We came in to land at sunset. Circling low over the lush palm groves of Soleb village, Captain Igor and his Ukrainian flight crew were preparing for touchdown. Just as the landing strip came into sight, they manoeuvred the helicopter back over the village so we could catch one final, unforgettable aerial view of the place we had come all this way to see. Standing majestically beneath us, the 3000-year-old columns of Pharaoh Amenhotep’s temple shone golden-red, gilded by the last rays of the evening sun.

It was my first time in a helicopter. For someone who has never been the calmest of air passengers, I was surprisingly relaxed about being in a Soviet-era aircraft, particularly as we were just about to land in the middle of the Sudanese desert. Perhaps it was the breathtaking beauty of the landscape outside my window, and the excitement of the adventure ahead, that were distracting me. And in the hands of one of the most experienced flight crews in Sudan, I knew
I had no need to worry.

It was over almost before I realised it was happening: the engines thrust back with a roar; the aircraft shook from side to side; and, as we hovered to the ground, the rotor-blades whipped up the sand, engulfing us in a dust storm.

Outside, on our makeshift landing strip, a crowd had already gathered into an impromptu welcoming party. The village elders stepped up to greet us while young men in their white tunics looked nonchalantly on. Mothers dressed in brightly coloured taubs – Sudan’s take on the sari – chattered furiously to each other, oblivious to their children who were darting excitedly around us with shouts of “Welcome...welcome.”

This experience was something I would get used to over the coming days as we flew along the Nile on an aerial tour of the region’s archaeological sites.

Launched by local tourism company Safari Sudan at the end of 2007, the aerial safaris are the first tours of their kind in Sudan. Tourists fly in the romance and speed of an Antonov-2 bi-plane or Mi-18 helicopter and stay in true “Lawrence of Arabia” style in comfortable desert camps right next to the ruins, missing out on the usual gruelling road trips and basic hotels that have until now been an inevitable part of travel outside of the capital.

Company manager Nadia El Maaroufi says that the aim of the new venture is to make Sudan’s spectacular landscape and peoples more accessible to those who don’t want to rough it.

“We felt we could easily improve on the standards that most tour operators currently offer in Sudan. We also wanted to provide for older tourists who are keen to see the country, but want to travel in a less strenuous and more civilised way.”

Drawing on the resources and experience of its partner, a local logistics company, Safari Sudan can fly tourists between destinations in a third of the time it would take by road. This makes it possible to see northern Sudan’s top sights – from Pharaoh Amenhotep III’s temple at Soleb to the iconic pyramids of Meroe 600km away – in a leisurely four-day trip instead of the arduous 12 day minimum needed by car.

But launching such a business in a country like Sudan has its challenges. With the tourism industry there virtually non-existent, Safari Sudan has needed to train its staff from scratch. The country’s negative international image is also a problem, as Nadia El Maaroufi explained to me.

“People rarely realise how big Sudan is, and they often think that the whole country is in a state of conflict. We have to make a special effort to get across the fact that most of the places we take people to are at least 1000km from Darfur and haven’t seen any fighting for decades.”
 

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After our stop at Soleb, Captain Igor flew us due south to Kerma where we climbed a colossal mud-brick building which archaeologists think may be the oldest manmade structure in Africa. We then travelled onto Old Dongola, staying overnight in a camp near the ruins of the now forgotten medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria.

The tour revealed a string of archaeological wonders virtually unheard of in the West. But for me the real revelation of the trip was the high drama of the Sudanese Sahara, which we witnessed in all its glory from the perfect vantage point of our helicopter.

Leaving the fertile palm groves of Old Dongola behind us, we flew quickly into the heart of the desert. Constantly changing, its landscape shifted from classic Saharan sand dunes to rugged red-rock mountains. Miles from the life-giving river, it seemed a dead and uninhabited expanse. But even here people live.  Occasionally we glimpsed them, tiny flecks of white against the yellow sand below us, the nomads on their camels trekking towards the nearest water well or to the camel markets in Egypt.

Halfway through the trip Captain Igor invited us to sit alongside him in the cockpit. From there, Africa’s largest country was spread out beneath us like an atlas, peppered with black mountain ranges rising out of the sand. In the distance the thin ribbon of the Nile shone like liquid mercury, bright in the desert sun.

We were now entering the land of the ‘black pharaohs’, the Sudanese kings who conquered ancient Egypt in the 8th century BC. As we approached the Nile, a single sandstone mountain came into sight through the helicopter windows, towering lion-like over the desert plain. In its heyday, Jebel Barkal, or the ‘Holy Mountain’, as locals call it, was the capital of the Kingdom of Kush. An important stop on the trade route between ancient Egypt and Africa, the mountain also had sacred power. Ancient Egyptians and Kushites believed that Amon, the god of life, lived inside it, and they developed the site into a major religious centre.

After landing we explored what little remains of the vast temple complexes that once stood here. Like so many other ruins along the Sudanese stretch of the Nile, the temples at Jebel Barkal are less well preserved than those downstream in Egypt. But standing in the splendid tranquillity of a region virtually closed off from the modern world, Sudan’s uncommercialised ancient sites offer the adventurous tourist something altogether different: an intense feeling of natural majesty.