Things to Do in Sudan in December

The pyramids at Meroe sit in open desert roughly 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Khartoum. December is likely the single best month to visit. Cool morning air makes the 30-minute sand walk from parking to Northern Royal Cemetery tolerable. Low winter sun turns the steep, narrow pyramids, smaller and sharper than Egypt's, built by the Kingdom of Kush between 300 BCE and 350 CE, into glowing orange against impossibly blue sky. Arrive before 7 AM. You will likely have the site alone. The silence hits hard. No buses. No hawkers. Just wind, sand, and roughly 200 pyramids across three clusters. Nearby Naqa has a Roman-influenced Temple of Apedemak with carved lions guarding the entrance. Musawwarat es-Sufra, a large ceremonial complex half-buried in sand, sits further on. Both work as day trips. An overnight desert camp between them improves the experience.

Port Sudan opens onto some of the Red Sea's least-dived reefs. December's calm seas and 26°C (79°F) water create conditions divers call excellent. Sanganeb Atoll, a UNESCO site 25 km (15.5 miles) offshore, drops 800 metres (2,625 feet) into hard coral walls where hammerheads gather at dawn. Sha'ab Rumi, famous from Jacques Cousteau's 1960s underwater village experiment, still holds Conshelf II remains on the seabed. Corroded and barnacled now, the human shapes remain unmistakable in the deep blue. Mass tourism never arrived here. The coral shows notable condition. No bleaching. No anchor damage. December visibility routinely exceeds 30 metres (98 feet). Currents bring pelagic species close to the walls.

Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city on the western bank of the White Nile, is where Sudanese culture lives at its most unfiltered. The Omdurman Souq is a sprawl of narrow alleys where the smell of bukhoor incense and roasting coffee beans competes with the sharp tang of leather workshops and the sweetness of date vendors' stalls. December's temperate afternoons make this walkable in a way that summer's heat absolutely does not. The climax of any Friday in Omdurman is the Sufi dhikr at the tomb of Sheikh Hamed al-Nil, where dervishes in green and white jalabiyas spin and chant in a dust cloud of devotion that builds for two hours before sunset. The drumming starts low, almost conversational, then escalates into something ecstatic that the whole crowd, locals, pilgrims, the handful of travelers, gets pulled into. The Khalifa's House museum nearby holds the battle standards and chain mail from the Mahdist wars against British colonialism, and the view from the Mogran, where the Blue and White Nile visibly merge in two distinct colours, is worth the walk alone.

Jebel Barkal is a flat-topped sandstone mesa rising 98 metres (322 feet) from the desert floor near the town of Karima, about 400 km (249 miles) north of Khartoum. The ancient Egyptians considered it the home of Amun, and the Kushite kings built temples into its base that are still being excavated. In December, the climb to the summit, a scrambled path up the back side that takes about 40 minutes, rewards you with a panorama of the Nile curving through palm groves below, the temple ruins at your feet, and nothing but Saharan emptiness to the horizon. The air at the top is dry and cool enough to sit comfortably, a luxury impossible from March through October. The nearby Nubian village of Karima itself has a quiet, sand-coloured charm, with mudbrick houses and donkey carts, and the local guesthouses serve the best kisra, a spongy, slightly sour fermented sorghum flatbread, you will find anywhere in northern Sudan. The nearby El-Kurru tombs, burial chambers of Kushite royals with vivid painted walls showing Egyptian-influenced funerary scenes, are typically empty of other visitors.

Suakin sits on the Red Sea coast about 60 km (37 miles) south of Port Sudan, and it is one of the most hauntingly strange places in all of northeast Africa. This was once the primary port linking Sudan to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage and a major slave-trading hub, built entirely from coral blocks cut from the reef. The Ottoman-era merchant houses on the island portion, three and four stories tall, with ornately carved coral facades, wooden mashrabiya screens, and interior courtyards open to the salt air, have been crumbling since the port was abandoned in favour of Port Sudan in the early 1900s. In December, the coastal humidity is at its most bearable, and the low afternoon sun throws long shadows through the roofless shells of buildings where you can still see the patterns in the coral masonry. The smell is salt water and dry coral dust, and the only sounds are seabirds and the slap of wavelets against the causeway connecting the old island to the mainland. Turkish-funded restoration has been underway intermittently. But much of the site remains a ruin in the most photogenic sense.