Sudan

[nwhyte]

Well, I have very nearly caught up with myself after my 17-day trip which included five countries, five hotels and three overnight flights. I can't write much here about the actual trip to Juba, but I can share with you some of the photographs I took (below the cut):

Comments

[yiskah]

Yay, I am so excited to see these!

Sudan nitpicking: Garang only died four years ago (CPA was signed in January 2005, Garang was killed in June or July [can't quite remember] the same year).

I think that last lizard is some sort of monitor lizard. I had one stuck in my courtyard the other day.

[yiskah]

Hmm, having looked again I think that lizard is smaller than I thought. Ignore!

[nwhyte]

Yeah, you're right; corrected above.

[annafdd]

What amazes me is not the lizard, it's the fact that the electric outlet is British. I don't know what I expected, continental plug maybe?

[yiskah]

They actually have a mixture of the two in Sudan (continental and British), but more modern buildings seem to verge towards the British system.

[nwhyte]

Sudan is a former British colony, as are neighbouring Uganda and Kenya which supply the city of Juba. Having said that, inside the hotel rooms the sockets were ingeniously designed so that three-rectangular-pin British, two-round-pin European, and two-thin-pin American plugs could all be used.

[tortoise]

I'm surprised that it's possible to make a socket that accommodates American plugs as well as British/European ones; do you know if there's something clever they do to get around the voltage difference, or are you just supposed to hope you don't fry anything?

[saare_snowqueen]

I'll bite - or would like to. What's an injera and wot?

[geekosaur]

Injera is a bread made from fermented teff (a grain-bearing grass unique to Ethiopia). Wot is a hot Ethiopian stew of sorts.

[saare_snowqueen]

Thank you. I'm a cook and cooking teacher, so new foods are always interesting to me.

[nwhyte]

I think you may have difficulty locating teff in Estonia!

(Though I will be very interested here if you are successful...)

[frumiousb]

cool, thanks!

[crumpetsfortea]

Hard to tell if the two lizards are different species. The best that I can do is to tell you that they're both probably small agamids...