Fantastic voyage

I've just finished a week on the Chad-Sudan border - an eventful week, so I'll post in parts. As background, over the last few months, the Darfur war has gotten worse, with violence spreading into eastern Chad and forcing thousands of people out of their homes. The janjaweed - you remember them - are using in Chad the murderous techniques they honed in Darfur. I went to the border to ask Chadians - I think that's the adjective - what the janjaweed have been up to recently.

First, though, "went to the border" doesn't quite do justice to this voyage. Between my leaving Nairobi and actually reaching the Chad-Sudan border, it was a week. It began in Addis Ababa, where I had to go to get a visa to be allowed to actually enter Chad. (There's no Chadian embassy in Kenya.) I took an early morning flight from Nairobi to Addis, and after landing headed straight for the visa office. The francophone consular officer realized that I would stop speaking to her in my California-French accent if she just told me I could have the visa that afternoon, which she did, and I figured I was in business.

But I couldn't get on a flight to Chad until Monday. So I was stuck for the weekend in Addis, which turned out not to be a bad thing, because I had some work to catch up on there, plus my digestive system decided to go on strike. This was a huge stroke of luck - I got whatever it was out of my system, and after seeing the facilities in the border areas, it was far better to be sick in a hotel room in Addis.

On Monday I flew to N'Djamena, the virtually unpronounceable capital of Chad. I made arrangements with the local office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to fly with them to eastern Chad the next day, and Monday evening I set up an interview with a leader of one of the major Darfur rebel groups. It's one sign of the bad blood between Chad and Sudan that you almost can't walk down a street in N'Djamena (assuming you'd want to do such a thing) without running into a Darfur rebel.

My rebel - balding chain-smoker, slow gravelly speech, what you'd expect from a man who spent many nights in the bush - was a fountain of information. He was also a little too eager to have me meet his colleagues who are holed up somewhere in a rebel-controlled area of Darfur. I told him I didn't want to think what the Sudanese government might do if they found me on their soil with a camera and notebook but no visa, he said something like, "Don't worry, we have guns." I laughed, until I realized he wasn't.

The next day I flew to Abeche, the largest town in eastern Chad and base of humanitarian operations in the area, which is home to more than 200,000 Darfur refugees in about a dozen camps. The folks at UNHCR gave me a space in a guesthouse, but they don't work on the border anymore for security reasons, so I had to rent a car and driver and get there on my own.

The car-rental sector in Abeche is basically one tall dude in a caftan, and in this case when supply meets demand, the result is pretty brutal. I won't say how much I paid for a car to the border for two days, in case my editor is reading this, but because there's pretty much nothing else on the border to spend one's money on (like food or accommodation), I figured my expense report would look all right in the end.

Given the security concerns that the car-rental guy said justified his rates, I was a little concerned when the driver showed up the next morning. The kid looked about 14. Together, we looked like two high school buddies out for a joyride in Dad's SUV. But Abdul Hamid turned out to be a pretty competent driver. It's not the easiest drive - this part of Chad is basically a total desert, so in parts of it it feels like driving on a beach. Occasionally you slow down to let camels cross the road. And you either keep the windows down or die of heatstroke, and with the windows down everything gets coated in sand and dust. I think I'll be scraping bits of Chad out of my stuff for the next several weeks.

Next: "ER" comes to Chad