BBW, True story. What happened during an adventurous trip to Sudan
A Trip to Sudan
By Orso di Monte Ribelli
A Trip to Sudan
By Orso di Monte Ribelli
I was 31, therefore on the wrong side of the thirties, my girlfriend had just dumped me and I was sad and lonely in a sad and cold January. I was rather depressed and had the usual fantasies of quitting my job and leaving for some faraway tropical place to start a new life, or maybe joining the French Foreign Legion, as young men with a broken heart used to do in the past.
Then the Great Old Man of Italian Egyptology and Sudanese archaeology – I am Italian and lived in Italy most of the time – proposed me to join his excavation at one of the most important archaeological sites in Sudan, a complex of temples of Napatan and Meroitic period (750-270 BCE and 270 BCE-350 AD). It was not my area and my period, but I never was in Sudan, it was a faraway tropical place, a dig was a good substitute of the Foreign Legion and my boss gave me the permission to go, so I jumped at the occasion. Furthermore, according to my readings, Sudan was one of the blessed countries where BBWs were considered the peak of beauty and skinny – meaning non obese – young women were fattened up before marriage.
So, on a night of very early February 1979 I was at Rome airport with the other rank and file members of the excavation, happily waiting for the check-in of the flight to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The Great Old Man and his vice-director left three days before to do all the red tape work, so the morning after our arrival the whole group could have left to the excavation place. But no, wait, we saw the director and the vice-director standing at the check-in! It came out that their flight had been postponed so they were put three days in a cheap hotel nearby and they could not move because they were told the flight could leave any moment.
When we arrived in Sudan I was as glad as I could be. It was my first time in Africa and my first time in an Arabic country, everything was new to me and I was even happier when we had to spend some unforeseen days in Khartoum to do the paperwork, because I really liked the city. The central part had great colonial architecture of the Thirties with wide boulevards shaded by enormous trees, the enormous Nile crossed it with picturesque sights and in the city there were many BBWs and SSBBWs. They wore dark-coloured flowing dresses and their head was covered, but they were unmistakably Big and often Beautiful, and under their caftans one could guess generous breasts and bellies and remarkable and majestic bottoms. I was glad to be in FA country and I admired from afar the local beauties, and furthermore quite a few of the female employees of the Archaeological Service, where we spent days to set all the paperwork, were Big and Beautiful.
Thanks to the help of the Sudanese officials we could do everything very quickly and we were lucky enough to find airplane tickets to Karima, the city near our excavation. The flight was not by Sudan Airways that didn’t go anymore to that destination, but by an air taxi company and I was really glad because we would have flown with a DC 3 Dakota, the legend!
So we were at 8 am at the airport, waiting with the other passengers outside the hut of the air taxi company, and I saw on a corner some SSBBWs escorted by a dapper young man in western clothes, evidently in charge of the group. We waited until 9, when a pilot came out and told us the sad new:
“Sudan is experiencing a terrible fuel shortage and we have to make changes to our schedule. This flight is cancelled and the next one is seven days from now”.
The director jumped inside to get refund and then he ran us to the taxi parking.
“Hurry up, we can buy tickets for the night train. We’ll be there tomorrow morning, 24 hours more of delay, but we’ll be there. Trains are OK even if they are railcars, not running on electricity”.
So we ran at the station and at the tickets counter an employee gave us the information:
“You are late, the train to Karima left two hours ago”
“We know, we want the tickets for the night train”
“Sorry, there is no night train. We have a terrible fuel shortage and there is only a train a week to Karima. Come back in seven days”.
So, as a last option, we ran to the bus station and we got tickets to the bus of the following day.
***
In the late morning we were at the bus station and there, among other passengers, we found the same group of SSBBWs we saw at the airport the day before, and the dapper young man smiled and waved to greet us. The group was composed by some middle age women and by a young one, apparently in her very early twenties, with a round, soft, very abundant body hidden by a blue flowing caftan, but one could make out the juicy figure under it. I reckoned she was about 1.70 m and 130-140 kilos (5’7”, around 300 pounds), not a SSBBW but remarkable indeed. A lighter scarf coquettishly covered her head and neck, leaving exposed a face with large, beautiful black eyes, sensuous full lips and very fine features. The young woman had also an inborn dignity and elegance even in the caftan, and she wore tasteful traditional heavy silver jewellery: finger rings, earrings and a worked big necklace with pendants. She had an almost aristocratic look and I was really impressed. I was not the only one, as our director, definitely not an FA, half joking and half serious remarked:
“In these messy times of confusion, it’s comforting to see a beautiful young woman”.
I tried not to look too much at the girl – you are not supposed to do it in Islamic countries – but I couldn’t resist peeking every now and then, and I remarked that sometimes the girl did the same, looking away when she realized my eyes were on her. Well, I was told that the definition of a handsome man in Sudan was someone very tall with broad shoulders and I was 1.91, 90 kilos (6’3”, 200 lbs) of bones and muscles and broad-shouldered, so I was rather close to that definition.
We were the only foreigners in the group, so we were the centre of the interest of the other travellers who very kindly helped us in every possible way and treated us with tea, cakes, falafel and ful, the national dish of fava beans. There were the usual questions of our age, our work, were we married or not, children and family, and everybody was delighted when our director answered for all of us in Egyptian Arabic.
The dapper young man, who was in his late twenties, spoke good English and told us that in a few months he would have gone to Britain for a Ph.D. in economics. He and the ladies were clearly from a wealthy family who should have had at least one car and they were definitely out of context in that group of travellers, so we were a bit surprised, but the clever young man, who was called Mansur, explained us the mystery. His family had more than one car, but the one needed for the trip, a Land Rover long wheelbase, was away in Dongola and therefore unavailable. The group had to go to Karima for important family business – we guessed a marriage or a funeral – so that’s why they were at the airport and finally had to use the bus.
During these chats I kept stealing glances at the girl and sometimes I could feel her eyes on me.
Then a lorry came to the bus station, it was our bus. In those times Sudanese buses were just trucks fitted with two rows of wooden benches with a low backrest, that left a narrow corridor at the middle, and a wooden roof supported by T- and L-bars that went a bit down the sides. The spaces between the bars were free, no glass or anything. We climbed in, the baggage went on the roof and we left, following a route almost straight north from Khartoum, cutting the very large bend of the Nile.
***
In those days in Sudan there was only one paved road and obviously it was not the one we were following. We travelled on a poor paved road that some miles outside Khartoum became a good gravel road, but soon it changed into a bad gravel road and then, after a couple of hours, into a track in the savannah. I understood why Mansur, the dapper young man, wanted a Land Rover for the trip.
I was looking around in fascination. The landscape was great, just like in the documentaries about wildlife in Africa, with grassland and acacias, and I almost expected to see giraffes and elephants any moment, so I thoroughly enjoyed that part.
The trip was not comfortable also because our driver was a fan of cross-country driving, he kept going at the maximum possible speed, jolting and shaking, but at least there was one good thing: luckily from my place I could see the BBW girl without turning too much, and we continued our looking-not-looking game. The other, elderly women of the group were quite bigger than her and I was sure that in the future the gorgeous girl would have grown to the size of her aunts or whatever they were, a great prospect for an FA.
I began thinking of the girl, wondering how came that such a beautiful woman was unmarried. Originally I thought she was the wife of Mansur, but he told us that the young lady was his half-sister, and clearly if she were married she would have travelled with her husband. There was surely some reason for her being single and I was wondering which one.
Then I passed from thinking of the girl to fantasizing about her. I put together the woman’s aristocratic appearance, her beauty and the Meroitic period we were going to excavate, so I fantasized that she were the kandake of Kush, that is the queen of Nubia, and I was a Roman officer wanting to marry her. The size of the girl was the finishing touch of the fantasy, because often Meroitic monuments portrayed the kandakes as BBWs. I even organized in my mind the time, around 250 AD, the period of the Barrack Emperors, and the circumstances that led a Roman legion with his officers to leave the Empire and become mercenaries. I fantasized about wars and intrigues, but the main subjects were the queen and our lovemaking in the royal palace.
