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.
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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.
