Kassala

The Taka Mountains

From a distance, Kassala looks like a mistake in the landscape — a city that built itself in the wrong place, too close to rock formations that have no business being that dramatic on an otherwise flat eastern Sudanese plain. The Taka Mountains rise directly behind the town, bare granite peaks with almost vertical faces, their surfaces dark against the sky, their bases littered with enormous boulders. The tallest, Taka itself, is around 1,000 meters. It sounds modest until you’re standing below it and watching a hawk work the thermals off the south face.

I arrived by bus from Khartoum — a journey I’d been warned was long and turned out to be longer, roughly 500 kilometers of mostly flat road that gave me time to watch Sudan’s east unfold in a slow slide of acacia scrub and dried riverbed. When the mountains finally appeared on the horizon they seemed almost too theatrical, like scenery placed there for effect.

The Camel Market

Nobody had told me about the camel market, and finding it at five-thirty in the morning was one of those travel accidents that justifies all the uncomfortable hours. It’s held on the outskirts of town, beyond the main market district, and it starts before dawn. Rashaida herders bring animals from as far as a week’s journey away. The Rashaida are an Arab nomadic people who maintain a strong separate identity in Sudan and Eritrea — the women wear distinctive silver-embroidered face veils that cover nearly everything except the eyes, and the jewelry they wear is extraordinary: heavy silver necklaces, complex earrings, bracelets in stacked layers.

The camels moved in their unhurried, contemptuous way while men haggled in Arabic I couldn’t follow. Tea appeared from somewhere. I drank it. A man with a camel on a rope smiled at me as though I were the mildly amusing thing in this scene, which I probably was.

The Gash River and the Delta

The Gash is an unusual river — it flows only during the rainy season, arriving from the Eritrean highlands, spreading out into a wide delta near Kassala, and then simply stopping, absorbed into the ground before it reaches the Nile. During and just after the rains, the delta around Kassala becomes intensely green and fertile: sorghum and sesame, watermelon, a burst of agriculture that the rest of the year leaves no trace of. When I visited in November, the riverbed was dry, but the date palms along its banks were still heavy with fruit and boys were climbing them with a casual ease that suggested they’d been doing it since they could walk.

The Border Atmosphere

Kassala is a border city in a way that shows. There’s a large refugee population from Eritrea and Ethiopia here, and the mix of languages in the market — Arabic, Tigrinya, Amharic, and others I couldn’t place — gives the city an energy distinct from Khartoum’s relative uniformity. The food reflects this: I found injera being served alongside Sudanese ful and kissra flatbread at stalls on the same street. The politics of the region are complicated and not always safe, and the border itself is not open to tourist crossings, but the proximity of Eritrea changes the atmosphere in ways that are hard to articulate and easy to feel.

I spent two nights and wished I had more. The mountains were different at every hour.

When to go: October through February. The rainy season (June–September) floods roads and makes travel difficult, but the post-rain period — October and November — delivers a greener landscape and slightly cooler air. December and January are ideal. Avoid April–June when temperatures regularly exceed 40°C and dust makes the air feel solid.