A country without backpackers

Text and photos / Published by Times Publishing  by Huang Yuyang, “Passing By, What the World Taught Me”

Before going to Sudan, I first went to the Taiwan Economic and Trade Office in Cairo, Egypt, to apply for the documents required for a Sudanese visa. They gave me the phone number of the Taiwan Office in Saudi Arabia. After several back-and-forth phone calls, the response I got was always to advise against going. I don’t know why I was so insistent, but in the end, at their request, I signed a waiver stating that if anything happened to me in Sudan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already advised against it and would not assume any responsibility.

As I signed the paper, all I could think about was my mother’s sorrowful face.

When I first arrived in Sudan, I often walked barefoot in the desert, and my feet were badly cracked. With every step, blood seeped from the heels. The temperature difference between day and night exceeded twenty degrees. During the day, sweat would soak through my entire shirt, but at night, strong winds would blow, and the temperature would plummet. I had been suffering from a cold for almost a month, coughing non-stop, and there were times when I truly felt like my lungs might leap out of my throat. I wasn’t unaware of why I was putting myself through this, but the thought was quickly overturned.



To prove something I’ve always believed in.

In Sudan, I didn’t meet any other travelers, and information online was extremely scarce. I could only walk and ask around, often taking the wrong buses and ending up in places I hadn’t intended. That evening was no different—I took the wrong bus again and had no idea where I was. I could only stand at the desert highway and hitchhike. A truck driver saw me and stopped. He didn’t understand a word of English, so we could only communicate with gestures, laughing as we did. Listening to the tires roll over the flat asphalt road, the slow and steady rhythm carried us through the endless desert. He stopped at a rest area, brought me a bottle of water, but drank tap water himself.

Do we even need language to communicate?

Thinking back to my days in Sudan, there was only one time I actually paid to stay somewhere. They had set up a few beds in the desert, with no roof at all—it looked like a surrealist painting or avant-garde performance art. Everyone fell asleep under the Milky Way. On other days, I was invited into the homes of the Nubian people. I only knew a few simple Arabic words, but they were overjoyed just hearing me struggle to say a few of them. We had simple conversations, and they laughed while saying, “Taiwan kuiz ! Taiwan kuiz!” (Taiwan is great ! Taiwan is great!)

They were as hospitable as the Taiwanese.

On the night before heading to Ethiopia, they put some biscuits in my bag—“the bus ride takes four days, don’t go hungry.” They taught me the most important things without needing any words at all. That day, a little boy broke his biscuit in half and gave me one piece. Then he broke his half in half again to give to someone else. I offered him the whole piece of bread, and before eating it, he broke off half to give to another little boy.

During those times, language was both a strange and familiar concept. In this world, how many people share love as their common language?