Advisory - travel not recommended · checked 5 Aug 2026
Sudan
Sudan has been at war since April 2023 between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. Every foreign ministry advises against ALL travel, most embassies have suspended operations, commercial flights to Khartoum have stopped and famine has been declared in parts of Darfur. There is no consular assistance inside the country. Standard scores are suspended while this alert is active.
Official advisory →No part of Sudan is currently visitable: the country has been at war since April 2023, every foreign ministry advises against all travel, most embassies have suspended operations, famine has been declared in parts of Darfur and there is no consular assistance inside the country. This route is published for the day that changes, not as an invitation for today. It is the Nile corridor as it was actually travelled until April 2023 — Meroe's royal cemeteries, the Bayuda crossing, Gebel Barkal, the mud-brick mass at Kerma and the temple at Soleb — and it goes nowhere near Darfur or Kordofan.
Khartoum and the confluence
The Blue Nile comes down from the Ethiopian highlands and the White Nile up from Uganda, and they meet at al-Mogran in the middle of the capital, running visibly different colours for some way past the junction. The other reason to be here was the National Museum, whose garden holds temples cut out of the Nubian valley and reassembled before Lake Nasser drowned their sites in the 1960s — Buhen, Semna, Kumma. The museum was occupied and stripped during the fighting after April 2023; the antiquities service and UNESCO have both said thousands of objects are missing, and recovery is a project of years rather than months. The day itself is arrival, registration, permits and a first look at the river.
Omdurman
Across the White Nile, the larger half of the conurbation and the older idea of it — Omdurman was the Mahdist capital from 1885 until Kitchener took it in 1898. The Khalifa's House was a museum; the Mahdi's domed tomb beside it is a 1947 rebuild of the one British artillery brought down. The souq was one of the biggest in Africa, and it was looted and burned while the city was held. On Friday afternoons, an hour before sunset, the Qadiriyya used to gather at the tomb of Hamed al-Nil for dhikr, in green and red patchwork; it is a religious act rather than a performance, and the etiquette was to stand at the edge and leave the camera down unless invited. Omdurman was fought over street by street from 2023, the army retook most of it during 2024, and what a visitor would be walking through is a damaged city with unexploded ordnance still being cleared.
Naqa
North-east out of the city and then off the tarmac onto sand. Naqa was a Meroitic town on a caravan route away from the river, watered by hafirs — engineered catchment basins that held the wet-season runoff. The Lion Temple was built under Natakamani and Amanitore in the first century AD and carries Apedemak, a Meroitic god with a lion's head, shown on one wall with three heads and four arms. Twenty metres (65 ft) away stands the so-called Roman kiosk, with Egyptian cavetto cornices, Hellenistic columns and Meroitic detailing on the same small building, which is the clearest statement anywhere of what this kingdom thought it was.
Musawwarat es-Sufra
An hour north across the sand to a site nobody has satisfactorily explained. The Great Enclosure is a sprawl of courtyards, ramps and colonnades covering several hectares with no obvious residential quarter and no clear cult focus, and elephants appear on its walls and as free-standing sculpture more than anywhere else in the Nile valley — one theory has it as a training ground for them. The Lion Temple below it dates to about 235 BC and was re-erected block by block by a Humboldt University expedition from the 1960s, which is why you can read the reliefs at all.
Meroe
Back to the river and north to Begrawiya, where the royal cemeteries stand on dunes above the east bank. Around two hundred pyramids in three groups, steep-sided and small — faces running close to seventy degrees against the fifty-two of the Great Pyramid, and rarely more than 30 m (100 ft) tall — each with a chapel on its east face carrying the dead ruler's reliefs. Nearly all of them are missing their tops, and that is not weathering: Giuseppe Ferlini, an Italian physician turned treasure hunter, dismantled the summits of some forty of them in 1834 looking for gold. He found Queen Amanishakheto's jewellery in one, sold it in Europe, and it sits today split between Berlin and Munich. UNESCO listed the island of Meroe in 2011. Stay to sunset, when the shadows fall down the dune faces.
The Bayuda
The Nile makes a great S-bend here, running south-west before turning north again, and the Bayuda is the desert inside the loop — a short cut that has been used for as long as anyone has needed to get from Meroe to Napata. It is a landscape of black volcanic cones and gravel plains with hand-dug wells at intervals, worked by Bisharin and Hassaniya herders who will appear beside the vehicle out of nothing. There is now tarmac linking the two ends, which reduces the crossing to about four hours; taking the older track and camping in the middle is the reason to spend the day instead.
Gebel Barkal
A sandstone butte 100 m (330 ft) high with a free-standing pinnacle at one corner, which the Egyptians read as a rearing cobra and therefore as the southern home of Amun. Thutmose III garrisoned it in the fifteenth century BC; seven hundred years later the Kushite kings who ruled Egypt as its twenty-fifth dynasty ran their state from the temple at its foot. The Amun temple, the Mut temple cut into the rock, and a field of small pyramids on the south side are all part of the Napatan Region listing UNESCO made in 2003. Climb the butte at dusk and you can see the whole bend of the river; the Merowe Dam sits on it about 25 km (16 mi) upstream, at the downstream foot of the Fourth Cataract.
Nuri and El-Kurru
Two more royal cemeteries within half an hour of Karima. Nuri is where Taharqa, who ruled Egypt and Kush together and fought the Assyrians, built the largest pyramid in Sudan; the burial chambers beneath it now sit below the water table, and from 2019 an American-led team excavated them in diving gear, which is not a sentence that applies to any other pyramid on earth. El-Kurru is older and holds the painted chamber of Tanwetamani, cut into rock and still carrying its blue ceiling of stars. Deir el-Ghazali, a ruined Christian monastery in a wadi behind the town, is worth the extra hour.
Old Dongola
North-west along the river to the capital of Makuria, the Christian Nubian kingdom that held off Muslim armies from the seventh century and signed the baqt, a treaty of exchanged goods that ran, by most accounts, for six hundred years. The Throne Hall still stands two storeys high; an inscription records its conversion to a mosque in 1317, which is the date the kingdom effectively ended. The Monastery of the Holy Trinity has wall paintings excavated by a Polish mission that has worked here since 1964, and a field of domed Muslim tombs covers the ridge above, so the two religions are stacked in view of each other.
Kerma
The Western Deffufa is a solid mass of mud brick about 18 m (59 ft) high, built and rebuilt from roughly 2500 BC, and it is the oldest standing monumental building in Africa outside Egypt — the temple of a kingdom that was Egypt's rival rather than its province, with a burial ground of tens of thousands of graves beside it. The site museum exists because of what a Swiss mission under Charles Bonnet found in a pit at Doukki Gel in 2003: seven monumental granite statues of Napatan kings, Taharqa and Tanwetamani among them, smashed and buried, almost certainly by the Egyptian campaign of Psamtik II in 593 BC. They have been reassembled and they are the finest sculpture in the country.
Soleb
Amenhotep III built a temple to Amun and to his own deified self on the west bank in the fourteenth century BC, and a good part of the hypostyle hall is still standing — sandstone columns, and reliefs listing the peoples the pharaoh claimed. The granite lions carved for it were moved to Gebel Barkal by a Kushite king and taken from there to the British Museum by Lord Prudhoe in 1832. There is no road to the temple. You cross by open boat from the east bank near Wawa, walk twenty minutes through palms, and arrive at a colonnade with nobody in it. Sedeinga, his queen Tiye's temple, is a single standing column about 15 km (9 mi) downstream on the same bank, and Sai Island is worth the ferry if the day runs long.
Wadi Halfa
The last stretch of tarmac runs to the border town, and the town is not where it was. Old Wadi Halfa went under Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam filled in the 1960s, along with the Nubian villages of the Second Cataract; about fifty thousand Sudanese Nubians were resettled at Khashm el-Girba on the Atbara, nearly nine hundred kilometres (550 mi) away in a straight line and further by road, and a good many of them or their children came back to build a new town on higher ground. From here the weekly ferry crosses the lake to Aswan, and since 2014 the Qustul–Ashkeit road crossing has been the faster way out. It is the right place to finish: the country you have just driven through has been drowned twice, at this end in the 1960s and at the Fourth Cataract in 2008.
Good to know
Start with the fact that nothing below is currently doable. Sudan has been at war since April 2023 between the army and the Rapid Support Forces; every foreign ministry advises against all travel, most embassies have suspended operations, famine has been declared in parts of Darfur, and there is no consular assistance inside the country. What follows is the practical shape this route had when it last ran, kept because it will be needed again and because the mechanics do not change much.
The north is not a quiet corner of the war. This route avoids Darfur and Kordofan, where the fighting has been heaviest and where famine has been declared, but Northern and River Nile states are inside the same conflict. Khartoum and Omdurman were fought over street by street and are still being cleared of unexploded ordnance. Long-range drone strikes have reached infrastructure well up the Nile, including the power station at the Merowe Dam, and Port Sudan on the coast was struck in May 2025. The northern states have also taken in very large numbers of people displaced from the capital, and the fuel, power and water that any vehicle-based route depends on are rationed where they exist at all. Nothing in this corridor should be read as an exception to the advisory.
Access. Before April 2023 the route began with a scheduled flight to Khartoum International. Since then international air access has run through Port Sudan, which became the working seat of government and which was itself hit by drone strikes in May 2025. Khartoum airport was retaken by the army in March 2025 and its reopening has been announced more than once. Treat any schedule you find as provisional and confirm it the week you fly, not the month you book.
Visas. Sudan has never issued visas on arrival to ordinary visitors. The mechanism is a letter of invitation from a licensed Sudanese operator, submitted with the application at an embassy, which means the operator is the first thing you book rather than the last. Evidence of travel to Israel was grounds for refusal for decades; the position softened after the normalisation steps of 2020 and was never applied consistently.
Registration and permits. Registration with the aliens registration office within three days of arrival, and a travel permit for anywhere outside Khartoum, both normally handled by the operator and both carrying fees. Photography needs its own permit, and even with it, bridges, military installations, government buildings, airports and the Nile embankment are off-limits — cameras and phones have been confiscated for less, and this is the single most common way visitors got into trouble before the war.
Money. Foreign cards do not work anywhere. Sudan sat on the United States list of state sponsors of terrorism from 1993 until December 2020, and the banking system never regained meaningful correspondent links before the war removed the question. Bring US dollars in cash, clean, unmarked and in a mix of denominations, and split them across bags. Alcohol was banned nationally in 1983; the Miscellaneous Amendments Act of July 2020 permitted non-Muslims to drink privately, and in practice nothing is sold.
Insurance is the line most people get wrong. An ordinary travel policy is void in a country under an against-all-travel advisory, so the cover you would be relying on does not exist. Specialist high-risk policies with medical evacuation are sold, they cost several hundred euros for a fortnight rather than the twenty or thirty a normal policy costs, and you must read the exclusions: many of them will not evacuate from an active conflict at all, which makes the premium a payment for nothing.
Season and ground. The northern Nile valley runs above 40 °C (104 °F) from April to October and the workable window is November to February, when nights in the desert drop to single figures and a sleeping bag matters. Haboob dust storms close roads and ground light aircraft at short notice. Everything on this route beyond the tarmac needs a 4×4, a driver who knows the tracks and jerrycans of water and fuel, because there is no recovery service and, in the Bayuda, no phone signal.
Check your own foreign ministry the week you travel. This page does not replace it, and at the time of writing it will tell you not to go.
Shorter or longer?
Fly or drive east to Port Sudan and add Suakin — an Ottoman port built entirely of cut coral block, abandoned when Port Sudan replaced it in 1922 and slowly dissolving — then the reefs at Sanganeb, an atoll standing alone in open water, and Dungonab Bay, both inscribed by UNESCO in 2016. They were dived from liveaboards out of Port Sudan until 2023 and the boats are the only practical way to reach them.
Khartoum, Naqa, Musawwarat, Meroe, the Bayuda crossing and Gebel Barkal, then back to the capital on the Karima–Omdurman desert road. Keeps every Meroitic and Napatan site and cuts the whole northern run to Dongola, Kerma, Soleb and the border, which is where the long driving days are.