town surpassed all of its many limitations to provide one of the sweetest evenings of the journey so far.
Tuesday is the day the boat arrives from Aswan. Wednesday is when the train arrives. The boat fills the train with migrant workers returning from Egypt, laden with white goods and plastic domestic inventions, and the train from Khartoum fills the boat with people eager to find if there really are streets paved with gold. Once a week Wadi Halfa bustles with activity. The shisha seller does a roaring trade as do the rickshaw drivers plying the cafes with business. There are men carrying all manner of cartons on their heads and others with cheap plastic hold-alls pulling heavily on their bony shoulders. In the main square, more triangular, cafes opposite each other have televisions showing wrestling programmes and cheaply made action movies from Hong Kong. Keenly watched by the men in rows of plastic chairs, it was in stark contrast to a small group prostrating themselves in prayer. As it became dark, lights in the distance showed an industriousness that belied such a small and abject place.
The moon hung precisely between full and new. Underneath this moon and sounding sharply above the movement of merchants and businessmen being driven by taxis, was the slapping of dominoes on tables. Wadi Halfa is a transit town. It is the most northern port of Sudan where people arrive off the ferry and wait for the train if they are travelling south. If coming up from Khartoum or further, the cafes and small shops become the railhead.
The shisha man looked around and he had an air of calm. He was an old man and in these parts would be revered. It is a harsh environment, one of the hottest inhabited places on earth and the flow of humans on their important errands was something he had seen many times in his long life. For one day a week the party comes to Wadi Halfa. The café owner constantly checked our table to see if we needed more food, and boys and men shouted ‘welcome to Sudan’. The consensus amongst the townsfolk runs counter to the poor political image. ‘Sudan people are good people’ they would say, ‘everyone smiles in Sudan,’ and it was true.
Dinner was served in separate metal plates; beans, lumps of beef cooked in its juices, rice and a salad of red and green vegetables. The soft drinks were icy cold and pudding was a vanilla flavoured rice pudding from the fridge. Across the plains the desert wind began to gather strength and as the moon rose to some zenith, tin cans scattered across empty ground, cats shouted at each other and sweet smoke from shisha coals blew in everyone’s face.
The waiting time in the customs hall did not look as if it were going to be long, no more than hour. This is an efficient entry into a country still struggling to come to terms with technology at the expense of a nomadic past.
