This week’s travel dream: Sudan’s surprising promise

Despite its tumultuous recent history, Sudan may just emerge as a prime African destination, said Andrew McCarthy in The New York Times. At least that’s the hope of Will Jones, whose company, Journeys by Design, began leading guided trips through Sudan this year. Africa’s third-largest nation has had a peace agreement in place with the recently seceded South Sudan for only a month and isn’t a major attraction just yet. When I joined Jones there recently, I didn’t see many foreign visitors. What I did find were an orderly culture, some of the cleanest streets on the continent, and more pyramids than even Egypt can claim.

“A hot, dry wind blew as I stood under a large mahogany tree on the banks of the Blue Nile” in the heart of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. The peacefulness of the city surprised me, and when Jones and I sat down at a café among customers drinking sweetened tea while two men rowed sculls on the water below, the last decade’s atrocities in Darfur felt far away. In the city’s largest market, Souk Omdurman, the “narrow alleyways and covered passages swarmed with life”—old men selling bananas, “boys bent over sewing machines.” It was a typical East African market, “lacking only the tension of similar bazaars I had experienced.” A more chaotic scene unfurled that night beside a cemetery. Drums beat as 100 Sufi men gathered in a circle. Chanting arose and the men began twirling until the intensity built to a hypnotic level. “These were the famous ‘whirling dervishes’—in the throes of their devotion.”

We drove north along the Nile the next day and camped out in the dunes. If Sudan is to develop a primary tourist draw, Meroe will be it, and that’s where we were headed. About 200 pyramids “stand deserted” at Meroe, many missing their tops because a 19th-century Italian explorer mistakenly believed there were treasures hidden inside. These pyramids are far smaller than Egypt’s, but the scene’s “stillness and scope” make it striking. I was so moved that I walked the deserted site at sunset, and again at dawn.

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A 10-night Sudanese safari with Journeys by Design (journeysbydesign.com) costs about $5,950 a person.