My return journey from Kuron to Juba

In the time I’ve been in South Sudan I have almost always travelled by public transport, but never written about it.  Here is a description of my return journey to Juba from Kuron to give readers a flavour of why I enjoy it.

While I was at Kuron it became very clear that getting back would be more problematic than my trip there, in which I had shared Bishop Paride’s flight.  Flights are far and few between and very costly.  Sometimes Land Cruisers or other tough vehicles make the journey from Kapoeta to Kuron, but there is no public means of travel.  The nearest town with public transport is Kapoeta, around 200 kilometres away. 

While I was ruminating on this, I got the news that my contingent of deaf children were supposed to return to school at the beginning of March as part of Uganda’s gradual reopening of schools.  Before going back to Nimule to collect them all together, I needed to renew my South Sudan resident’s permit, so I realized that I needed to leave earlier than planned.

The road from Kuron to Kapoeta, while it was
still daylight.

Various trucks were arriving at Kuron with building materials for school renovations and for work on a new bridge, which was to replace one which had been swept away by floods last year.  I spoke to the driver of a tip-up truck who was about to leave on his return journey to Juba and he agreed to take me in the passenger seat.  The truck was a modern one with air conditioning, which made the drive relatively comfortable although it was still an extremely bumpy and painstakingly slow drive for the most part because of the state of the track.  We left at around 3 pm, which I was pleased about because it gave me a chance to see the surroundings before night fell.

The driver was a very young and friendly Ethiopian.  He spoke a small amount of English and I spoke a small amount of Arabic, so we were able communicate in a very basic way.  He was an excellent driver and very experienced in negotiating sudden drops from the track into dried up river beds.  I really admired his skill.

For the first part of the journey we passed Toposa villages, surrounded by thorny fences.  Their homes were built on stilts, dome shaped and completely made of long grass.  They were really works of art.  As the residents heard the approach of our truck, children came running to the roadside to wave at us as we passed.  Most people, both adults and children, wore bead necklaces and a cloth around their shoulders.  Women wore short pleated skirts in a traditional design as well.  Many women had lip piercings and exposed tattooed bodies. 

Children who had rushed to the
roadside to see the vehicle, close
to a feeding centre.

Outside one village I saw the remains of a bonfire surrounded by log benches with a tall homemade cross at one end.  This was very similar to the place where I attended the baptisms described in my last post.  It is the nearest thing to a church that I saw in the whole journey as far as Kapoeta.

I saw quite a lot of donkeys, which I know were imported by the Peace Village to provide agricultural help and beasts of burden for the locals, who have no tradition of using animals for work.   There were no towns, no shops or any other signs of outside civilization except for a very occasional sign marked ‘Nutrition Centre’. 

Then we passed along a valley path which wound through mountains.  By the time we had got to the end of the mountains night was falling.  As we drove on in the dark, various small animals scooted across the road in the light of the truck’s headlights.  I saw three hyenas, a couple of dik-diks (a very small type of antelope), an animal resembling a mongoose and lots of rabbits.  The driver was clearly an animal lover; he was extremely careful not to run them over. 

We continued driving in pitch darkness until 10.30 pm when we finally arrived at Kapoeta, which is the state capital for the whole area.  We stopped at a large but slightly grotty hotel which clearly catered for truck drivers. 

As we parted for the night I asked the driver what time he wanted to leave for Juba the next day.  He said he wanted to leave at 11 am.  He must have been terribly tired, as he had driven all the way from Kapoeta to Kuron earlier the same day – sixteen hours of concentrated, careful driving.  However, such a late start did not suit me at all, knowing that the driving time to Juba might be a similar length.  I wanted to arrive in daylight and not too exhausted, so we parted with many thanks from me for his willingness to help me.  I slept like a log, not surprisingly.

The next day I went to the transport hub for taxis to Juba.  ‘Taxi’ in an African context is the word used for a minibus.  As I went through the town, it was obvious that Kapoeta is in the Toposa tribal area as quite a lot of people were wearing tribal dress.  The Toposa are either a big tribe, or simply well scattered over a huge area.  I doubt if there are reliable statistics as their villages can be very remote indeed, mostly without outside access.  There are many international NGO offices in Kapoeta, but apart from the signs for nutrition centres, there seemed little evidence that they had a presence in rural areas. 

I paid my taxi fare and then sat and waited with everyone else.  As I was waiting, the local police chief introduced himself to me and we chatted.  He told me that the taxi drivers were discussing me and were very happy to have a white person taking a taxi.  They said that it was a sign that peace was coming.  If only ……  Anyway it was a nice thought.

Altogether there were ten passengers plus a baby and toddler and the driver in our taxi, crowded four to a row on seats intended for three people.  Two people shared the passenger seat.  As we left the town we waited for another taxi to catch up so we could drive in convoy in case of emergency, either of breakdown or banditry.  Our small convoy finally set off at around 9 am.

I sat squeezed between a young woman with her baby and a Dinka man with facial scarrings.  As with all public transport in South Sudan and elsewhere in Africa, people do not maintain a stony silence and avoid each other’s eyes as they do in the UK.  We all talk to our neighbours.  To me this is one of the pleasures of public transport in South Sudan.  I found that my Dinka fellow passenger was a refugee living in Kenya.  His sister was mentally ill, but their family could not afford medical care for her in Kenya.  He was therefore taking her to Juba in the hope that she could be helped.  I did not comment as I doubt very much that there is much help to be had for mental illness in Juba.  He had made a terribly long journey with her and I didn’t want to discourage him so close to the end of the trip.

Me in a rumpled and dusty state, having
just crossed the river.

As we continued our journey we passed through many checkpoints where our unfortunate driver had to keep paying the traffic police and soldiers.  I was asked for my ID twice, but there were no problems and the officials were friendly.  Until recently the road between Kapoeta and Torit was infamous for the roughness of the track (very bad even by South Sudanese standards) but it has been recently smoothed, so the ride was not bad at all, apart from one place where we had to cross a river and no bridge had yet been built.  There was an articulated lorry with an equally long trailer stuck in the mud, leaving little room for other vehicles to pass except through deeper water.  We all had to get out of the taxi and cross using very uneven stepping stones, so that the taxi would not get stuck

After leaving Kapoeta I noticed that the villages were the more usual grass-thatched mud huts, as they are in Nimule.  We passed through the Lotuku tribal area, centred on Torit (the state capital for Eastern Equatoria).  Juba is in yet another tribal area, the Bari.

We stopped for lunch at a small town called Liria, where we had a proper restaurant meal with soda before continuing our journey.

Soon after leaving Liria we had to negotiate our way through several large herds of cattle, which were being taken to market in Juba on foot.  Then we came to a large area where there were serious bush fires, purposefully lit.  There is a tradition of setting fire to the bush every dry season, which causes a lot of environmental damage.  It was very sad to see.

The main problem of that day’s travel was that our taxi was very old and we had to have the windows open all the way because the ventilation was not working.  Huge amounts of dust blew through the windows.  Some of us put our masks on which helped a bit.  We were covered with dust from head to foot, inside as well as outside our clothes.

We arrived in Juba at about 4 pm.  I took a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) to the guesthouse where I always stay when in Juba.  I had booked by phone early in the day but I found that my booking had not been communicated by the lady I spoke to, and they were not expecting me.  They had to hurriedly clear out a room while I waited, covered in dust and desperate to bathe.  Anyhow, it was a good trip and I was surprisingly untired by it.

The last leg of my journey was by taxi from Juba to Nimule, along a familiar tarmacked road.  It passes through Nimule National Park and across part of the Imatong Mountains.  I have described the road in a previous blog written when I had just arrived in South Sudan seven years ago.

I keep thinking of the happy reaction of the taxi drivers to having a white passenger.  I suspect that if only more foreigners would use the local public transport system, rather than private vehicles or light aircraft, it might even help to bring security and lasting peace.  It would certainly raise demand for improved road conditions.