FINDING SHANGRI-LA ON THE NILE
OF ALL THE MANY FUTURES
After our close encounter with the hippos, Mike Fay and I walk from the national park’s spartan headquarters through a village of thatch-roofed huts, feeling hungry. The chief warden has said he will meet us for dinner at “the market,” a rambling assortment of roadside shops, money changers and telecom stalls straddling the more-or-less paved highway to the Ugandan border. The highway is South Sudan’s busiest road by far, traversed daily by hundreds of long-haul trucks carrying food, fuel, building materials and other goods north to Juba, the nation’s capital.
Despite recent political instability, we have seen plenty of smaller vehicles along the route as well, an intermittent parade of rackety motorcycle taxis ferrying local shoppers and air-conditioned SUVs delivering foreign experts. After a decades-long civil war, South Sudan broke off from Sudan, gaining independence in 2011. Since then, the young country has attracted an alphabet soup of NGOs engaged in a smorgasbord of projects, from early childhood education to women’s empowerment to monitoring an outbreak of mpox.
Mike and I are here partly to assess the region’s potential for international tourism, but mostly to go flyfishing. As we make our way along the dirt paths of the village—passing chickens, goats and the occasional sharp-eared, long-legged dog—we discuss the results of our first day’s efforts (not a single strike) with the park’s deputy inspector.
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