The Ferry
One of the biggest regrets I have is not writing more while traveling. There are a lot of excuses, maybe reasons, but as I look back on my trip through Africa in 2007, memories are starting to get hazy.
The quickest way to clarity is to have a look through the 10,000 or so photos I took on the trip. Thinning that stockpile has been an ongoing project. Dropping duplicates and trashing the worst of the photos has still left me with a massive pile, and now it’s time to start turning each photo into words, to tell the stories associated with each, and to start to develop the story of the trip as a whole.
There is so much about this photo that I like. It’s easily one of my favourites from the trip.
We arrived at the ferry docks on Lake Nasser in Aswan, Egypt, to board an overnight ferry headed to Wadi Halfa, Sudan. I was energized at the excitement of leaving Egypt to see what lay beyond, and I was also very happy to be healthy. A foolish assumption about the quality of the water at our hotel in Cairo meant for most of the week prior to arriving in Aswan, I was running to locate every bathroom I could, and often none were available, so I’d dig in the sand.
My memories of an afternoon in Aswan meant checking out the dam, getting spare passport photos taken – I still have these in my passport wallet, one of the few photos I have of myself from the trip – and getting a relaxed meal with our tour leader, Jack. At camp the night before boarding the ferry, we stayed at a campground in Aswan, repacking our gear for the transfer from the coaches that carried our luggage, to the ferry.
The next morning, we packed up and made our way to the docks. We were told to expect a long day, and no one could wander off as our scheduled boarding time wasn’t known. Instead, we hung out on the massive ramp down to the ferry, wide enough for four or five lanes of traffic.
As we waited under a hot sun, small pickup trucks drove wildly down to the loading doors, despite cargo loaded more than double the height of the truck, held more or less in place with an intricate series of ropes. Men sitting atop the cargo would spring into action as soon as the truck was stopped, untying and lowering boxes down to more men who had jumped out of the cab. One by one, each box would be carried across a barge at the edge of the dock and onto the boat through a single doorway in the side of the hull. A steady stream of men wrestled boxes onto the ferry and a second stream came back to the trucks for a second load.
Most of the product being carried on board were goods that were not so easily available in Sudan, and instead could be more quickly and easily imported from Egypt.
Sometime in the early afternoon, our turn came to load. Calling it our turn is maybe a bit misleading though. All it meant was we got to join in the ever increasing crush all funneling through the door on the side of the boat.
The tour company had booked all of the first class cabins for our trip. Each cabin had two bunk beds, about the same space again in floorspace, except for where a desk intruded into the room, and a tiny closet. Washrooms were shared with the hundreds of other passengers on board.
Once a few of our group were on board, we began loading bags through portholes on the side of the boat. It was a precarious operation, with a sliver of water between the barge and the boat wide enough to swallow a duffel bag.
With the bags all on board, the bikes came next, hoisted in similar fashion, from the barge up to someone leaning out a porthole, who then passed it further up the side of the boat, to someone leaning over the deck railing. We got hold of some rope and used that to help string bikes up to the top deck, where the 40 or so bikes would be locked together for the overnight trip.
We said by to our Egyptian guides and got on board the ferry, pushing past the continuing throng of people loading boxes onto the ferry.
My bags were in a room along with the gear of two other staff members, our nurse, Elaine, and an amazing generalist, Rachel. Each of them got their own bed, while I would sleep sprawled across duffel bags and backpacks tiling the floor.
As the sun set, a number of our group began to relax on the front deck of the ship, and a few people took out laptops for their first chance in some time to draft letters home or download photos from digital cameras.
And that’s what strikes me about this photo. After the madness of Cairo and the hundreds of kilometers we rode getting to Aswan, the manic experience of getting our stuff and ourselves on board in a world that had already changed so much for all of us, we were only a fraction of the way into the trip, with so much left ahead.
