Pole to Pole
Day 70: Khartoum

Our meeting with the Eritrean transport contacts is set for the afternoon, back across the Nile, in Khartoum itself.
A neat modern villa is the incongruous headquarters of the EPLF - the Eritrean People's Liberation Front - and also of Ayusha Travel, an organization set up to capitalize on the experience gained driving to and from northern Ethiopia during the thirty-year war which ended with the overthrow of Colonel Mengistu only four months previously. On the walls of the bungalow are murals depicting idealized freedom fighters - women armed to the teeth, about to hurl grenades, tribal warriors brandishing spears, and the skulls of enemy dead grinning grotesquely. Hassan Kika shows me into his office. He is a soft-spoken, quietly authoritative man. It's much easier to think of him as a transport manager than a freedom fighter, though he does have things like bomb fragments on his desk and talks of the '10,000 martyrs' who died fighting for Eritrea against Ethiopian dictatorship.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Pole to Pole
- Day: 70
- Country/sea: Sudan
- Place: Khartoum
- Book page no: 151
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