It turns out to take about 30 hours to get from my house in Ann Arbor, Michigan to the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum. My colleague Carola Stearns and I flew together to Frankfurt, waited 7 hours, then flew to Cairo (where we met another member of our team, Martin Uildriks. We waited 5 hours in Cairo, and then flew to Khartoum, arriving at 3:30 am local time (although by that point our bodies were completely confused on the subject of time—it’s 8 hours later in Khartoum than on the East Coast of the US).

We arrived in a warm Khartoum night and moved through the somewhat slow but orderly process of getting our visas, having our carry-on bags scanned, picking up our luggage, and having customs agents inspect whatever looked like high technology (in our case, a battery-powered drill that our architect is planning to use to build supports inside our underground excavations).

Then on to the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, perhaps, but it feels like a home base to me (and to many archaeologists who work in Sudan), partly because the Pagoulatos family that runs it is so friendly and efficient.