So much happened in our four days in Aswan, but I was mostly too tired to write, still recovering from a semester that made me seriously question my commitment to corporate academia. Some of the highlights included:

The funny exchange between us and the pumpkin seed vendor, who wanted to charge us a really high price when the price was clearly marked in Arabic. Fhar asked “Fi mishkila? [Is there a problem?] Because here it says it costs much less.” The vendor laughed. “Fi mishkila kibeeeera,” he said, laughing. “There’s a biiiig problem. You read Arabic!” He gave us the seeds at the right price.

On New Year’s eve, walking around the market we were pulled over by an Ikhwan guy wanted to speak fosha (modern standard Arabic) with Fhar. He addressed me, made a point of not shaking my hand, saying "you understand, I can’t touch a woman." Finding out that I was an anthropologist, he asked me what I thought about evolution. "Do you think we come from monkeys?!" Noooo!!! I left the American continent to escape this bullshit. One of my most desperate moments in Honduras was getting in an angry argument with Teto about evolution and then bursting into tears, shouting out loud “How the devil did I get here? How can I possibly have surrounded myself with people who passionately defend creationism? Why is this the argument I’m wasting my mind on? Why should I bother with it?” Fhar’s new friend, who oddly seemed to be trying to proselytize him, explained to us the Islamic sales ethic, which Fhar loosely translated to me as "there is no compulsion in sales." He told us there are only the two Eid holidays, and no other celebration is legitimate. Sensing our increasingly urgent desire to leave his company, he disapprovingly let us go "celebrate New Year," which had erupted during our chat, even though it's a godless holiday.

Walking away, we saw signs for a product I hadn’t heard of: “Magic Face” cream. The picture showed a dark-skinned woman’s face with a diagonal zipper, zipped down to reveal white skin underneath. I am very, very disappointed at myself for not taking a picture.

When Fhar knew the ground invasion had started from his jaiku updates, we walked down the strip to find an qahua playing Al Jazeera. Didn't take long, we could tell from the two or three men standing, focused intently on the television. One of them asked Fhar, pointedly, "Why is the U.S. paying for this? Why do the people allow it?" Fhar told him that they think what Hamas does (in terms of violence) is the same thing as what Israel does. "But that doesn't make any sense,” the man responded, shocked. “There is a sun and there is a moon but you cannot call the sun the moon and the moon the sun!" Once he found out I was the working party and a professor, he perked up. "I would like to know how I can get a scholarship to study in the U.S." I chuckled. "I'd like to know that too." At the mention of AUC anthropology he perked up further. "Ikram Salima!" he exclaims, reversing my colleague's name. He asked if he could get a scholarship to study there, and I told him that's much more likely than getting one in the U.S. He wants to study Nubian burial practices but assured me that it's anthropology, not Egyptology, he was interested in...I ended up examining his entire transcript, resume, letters of recommendation, all of which he happens to have in a plastic file in his shop next door, and provisionally accepting him. Another man came in, watched two Hamas guys giving a hopeless-looking speech about victory against a plain backdrop on the TV., and said to us, "Hamas is the best group in the Middle East."

We’d lost our touch at cheap travel. We bargained but didn’t get people down, or didn’t try to bargain enough, and later cringed at the deals the 20-something backpackers we met told us they’d gotten. We found a place that seemed to us insanely cheap, after an expensive night in the lonely-planet favorite (but not mine). We paid the 30 Egyptian pounds and put our stuff in the room, only to discover a thin layer of mouse poo covering everything. We left, took a ferry across the river to elephantine island where a local boy brought us over to one of the many “Nubian Houses” (labeled as such in English) there. It was purposefully exotic, with 2 small pet crocodiles in a fish tank, Kenyan masks everywhere, and a kitten we called Surprise. We stayed there in the house by ourselves, in a room on a mattress on the floor for the next four days, paying way too much but not overly caring. Moustafa, who took care of the house for his cousin who owned it, was laid back and friendly. He told us a story about summers as a boy before the high dam was finished when the fish were so abundant you could just reach your hand in the muddy water and grab one. Nobody paid money for fish. Maybe in the winters, but not in the summers. Now the water is clear, and there are not many fish at all.

Having seen a sign in Korean that indicated a restaurant nearby, we went on a desperate but futile search for Korean food which ended in koshary. There, we met a guy who told us he was a Nubian guide, and did seem to know a lot. “Obama is Nubian,” he said, “did you know that? Nubians are originally from Kenya. So we hope he will help the Nubian people.” May god will it, I responded, baffled.

The boat ride over lake Nasser deserves a chapter here because it was so interesting, but the only notes I wrote down had to do with the group of Polish ethnology students on the second class deck, led by their teacher who was doing his dissertation research. They were headed to a “tribe” in some village in northern Sudan, and would spend three months there, each working through translators with their own project. I asked two of the young women what they’d be studying. The first told me "I am studying women's clothing and FGM, but I don't know if they will want to talk to me about it." In my notes I wrote “ugh. Enough of the fgm! Why don't you focus on something of central importance to people's lives, for a change?” Before I came to Cairo, I thought female genital cutting was a provocative and interesting way to get people to address feminist complicity with imperialism, double standards with regards to body reshaping in the West and with male circumcision, and the complexities of cultural relativism, but now I’m just sick of it. FGM and harassment- sick of them both. Don’t care. To me, there are far more interesting, far more important questions, and questions that don’t necessarily reinforce imperialist and bourgeois logics. The other young researcher told me she was studying women’s statues. She had to repeat it for me 4 or 5 times before Fhar said “status! women’s status!” Again, blech. Don’t get me wrong- you know I’m down with my sisters, but they don’t even speak a word of Arabic. What kind of data are they going to “discover?”

It was a lovely relief to meet the Spaniards on board, headed to Ethiopia to make a documentary film. They were brilliant conversationalists, politically astute and well-informed. They consisted of a dangerously handsome photographer name Kike, a human rights lawyer named Javier, a medical anthropologist named Francisco from the University of Salamanca, and a pretty boy whose name and function (other than being pretty) I didn’t catch. They provided us lots of entertainment the next night in their hotel room, having brought things we wouldn’t have dreamed of bringing to Sudan, like some sort of amazing Spanish home brew, canned lobster, a DVD player and Live Free or Die Hard.

We got the last room at the hotel (next to the outhouses) in Wadi Halfa, at the other side of Lake Nasser. It was a cement box with two rickety cots, no blankets. I spent the night wrapped in every article of clothing I had with me, shivering in a little ball and cursing everything I could think of for my suffering. In the morning, our new friend Mubarak (there only seems to be one in Egypt, but they're everywhere here, and I'd take the Mubaraks I've met here over Hosni any day) sent a few of his younger friends to show us where to buy a cheap blanket.

We didn't miss the train, because Fhar wisely thought to ask if there was a time change between Egypt and Sudan. It turned out there was. We made it by the skin of our teeth, without stopping for dinner or bottled water as we'd said we would. Outside the train station, a mostly outdoor affair consisting of sand, benches, and something of a yard (the only siding opportunity for many many kilometers), women sat selling dates, seeds, peanuts ("Sudanese beans" in Arabic) and tea. The tea stands here are colorful and many-flavored. They are little painted tables with a bunch of jam jars, repurposed and hand-labeled in Arabic as tea, coffee, creamer, ginger, cardamom, hibiscus and a variety of other infusions and spices. They're not only run by women, although that seems to be the norm. Most of the tea sellers (who are of all ages) seem to hail, judging by clothing style, accent, and general physical appearance, from areas south of Nubia. They boil water in a kettle on a rickety hand-rigged contraption Fhar calls a "rocket stove" and then make a Turkish-style coffee called yebbana, or pour it over a plastic-handled filter with generous portions of tea, to which they add various spices and, unless you direct them otherwise, copious portions of sugar. I wanted to get some, fearing dehydration on the who-knew-how-long train ride, but we were freaked out by our near miss and Fhar didn't trust the tea yet, so we just bought some dates and tirmis (probably amoebically sketchier than boiled tea, but so goes our partial logic) and rushed to our seats.

To expand briefly on the partial logic of not drinking tea, over the past decade or so I have increasingly developed a very un-anthropological phobia of, shall we call them, "alternative" toilets. Perhaps "non-normative?" No, both terms are too Eurocentric and elitist. But by now you're following, dear reader. I fear shit. Specifically, I fear the shit of others. The first thing I do, before deciding if I can stay in a hotel, travel in a train or bus, or go to an eating establishment, is check out the WC. As I write this, I think about how when the CIA gets ahold of me, they'll have their Adrienne version of "The Arab Mind" all worked out. The dogs, the dirty talk, even the Barney music and heavy metal, I can live with all that. This trip has been one of those occasions in which I confront my fears head on, and they splash back at me. So we'd looked at the shitty squat toilets on the train the night before--for the record, I love squat toilets and find them generally more sanitary that sitters as long as there’s no evidence of what’s come before. I'd determined I could handle one or two visits, but that the best thing to do would be to try my damnedest to maintain that delicate balance between mere dehydration and kidney infection.

Everyone had taken their places already on our second class cabina, but they allowed us to squeeze into the middle seats, and were pleased when they found out we "spoke Arabic." We haven't found many people at all here who speak more than a few words of English, so we're in that fortunate situation in which our Arabic is better than their English, and thus we actually get to practice it--indeed, this was the primary purpose of our trip. We were able to communicate the usual to the group. Our cabinamates initially consisted of a raucous old cane-swinging Nubian hajj with a strange growth hanging from his cheek, which swung hither and thither when he spoke; a youngish grey-haired man with a very nice smile who helped the hajj get up and walk when he needed to; and three other men who talked here and there but mostly slept. The room's composition frequently changed though, and two women, a local mother and daughter who had been standing in the hallway along with lots of other people, rapidly installed themselves in the place of two of the aforementioned men, who gave up their seats and hung out in the hallway, smoking out the open windows.

We were, then, four to each five-foot bench, eight in all, with luggage packed tight on the metal shelves above and underneath the seats. Although it was hot outside when we left, at around ten to five Sudan time, someone soon closed the window, which helped to hold in the cigarette smoke. And the old guy, by virtue of being a hajj or maybe just old, got to emit a lot of it. The women made disapproving faces and crinkled their noses but no one said anything. After all, it was clearly a great effort for him to get up. More than a day later, we were all similarly quiet when he soiled himself, although he suddenly had more room thanks to the men who "wanted to get up and have a smoke. I could barely walk over all the people to get to the loo, so it would have been much harder for the old man to have caned his way through that mess of bodies on a dangerously moving train.

The women were delightful. It's customary here, it seems, to click as a sort of punctuation. It's the kind of thing I could totally pick up and then not be able to get rid of, and everyone would think it a tic, and thus it would be. I already suffer when I think of how I will have to stop saying insha'alla when speaking secular American English. I tried to explain to a couple new Egyptian friends yesterday how the concept doesn't exist in English (God willing just isn't the same), and they couldn't understand how that was possible.

Anyway, we rolled out of town quickly--there isn't much to Wadi Halfa (a new town- old Halfa was drowned for Progress along with the rest of Nubia)--and found ourselves surrounded by nothing but Sahara. The sunset was spectacular, despite the lack of smog, and cramped as we were, I was heartened when one of my cabin-mates told me that since we were only traveling to Abu Hamed, we would arrive at 1 AM.

The hours started slowly passing. I was particularly frustrated with my limited Arabic. The men and women in our car were having what was clearly a fascinating heated discussion about Darfur, and then about Palestine and Israel, and all I could understand was that they were having the conversation. It was fast and accented, so Fhar didn't fare much better. Still, it was tantalizing to imagine the content I was missing.

I tried to find a way to sleep without resting too much on Fhar, who's more dedicated than am I to respecting gendered norms of bodily contact (which, I contend, he exaggerates in the manner of imperialist Americans who set up gender-segregated schools in certain Arab countries where that is not in fact the norm). That took some doing. My back started to ache. I had eaten four of my five oranges and felt dangerously dehydrated. I drank some very dirty water from a cup shared by all out of a bucket one of the women had brought, and had to suppress an intense desire to vomit. I wished I was with the Spaniards we’d joined the previous night with their illicit cache of alcohol (shocking!), shellfish, and pork products...and their DVD player with dumb Hollywood action flicks and...and...BAM. The train started shaking wildly, we heard terrified screams, and we came to a sudden stop.

I didn't think much of it. I don't panic too easy. I figured we'd get going either right away or in a few hours. By then, a lot of people- men, women, and some kids- had lain out blankets or potato sacks on the floor to sleep, either in between the benches where our feet would have gone, or in the very narrow hallway outside the cabinas. This left a little more room for us to spread out on the benches and get an hour here, an hour there of sleep. But since the bright lights were on the whole time someone was always talking, and despite grumpy eruptions from various people wanting quiet, there would be no sleeping through the night. I saw a number of people walking around outside, but didn't want to risk going out by myself- what if the train started moving? I'd die out there!

It was only as the sun rose that I realized that many people had slept outside the train. They had dug long, shallow holes in the sand and put their blankets and selves inside. It looked so much more comfortable, if much colder, than our loud, smoky environs. To go outside, I had to step over several still-sleeping people. A couple cabinas down, two miserably pink-eyed children squinted at me as their father shooed them aside to let me pass.

I stood around looking at all the people. Their were campfires, and already plastic trash was everywhere. There are no garbage cans on the trains, as on the boat from Aswan to Wadi Halfa. Everything goes out the window. It's just that normally it's not noticeable because it doesn't have such a good opportunity to collect in one place. Some passengers (men) walked around with boxes of individually wrapped cookies and other junk food to sell- perhaps they had planned on selling them in Khartoum, but here was a captive, hungry audience. Others, like me, stood looking around in the early light, dazed and confused.

Fhar came out soon thereafter, and a young Egyptian man who had been smoking in the hall outside our cabina all night, Ayman, adopted us. We asked when we'd be leaving and he told us not any time soon and brought us to look at the tracks. The railroad ties were shredded. So that's where everyone was getting their firewood! And when we got up to the sleeper car, the third from the front, we realized how they’d been shredded- the car was tilting slightly on its side, thrown totally off the tracks but held in place by the surrounding trains. It had destroyed all the ties as it went forward, conveniently providing fuel for cooking and warmth as it stranded us 115km into the Sahara (Fhar had his GPS out). As we walked along the train's length, we saw an errant brake pad lying in the sand and an iron coil of an odd size. We also saw what appeared to be several ancient lead sardine tins. Ayman pointed out the cargo cars at the end- "Those are full of fish," he told us. "We need to eat it before it spoils!" I exclaimed, thinking of the starvation facing us in the days ahead (I already had a plan to start drinking my own urine). He replied "It already has."

Instead of rotting fish--which, prepared properly, is actually a delicacy around here, but never mind that--our new friend brought us to the cafeteria car, which was up & running. I was determined to drink as little cholera water (or urine) as possible, and that meant getting legitimate liquid however I could. Speed and quantity were of the essence. The cafeteria car retained the charm of its original British construction, with diner-like seating and coloured lamps (they didn't seem functional). Men were seated drinking tea and talking, and as we sat down, a large delicious-smelling platter of some sort of chicken stew with the local bread, which looks like injera and is called kisra, was brought to the table across from us. We ordered lentil soup, which was the best I'd had since moving to the region, and I'm quite sure it wasn't just the scenario that made it so good. And then we ordered it again. The tea was too heavily sugared for me to stomach, with my delicate Californian habitus. Like most of my boojie friends back home, I have *allergies*, which make me special. About a decade ago, after a lengthy illness, a very expensive L.A. nutritionist read my aura through a polaroid photograph and determined I was allergic to sugar and yeast. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I haven't eaten either since, with the minor exception of red wine (we all have our limits, right?). So, weighing the odds, I decided urine was a better option.

Right. We went out and found ourselves a spot on the sand. People had set up all over. It was kind of like a beach, but with nothing but beach (and derailed train) in sight for hundreds of kilometers. It was both hot and cold at the same time, until it became decidedly hot. After sleeping a while, I got up and started walking westward. I knew I couldn't get far away for no one to see me, and there were no bushes, but it was okay. I could grow smaller. Just beyond our blanket was a broken bottle, clearly aged- all the pieces were sand-smoothed. It appeared to be from the original RR construction, like the heavy blackened sardine tins we kept finding here and there. It was way too far to throw from the train, and when else would anyone have hung out here drinking booze? On my way back from my walk, I found the bottle again and started digging. I wanted to find the bottom and see if it had identifying markings. As I kneeled there scooping out piles of sand, a young man I'd previously noticed came by. He'd been hard to miss, with his fashionably gelled hair, sparkling long-sleeved black shirt and equally glimmering white pants. He told me he was from a town on the Delta, where the people are peasants (fellahin). He told me he was a peasant. I tried to explain in Arabic (all of my conversations in this place, many involving a lot of gesture, were in Arabic) why I was digging the bottle. My explanation went something like "This bottle pretty because very old, to make train first time, and I like to know was it alcohol? Because in Sudan, there is no alcohol, right? In Egypt, there is, but very bad." He laughed and said to me and his newly-arrived friend, "but there's plenty of hashish!"

They started digging with me, and we came upon many more pieces, but not the bottom. I gave up and said goodbye so I could go check on Fhar, who I was afraid would get heatstroke, but minutes later my self-described peasant friend came up to me, proudly showing off the bottle bottom and another he'd found right there. The first, though thick and beautiful, was unmarked, but the second yellowish, faded, rounded-square bottle bottom read:

WALKERS
S
KILMARNOCK
WHISKEY
IOL2 (or 19L2 or some combination thereof)

Inspired, we decided to do some more exploring with our friend. We found numerous more lead cans, an old straight-edge razor, some ancient-looking cardboard with ancienter looking rope (though to be fair, it could have been thrown off a four-wheeler more recently and aged quickly in the desert air), and charcoal from old fires, which I used to write my URL on an imported rock. Fhar pointed to a small square box that someone back at the train had thrown out, being carried jerkily by the uneven desert wind Southwestward. Where did all that trash end up? We wondered if there was a place at the edge of the desert, like our back porch in Rehab City, where Nature consolidates the trash. Another thing I found curious was the presence, here and there, of long-dead, hard clumps of dried grass. It seemed almost petrified, and I can't imagine how anything could have lived out there. It made me wish Tom Wessels, my high school biology teacher who knew everything, was there to explain their presence to me.

It was the kind of situation that forced community among total strangers and a beautifully lazy day, and though the water issue nagged at me, I was overwhelmingly happy. We went back into the cafeteria car but found it was out of everything. No more lentil soup for my hydration needs. A man with super-hip sunglasses vigorously motioned for us to sit with him, which we did. He told us his name was Mohamed and said, don't you remember me? I showed you where the WC was yesterday? He told us he was from Alexandria and was aghast, as are we, that we haven't been there yet. Mohamed was headed to a wedding. It was his first time in Sudan too. Adel, a very strange but friendly man we'd met on the boat came and sat with us. Adel had brought his own tea, sugar and teapot, which made him an instant hit with us, because all he had to do was get hot water from the kitchen and we could have sugarless tea. Alhamdulileh! At some point the hip-hoppest Sudanese guy I'd seen yet--low-hanging pants, big baseball cap placed too-high over hoodie, massive watch, flashy sneakers, etc.,--started egging our table of Egyptians on. An argument ensued about the relative merits of Egyptians vs. Sudanese, and again I was stymied by my limited Arabic. Soon Mohamed was red-faced, shouting, chain-smoking and getting so angry he had to leave the train. He left and came back a couple times and we just sat like cats at a ping-pong table, looking back and forth between the parties of the ongoing dispute, trying to figure out was going on and hoping not to get hit in the crossfire. Adel, in a conciliatory gesture, went to sit at the hip hop guy’s table. It’s very bad to stay angry at people, and even Mohamed was loudly referring to the hip hop guy as his great friend later on.

A repair unit arrived in the late morning from the south with some workmen, a bunch of shovels, new railroad ties, a generator and a hydraulic lift. Since there was nothing but sand under the tracks, it seemed fairly easy to dig out the shredded ties and slide the new ones in underneath. There were only a dozen or so ties for the hundreds that had been destroyed, so they had to space them out. A large crowd of men were gathered around the generator, nearly on top of the workers, but they didn't seem to mind as much as I would have expected.

And so the day passed as we waited around, moving every so often, people-watching. People were in all different sorts of groups- nuclear families, large crowds of men, large crowds of women, off wandering or praying by themselves...there were even a few love-birdy couples sitting further in the distance. I read some legal anthropology for the online course I had agreed to teach, and which was half-way done despite my total lack of internet access. It’s not a model of pedagogy I hope to repeat. The shadows changed direction and got longer and longer.

Just as the sun was going down, Mohamed, who had joined us in the shade of the train, pointed north. “Look, here it comes,” he said. Sure enough, an engine car was heading our way. Shortly, we got back in the train and rejoined our cabina-mates. The old hajj was grumpier than before, and kept hacking, arduously and loudly drawing the nicotine-inspired wads of phlegm from his lungs and then depositing them with satisfaction on the floor in front of him. I became obsessively attached to Fhar's GPS, in a watched-pot sort of way. The car felt like hell, between the overwhelming smell of urine mixed with smoke and the fear of the hajj's spit getting on my feet and bags. And the closer we got, it seemed, the slower we went. I had a vision of our going along an exponential curve, always approaching, but never reaching, point zero. Fhar and I got in an argument about whether my personal hell was exponential or asymptotic. He doesn't believe in the concept of negative growth.

Back in town, the derailment was big news. People in shops and on the streets apologized to us laughingly for it. "Welcome to Africa," they said. We got a nicer hotel room at the same price and ate at the same restaurant as two nights before, only now, at midnight, the fried fish was cold and clammy. At the restaurant I walked over to the sink by the charcoal grill for the shisha to wash off my hands, past a group of men from the south. We exchanged greetings and then, apparently, they started having an animated discussion abut me. I only know this because as I was drying my hands over the hot coals, one of the Egyptians nearby said to the group, "She speaks Arabic, you know. She speaks Arabic." I turned around at them, raised my eyebrow and nodded slowly, at which they looked shocked and laughed embarrassedly. When I walked back past them I made sure to give them another meaningful look.

The next morning a large group of men crowded around the television in the entryway of our hotel. The previous night they’d been watching the ongoing Palestinian genocide on Al Jazeera and then on a Sudanese station. Now they were watching Stone Cold Steve Austin get slammed on WWE. I had wondered about the big Rey Misterioso poster in the restaurant. Alhamdulileh, there is no escaping pro wrestling. In the outhouse, I realized that that metal-and-plastic thing wrapped like the inside of a Mexican bus was actually an old person’s outhouse seating aid. And in the store outside, a product called cow jam was for sale.

Along with everyone else we’d spoken to, we were planning on getting the bus this time. But we were intercepted by our friend Mubarak, who, along with his faithful young friend who wanted to marry an American girl (did we know any?), heartily ridiculed our choice. Why would we want to take the bus over that terrain when we could take the train? But, we protested, we couldn’t take the train! It was broken. They insisted it would be fine, and plus, it’d be empty since everyone else would be taking the bus. But we didn’t trust it now, we said. They laughed at us and said, go ahead then, look at the buses, but you’ll be back. So we walked the other block to the bus station to check out the buses. They looked seriously rickety and had 3 seats to a row. I was thinking about bathroom stops. We ran into our young fellahin archeologist friend with the slick hair & shiny outfit, and his friends. We told them we were thinking of taking the train now. They heartily ridiculed us. After yesterday? Were we crazy? Maybe. We had been told we needed to get a reservation early. But we couldn’t commit to it now. Maybe the train would be empty. Maybe it wouldn’t derail this time. We said goodbye to our fellahin friends, who nodded their heads laughing at us, and went back to Mubarak, who laughed at us and had some of his young friends pull up chairs for us outside his little store, so they could laugh at us some more. It was all good fun.

We got there early, this time well-provisioned with water and a thermos full of tea, and having eaten a full square meal of meat stew, rice and salad. I was hoping, selfishly, that the hajj wouldn’t be up for it again, but he showed up in a fresh galibeya, as did all the other people from our cabina, except for the women, who had found another. Mohamed was at the station, this time with his mom, who told us how we had to go to Alexandria. Soon after we left, the men in our cabina got in a heated argument having to do with Nubia. One of them, not a Nubian, had said something the others didn’t like about Wadi Halfa. They retorted with something about the original Halfa, drowned by the Aswan Dam. The argument was clearly about the ongoing Nubian ethnocide, which Fhar, who understood more of it than I did, confirmed. At one point the nice youngish man with short white hair, Nubian, pointed at the two of us and said something about tickets. Fhar explained to me he was talking about the racism against Nubians on the part of the Sudanese state. They all needed to show their tickets to take the train the second time, but neither we nor the non-Nubian man had been asked to. The argument continued and I wished I spoke enough to understand more than just the gist. But eventually it wore down, and everyone was perfectly nice to each other again.

After a bit I got up to go to the loo. The room at the end of the train car, normally reserved for luggage, was jam-packed with non-Nubian Sudanese guys talking loudly. I made my way through the crowd to the little WC. On the way out one of them, a tall young man, started a conversation with me in English. His English was respectable, better than my Arabic at least. Still, we switched back and forth, as the others looked on, amused. He introduced me to the others, who included the hip-hop guy from the previous day’s argument. He told me he was from Nigeria. I made a totally disbelieving face and he shouted to the others that I hated Nigerians. After he was done with that, he admitted he was kidding, he was really from Sudan, from the south. “I am Nuer,” he said. “Do you know Nuer?” I tried to contain my colonial-anthropological excitement, which rather embarrassed me. “Yes, I know Nuer,” I said, relying on the broader meaning of the Arabic word for “know.” He asked if I had children, and if that man was my husband. He asked when I would have children. I said maybe later. He asked how old I was. I made him guess, and he guessed wildly low, which is funny, since I look about my age. But it was dark, and people are often bad at judging the ages of those who look so different. Someone else corrected him, saying that if she’s a professor, she must at least be thirty. When I told them my real age, they gasped. “When ARE you going to have children??!!” they asked. I fessed up. “I don’t want children.” My Nuer friend then told me about how happy his kids make him. He had 6 or 8, I can’t remember. Some in South Sudan, some in the U.S., and several in Cairo. He was just returning from being with his newborn daughter in Cairo. I told him thank you- since he’d had so many, I didn’t need to have any. They nodded their heads and rolled their eyes at me. Freak.

Mohamed caught me on the way back to my cabina, and dragged me and Fhar into his cabina with Adel and a bunch of other guys. He theatrically introduced all of them. There was a Sudanese guy, two Egyptian “peasants,” a “Hindu” who was obviously Egyptian but with thick hair and a very Bollywood-looking low-zipped shirt, and another Sudanese guy. As one of them went off to the cafeteria car to fill Adel’s teapot with hot water so I could drink sugarless tea, the “Hindu” and one of the “peasants” took out their cell phones and started snapping pictures of me and Fhar, comparing shots. I tried to ignore them for a while as I talked with the first Sudanese guy, a nice young lawyer who studied at Cairo University and was studying English. Finally, I looked at them, and, laughing, shouted “khalas! [Enough!] Enough pictures!” They laughed sheepishly and put them away. Later, one of them asked my permission to take a shot, which I gave and posed for. They compared pics again and seemed pleased. The other Sudanese guy in the car had a kuffeya which he kept wrapping and rewrapping in different configurations. Adel made fun of him, calling him the “lone Afghani.” I liked the lone Afghani. Earlier he had asked what I thought of smoking, and not realizing he was trying to get me to help him make the two peasant smokers go in the hallway I’d told him it was fine. Meanwhile, Mohamed was pushing tea like an addict. I tried to refuse a third cup and he acted so offended I had no choice.

At some point I started writing shorthand notes on the back of a business card. This drove Mohamed insane. “What is she writing?” he shouted. “Is she studying us? Is that for your work?” He asked Fhar to translate. He looked, but couldn’t understand my writing. Fhar mentioned that they had been taking pictures of us- how was it different? The others laughed. I ran out of room on my business card and Adel handed me a slip of paper so I could continue. It was from a pharma handout pad, and advertised Abimol ™ Extra, Paracetamol+Caffeine Extra strength Pain relief. On it, I wrote to remind myself to write about Abimol ™ Extra. Mohamed then got distracted by his anger at another Sudanese guy who had stopped in to the doorway earlier and given me and Fhar advice about hotels in Khartoum. He must have an ulterior motive! The Sudanese guys told him that as an Egyptian it may be hard to believe, but that people in Sudan were actually nice. Thankfully, it didn’t escalate too much, but I did note down how much I love they way people say the name Mohamed during an argument. “mHAmed!” We came up to the derailment spot just as Fhar’s GPS ran out of batteries. The lone Afghani had taken a position opposite me by the window, and we both had stuck our heads out looking for signs, every so often commenting to each other about clues. For some reason it was very exciting to be going over that spot again, slowly, slowly, slowly.

We made our way back to our cabina, and slept on and off throughout the night as our fellow travelers became more and more impatient with the hajj, whose increasingly unreasonable actions and demands had worn away his welcome. We rolled into Abu Hamed station before dawn, when it was still quite dark. We started packing quickly, and one of the men across from us said to us, “haram! haram!” Fhar and I had a brief argument about whether he meant that we were doing something bad or that there were pyramids nearby, which I won when they explained “Ali Baba!” and made motions of pickpocketing and running off. Sudan Etiquette Rule #78: don’t leave in a hurry.

So with deliberate slowness, we made our way off the train and were grabbed by some sort of agent who made us follow him quickly to a stark office with some military police. They demanded to see our passports, and made a great show of examining them before asking Fhar where we were from. In Arabic, he said the equivalent of “USA, Duh,” for which I elbowed him, though it made me laugh. Going through our bags they missed all the really illicit stuff, like his GPS, but they found Fhar’s old palm pilot I was using for my fieldnotes and became enthralled with it. They took it next door to look at with a whole bunch of military police and told us to sit down outside of their view. I became increasingly indignant. Those bastards were not going to take my fieldnotes, trite as they may be. Standing outside in the dark, I shouted inside to the group of Sudanese military officers in my broken Arabic, “What’s the problem? Is there a problem? I can turn it on if you can’t figure it out. I want my things back.” For what seemed like an eternity (the sun rose), they huddled around it in the dark little office, and then they abruptly came out, one of them holding it and telling us to follow him. He went to a pickup and shouted “Get in!” I shouted back “Give me my thing! Where are you taking us?” He shouted back louder “get in!” We got it.

As we drove away from the little commercial area surrounding the train station I became increasingly scared. It had been dark when we got off the train, nobody had seen where we went. Why did I care so much about my stupid field notes anyway. If we were being abducted, I’d surely be raped, and we’d both surely be killed, and no one would ever know what had happened to us. Every so often we rode past people walking and I would wave, hoping that when the INVESTIGATION happened, they would remember which direction the white people had been driven in. The only words I said during the ride, which lasted forever or about 7 minutes, was “I hope they don’t hurt us.” Fhar, who claims now he didn’t experience similar fears, nonetheless gave me an empathetic look.

We came up on the bus station and parked around the corner at the office of some official named Mubarak, whom our police escort had to wake up. After a lot of banging and a cell phone call, Mubarak opened the door, wrote down our passport and visa numbers in a large book, gave our palm pilot a dreary-eyed once over, and told us we were free to go.

Feeling like an asshole for being so suspicious, I went with Fhar back to the bus station. Outside the open ticket room we were accosted by no less than seven bus touts, all trying to sell us on the same route. ?? We went inside and saw the women who had shared our cabina the day the train derailed. Old friends now, we shared some tea and biscuits and asked their advice on buses. We bought our tickets. I’d thought, given how fancy the buses looked, that they’d have a bathroom. Since of course I had no such luck, I asked one of the ticket sellers in the station where the bathroom was. They first pointed, and then one man, recognizing my confusion, told me to follow him. I went behind the building, past another small partially constructed building, and looked out at piles of trash, open desert, and numerous small cement dwellings. In the middle of a large open space was a cement outhouse with three doors, the middle one locked. I went to the far one, and before I could react to his “no!” I’d opened it. I was presented with a pile of feces and old soda bottles at least two feet high. I closed it. He tried to open the padlocked door. But it was padlocked. I looked at door #3, and it was the same as the first. I looked at him for help. “Ma3lesh,” he told me, pointing at the ground in front of the outhouse by a waist-high hill of trash. There was my bathroom.

The bathrooms we got to on the trip were much better. At a stop with nothing but Sahara around it I went out back, where a man was selling rinse water in old plastic bottles for half a guinea. Though I had paper, I did like the Romans and bought mine. I followed the ladies, all of them wearing beautifully-draped sheets of widely varying quality and sporting gorgeous henna tattoos on their hands and feet, to a little mud structure providing privacy for the three holes on each side. Although it was one of the simplest outhouses I’d seen, because it was open air in the desert it didn’t smell all that bad. This was a good thing, because it was right then that all the dirty water I’d drank on the train hit me, and I had to return three times in the space of the ten minutes we spent there. It was only on my third visit that I saw several worms crawling up from the septic pile onto the ground in front of me. I was glad that, unlike the women around me, I was wearing sneakers.

I need to finish this post. Here’s what happened then: approaching Khartoum, we saw the answer to our earlier question. The trash went here! Forests of multicolored fences, bushes and trees, beautifully adorned with plastic products of every shape and color, caught the refuse of the Sahara. We went to an overpriced hotel (but with a clean toilet, my #1 priority), we walked around and saw a whole lot of Obama paraphernalia (and later heard that many Sudanese like him because they think he’s a Muslim- ha!), we saw a very small anti-Israel march from our hotel window, we got in touch with someone on couchsurfing, we tried to buy plane tickets but realized credit cards were blocked, we found out the government was issuing thinly veiled threats to foreigners, should the ICC rule to have Bashir arrested, we met our wonderful couchsurfing host at the Khartoum American School, went to her spacious clean apartment, and crashed. It was right next door to the Kingdom Hall residence of the Sudan. Then Fhar got sick, and it was hot, so we lay around doing nothing trying to figure out how to get the hell out of Khartoum with no way to pay for it, which we did thanks to our fantastic AUC travel agents (thanks Jeannette!). We walked to Afra Mall down the street, took an unmarked cab back downtown to print out official tickets at EgyptAir since we’d heard the airport didn’t recognize e-tix, were told we needed those damn yellow cards showing our vaccinations, realized we’d left them at home in Cairo, went outside on the street and bought brand spanking new ones, complete with hospital stamp and doctor’s signature, and then took a cab to the Korean restaurant that someone had marked on a GPS database Fhar had downloaded by the airport. And although they made me pay for it (import costs), the gaktugee was some of the best I’ve ever had. Mmm, and the kimchee pachun. We walked back the long way because I refused to jump over the ditch with the decomposing donkey in it, past the hugely fortified and rather hostile-looking UN complex, to the house, where our generous host invited us to a party at the German embassy with alcohol and bratwurst. Fhar stayed home, but I got gussied up and went out on the town. It was expat insanity- we were driven there in a UN van full of 20-something blond giggly female teachers- all very nice, and all very young. Inside, the German embassy staff wore really nice tee shirts that read “Happy Hour Khartoum” but they didn’t have any for sale. I met some young French kuffeya-wearing NGO workers who insisted their scarves weren’t a political statement (“They’re from Pakistan!”) and, when I asked them what they did, said “finance,” which I mistook for violence and replied “me too!” They were actually doing some food security thing in Darfur. I met several drunken Spanish pilots, among the rowdiest of the large crowd, the bodyguard to the French ambassador, and plenty of “businessmen”. Not a single person mentioned (at least in my earshot) the threatened upcoming evacuations, even though a fair number of UN staff has apparently already been evacuated, or the slaughter going on in Palestine. It was just a big, boozy, colonial shindig. The next day, we went to an incredible Ethiopian restaurant, which made me a little less sad about not making it to Ethiopia, and went to the airport, where we had a very interesting conversation with a state department bodyguard who didn’t like Condi’s politics but liked her managerial style, was seriously worried about dealing with Hillary, and couldn’t understand why the U.S. didn’t just get rid of insurance companies and form a single-payer health care system.