For the first time in my life I’ve been refused entry to a country on, as far as I can tell, purely political grounds. Preparing for my fourth trip in eight months to Sudan, I applied as usual for a visa at the Sudanese Embassy here in Brussels. Immediately the vibes were a lot less positive than previously – not unexpected since the ambassador and consul have both recently been replaced, and their president has just been indicted for genocide so they are not in a mood to be nice to foreigners. Given that I am leaving for a nine day trip this evening, I was more than a little concerned as to what to do.

But it is (probably) all right in the end. The autonomous government of Southern Sudan issues its own ‘travel permits’ which gain you access to its territory (though not to the northern part of the country) and since that is where I am going, I should, in šāʾ Allāh, be able to collect such a travel permit from the Southern Sudan office in Kampala tomorrow morning in the brief window between my flights landing from Istanbul and taking off for Juba at Entebbe. (Fans of Evelyn Waugh will remember a very similar dilemma for William Boot in Scoop.) Wish me luck.

(Explanation of the title of this post – ‘PNG’ = persona non grata. Another distinction for my CV.)