Reading of Jim West’s trip to Egypt reminded me that I was looking for somewhere to go just before Christmas, to fight off the winter blues. I was thinking about flying out to Khartoum. After all, the location is right for sunshine in December, and spending a week in a good hotel relaxing wouldn’t be very arduous.
I came across the Tripadvisor website, for “Sudan”. This site is quite useful for hotel reviews, although for Luxor some of the hotel-keepers have started to game the system with fake reviews. (You can tell, because they’re tiny places no-one has ever heard of!) But the reviews for Sudan were enlightening.
You see, I reasoned that the rulers of Sudan, as in any third-world country, enjoy acquiring foreign aid. Those Mercedes-Benzes cost hard currency, after all! So they would need to have at least one good hotel for all the fat-cats to stay in, while being wined and dined, preparatory to handing over money exacted from poor people in rich countries to the rich people who keep poor countries poor (as the saying has it). If so, I too could stay in it.
The results are pretty awful. There is the al-Rotana, which seems the probable hotel that I had in mind, charging $200 a night. But look at the rest!!?!
The best hotel is apparently run by Greeks, which will amuse those who have read the “River War” by Winston Churchill. Churchill, who was going up the Nile with Kitchener against the dervishes, and indeed G. W. Steevens in his “With Kitchener to Khartoum”, makes regular mentions of Greek hoteliers as the only source of civilisation! Perhaps the Sudan has slumped back into the state that it was in a century ago — the victim of 50 years of failed policies.
PS: I looked at the UK Foreign Office advice here. The list of disease outbreaks was pretty interesting. You know, I don’t really want to experience all that…
PPS: I’ve been laughing all evening about the hotel reviews, which were in order of preference. Most countries list hotels by resort. This one contains the only 14 hotels in the country. The first one sounded rather dodgy. The second was the corporate one I referred to. But the review of third one started witha single word, doubtless written with a shudder of memory: “horrible”. One can imagine the pale and desperate frame of mind of the ‘guest’ in which that was the first word that came to mind. What hotel number 14 was like I cannot imagine!
Some fun reading you might enjoy on your next trip–to Egypt, I hope.
Agatha Christie’s second husband was the renowned archaeologist Max Mallowan. Christie often accompanied him on digs and even participated in some of them, in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
And of course she wrote several beloved mysteries such as Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, and They Came from Baghdad, which unfold in the Middle East.
What is not so well known is that during one of the digs, her colleagues challenged her to write a detective story placed in ancient Egypt. Thus she wrote Death Comes as the End, one of her lesser known books. But what a story! She methodically researched it, constantly badgering the archaeologists for details about daily life. If you enjoy detective stories, and are a stickler for precise details, you will love this one.
Thank you — I had never heard of that one, so will hunt it out!