Off to Kassala, Sudan

 Sudan arrival; October 2021

The heat hits you like a brick wall.
I hesitate at the top of the gangway, exiting my Air Ethiopian flight from Addis Ababa to the capital of Sudan, Khartoum.
Hot air scalds my lungs and the shimmering heat scorches my eyes.
Only moments before, as we glided down towards the sleek black runway and basked in air conditioned luxury, I’d caught a glimpse of the cool Blue Nile on the right and the much larger, sluggish, wide and brown, White Nile on the left. The Blue Nile originates at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and travels for nearly 1500km in Ethiopia and Sudan before its confluence with the White Nile in Khartoum. The White Nile flows from Lake Victoria in Uganda with its source disputed between Burundi and Rwanda. We have swum in its fresh clean water at Jinja  Falls below Lake Victoria, on our family “Africa trip” in 2011. Its length is said to be 3700km from source to the confluence with the Blue Nile and crossing Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, DRC, South Sudan and Sudan, if all the tributaries are to be included. The Nile is the longest river in Africa, and possibly the world, but the Amazon may hold this title. It is 6,650km long flowing into the Mediterranean at Alexandria.(Wikipedia)
We are lucky. Arriving in the middle of the day, the airport queues are short and we pass immigration and customs relatively easily and I look anxiously for my bag on the luggage carousel. It drifts towards me and I am always impressed how I can drop off a bag at Charles de Gaulle in Paris, watching it disappear down an anonymous black hole, and then see it reappear from a similar hole on the other side of the world, intact, despite multiple stops and flight changes!
Ahmed, in his fluoro jacket and waving his banner, is patiently waiting for me. He helps me with my bag, loads us into the van and off we drive, ready to take on honking horns, deep potholes, masses of people and the general lively chaos that is Africa.