The Tina Trip 03 - Sudan

"There´s nothing I´m more proud of than you being my girl. I have no problems bragging about that."

"Doesn´t count. Come on; BRAG! You know I have a lot of teeth."

"Well, we have these tests for those who want to go to university. A certain percentage of the students are admitted from those who did well on these tests. Day before the test I did a practice version and it was pretty easy. Told my friend that I could see no way I wouldn´t do well on the test. I bragged, happy?"

"Good boy, keep bragging now."

"I sort of had to eat my words, though."

"You did badly?"

"In a way. I was there on time – but the day after the test was. Head in the clouds, you know."

"Aww, my poor baby. Then what?"

"Half a year later I had another chance. This time I was there the right day."

"So..."

"So I nailed it. Highest possible score. So, yeah, I will be admitted."

"Our children will be marvelous! Your brains and my beauty."

"At last! I´ve finally found one thing you do badly – playing bimbo."

The journey to Aweil was unremarkable. We got a ride with a lorry, sitting on big grain bags. Aweil was unremarkable too, although I guess we didn´t give it much of a chance. We just wanted to move on. That night we slept on the unremarkable lawn of the unremarkable police station and nine o´clock next morning the train to Khartoum was supposed to go. It didn´t, quite, but almost. We left Aweil just four hours late, sitting on the roof of the train. The other travelers going the same way made clear that if you were cool you traveled on the roof. We desperately wanted to seem cool (Ha!) so the roof was a given.

It was actually quite pleasant on the roof. There was a little fence so you wouldn´t fall off in your sleep and the train was nice and slow. You could wave to people and you could throw banana peels to goats, donkeys, horses and then we were out of bananas. Sorry Mrs Cow. There was a ladder attached to the side of the train and if you had the guts you could climb down into the trainbelly while the train was running. We didn´t have the guts. If we needed to go we just...didn´t. It was ok, we stopped fairly often.

We invented yet another nerdgame. We chose two artists and tried to find the fewest number of connections, a connection being someone who had recorded at least one song with the next connection. To give you an example we could connect Frank Zappa with Norwegian saxplayer Jan Garbarek in five steps: Zappa – Chester Thompson – Joe Zawinul – Keith Jarrett – Garbarek. Get it? Great, right? We slept like soft little logs through the semi-desert night and when we woke up we were in good ole Khartoum again.

We still wanted to go home to Europe as soon as possible. We made enquiries about flying from Khartoum and found that it was really expensive, beyond our budget. Tina, ever being the practical one (when not crazy) was quick to see a solution.

"Fuck pride!" she said, and called her dad.

"Am I supposed to buy a ticket for him as well?" he said. I think he was joking again. I do think so. Yes.

"Come on vaterlein, you can´t leave the father of your grandchild stranded in the desert. He must come with me so he can make me an honest woman." While his secretary checked flights and reserved tickets they chatted about relatives and news we had missed and me.

"Ok, Hilda has reserved two tickets to Frankfurt, the plane leaves in three days, sorry about that – that was the first available flight."

"Don´t worry, Dad. Three days is fantastically fast. We´re not on European time here."

"See you soon, dear. We´ll meet you at the airport. I look forward to scaring that Johan fellow."

We had ice-cream. It was ok, but not half as good as you imagined it to be when you couldn´t get it. We had farewell-ful from a foodstall. As a goodbye meal it was ok, almost good. I had visions of us in the future, having remember-Sudan-meals, eating ful and addes, talking ´bout our glory days of squalor. Maybe we could find us a lung to chop up.

The last night in Khartoum we slept in a good hotel. We wanted to have some good Goodbye Africa sex. And we did. In case you wonder, Goodbye Africa sex is slow, lasts long, smells of swamps, overripe mangos, rotting meat, sun on sand. There´s sadness, poverty, hunger and the joy of being alive. There´s a butchered hippo, the pain of entrails being shook loose on a lousy road and clouds of flies. Bilharzia. It´s vast and we were vast, too.

Yes we were vast and now we were going back home, back to Europe. Back to the rest of our lives, our lives together and we would not shrink. Or so we thought.