Travel in Sudan: the Meroë road and the permits at its Red Sea end

What the British advice says about Sudan

Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office advises against all travel to Sudan because of the military conflict in Khartoum and other parts of the country. Its page was last updated on 11 May 2026 and was still marked current on 16 October 2026. Two areas on the border with Egypt are handled separately. For the Hala'ib Triangle, which Sudan and Egypt dispute and Egypt administers, and for Bir Tawil, which neither state claims, the advice is against all but essential travel. The office records that several ceasefires have been agreed and regularly broken, and it warns that travelling against its advice can invalidate travel insurance.

The British Embassy in Khartoum is closed and there are no British consular staff in the country. The FCDO says it cannot give in-person help inside Sudan, that the UK government is no longer evacuating people, and that it cannot advise on the safety of travelling to any departure point. Its safety page describes a high threat of detention, including kidnap, enforced disappearance and unlawful arrest, and reports recent cases of British and other Western nationals held against their will. Humanitarian aid workers and journalists, it says, are viewed as legitimate targets. The crimes it lists for Khartoum since the start of the conflict include looting, burglary, home invasion, demands for money at checkpoints and bag-snatching by thieves on motorbikes. Communications black out regularly, and the networks can be disrupted without warning.

The movement the war set off is counted by the humanitarian agencies. The International Organization for Migration's displacement tracking recorded 8,583,274 people displaced inside Sudan in August 2026, and 5,145,165 returnees. UNHCR's total for the Sudan situation, updated on 5 October 2026, was 11,321,158 people forcibly displaced, a figure that takes in those who have crossed into neighbouring countries.

How a visitor enters Sudan and registers

The FCDO's entry page is written for British citizens who travel against its advice, and it sets out the UK government's understanding of rules that Sudan's own authorities make and enforce. A visa is needed in advance, from the Sudanese Embassy in the UK or from the Sudanese embassy in the country of departure. The passport must be valid for at least six months after arrival, and one carrying an Israeli visa or an Israeli entry or exit stamp is refused. A certificate of yellow fever vaccination is required for entry.

Arrival starts a clock of three days. In that time a foreign visitor has to register with the Aliens Department of the Ministry of Interior, bringing two passport photographs and paying a fee, and a visitor who misses the deadline may be fined; some larger hotels make the registration for their guests. Leaving has its own paperwork. A visitor who came in on a single-entry visa needs an exit visa, which can mean showing proof of a sponsor and paying a fee. The FCDO says the rule is not always enforced and sends questions about it to the immigration office at Port Sudan Airport.

Movement inside the country needs a permit of its own. According to the entry page, a visitor will not be allowed to leave Red Sea State without a travel permit, applied for and paid for after arrival, and each state sets different requirements, so the fee and the process depend on where the visitor is going.

Children aged 17 and under need their father's consent to enter Sudan and to leave it. A child travelling without the father carries a letter of consent, stamped at the Sudanese Embassy in the UK before departure. Where the father is absent, the mother or guardian needs a court order showing sole custody, with divorce papers or a death certificate where those apply. The letter, too, is not always asked for. Customs rules are strict, and anything that may be prohibited or liable to duty has to be declared.

Why Port Sudan became the way in

Port Sudan was built between 1905 and 1909 by the administration of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to replace Suakin, about 50 kilometres down the coast, and the 2008 census counted 394,561 people there. It is the capital of Red Sea State and the country's main seaport. When the war began on 15 April 2023, the Sudan Civil Aviation Authority closed Sudanese airspace, and fighting in and around Khartoum's airport left foreign governments to take their nationals out by road to Port Sudan, about 650 kilometres north-east of the capital, and fly or ship them on from there.

The government followed. From April 2023 to January 2026 it worked largely from Port Sudan, which the Congressional Research Service called the country's interim capital in its briefing on the war. The army retook Khartoum International Airport on 26 March 2025, and the government returned to Khartoum on 11 January 2026.

Neither airport has been out of range. The Rapid Support Forces sent drones against Port Sudan for the first time in early May 2025, hitting the Osman Digna Air Base, a warehouse and civilian facilities, and then fuel depots. In May 2026 Sudan's government accused Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates of drone attacks on Khartoum International Airport, which both denied. The FCDO's page of May 2026 says both airports are operating limited numbers of international and domestic flights, that both have been targeted by drone strikes, and that further attacks could close them again for a time. No Sudanese airline meets the standards for direct flights to the United Kingdom or the European Union.

By sea, an international ferry connects Port Sudan with Jeddah, and Wikipedia's account of Suakin has ferries running daily from there to Jeddah. On land a tarred road links Port Sudan to Khartoum by way of Atbara, and a railway of 1,067-millimetre gauge joins the two cities.

Where the two Niles meet at Khartoum

The Blue Nile and the White Nile meet at Khartoum to form the Nile, with Tuti Island at the confluence, and Greater Khartoum takes in three cities: Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North. The record gives the capital 5,345,000 people in 2018. Omdurman was the Mahdist capital, and Britannica illustrates its history of the Mahdiyya with the tomb of the Mahdi there, a large silver dome between two smaller ones.

The World Bank counted 246,000 international arrivals in Sudan in 2005, 495,000 in 2010, 741,000 in 2015 and 836,000 in 2018. The count rose in every year of that run except 2009, when it slipped to 420,000 from 440,000 the year before, and the series has no figure for any year from 2019 to 2024.

The National Museum of Sudan is in Khartoum, and the Rapid Support Forces took control of it in June 2023, along with other cultural and government buildings. When the authorities secured it, UNESCO reported in April 2025, they found evidence of "large-scale looting and significant damage". UNESCO brought law-enforcement, justice and culture officials from Sudan and nine neighbouring countries to Cairo that month to train against the trafficking of looted objects. It had by then helped digitise more than 1,700 cultural objects and 100 manuscripts under threat, and it announced funding for emergency stabilisation and security work at Meroë and Gebel Barkal.

What the Island of Meroë holds

The Island of Meroë is the semi-desert between the Nile and the Atbara, and UNESCO calls it the heartland of the Kingdom of Kush, a power from the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD. From the 3rd century BC most royal burials were made at Meroë. The World Heritage property inscribed in 2011 has three parts: Meroë itself, the capital, with its town by the river and its cemeteries of pyramid tombs, and two religious centres out in the desert, Musawwarat es-Sufra and Naqa.

The pyramids follow their own pattern. Wikipedia's article on the Nubian pyramids counts about 255 built by the Kushites, the first at El-Kurru in 751 BC and the last at Meroë around AD 350. They stand 6 to 30 metres high on small footprints and rise at about 70°, most have an offering temple against the base, and the burial chamber lies under the pyramid, its entrance filled in and hidden after the funeral. The largest pyramid at Meroë, 30 metres high, is thought to have been built for Queen Amanishakheto. In the 1830s Giuseppe Ferlini came to Meroë seeking treasure, levelled her pyramid from the top and is held responsible for destroying more than 40. UNESCO's assessment treats his treasure hunting as the last intervention that reduced the integrity of the site.

The modern road is the other intrusion. UNESCO says the main north-south highway linking Khartoum and Port Sudan, which separates the two parts of the Meroë site, has a negative visual and auditory impact on it, as does the high-voltage power line along its route. The National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums runs the property from a technical office at Shendi, about 40 kilometres from Meroë and 60 from Musawwarat es-Sufra and Naqa, and security guards and police watch it daily.

At Musawwarat es-Sufra the Kushites dug the Great Hafir near the Lion Temple, a reservoir 250 metres across and 6.3 metres deep that held the water of the short rainy season. UNESCO's listing asks how such centres, far from the Nile, were viable in what is now an arid zone with no permanent settlement.

Why Gebel Barkal is still visited for blessings

Gebel Barkal is a flat-topped sandstone mesa beside Karima in Northern State, near the Nile and about 400 kilometres north of Khartoum. UNESCO gives its height as 100 metres and Wikipedia as 104. The Egyptians of the New Kingdom, from about 1500 BC, believed their state god Amun lived inside it, and the Kushite kings who ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty, Piye and Taharqa among them, built and enlarged temples at its foot. UNESCO notes that Taharqa is the only Sudanese sovereign named in the Old Testament.

The hill has a second name. Local people call it Gebel Wad el-Karsani, after a Muslim sheikh buried near it whose tomb is still visited for blessings, and UNESCO records that the largest temples at the foot of the hill, the Temple of Amun among them, are still held sacred by the people who live there.

The property inscribed in 2003 joins five sites on both banks of the Nile across more than 60 kilometres: Gebel Barkal, Kurru, Nuri, Sanam and Zuma. At least 13 temples stand in ruins around Gebel Barkal. In the rock-cut Temple of Mut the carved and painted chambers are well preserved, and one scene shows Taharqa worshipping Amun seated inside the flat-topped mountain. Nuri, 9 kilometres to the north-east, holds most of the royal pyramids of the 7th to the early 3rd centuries BC and the burials of 21 kings and 52 queens and princes, with Taharqa's the earliest. The tombs at Kurru keep their paintings and their corbel vaults, a technique UNESCO credits with influencing Mediterranean building from the 7th century BC, and the burial mounds at Zuma carry the tradition on to the 6th century AD.

UNESCO's assessment of 2009 found the sites only very slightly affected by modern urban growth and most of the Gebel Barkal pyramids still at their original shape and height. A military force from the Police of Tourism and Antiquities guards them. A museum of the region's history was set up inside a tourist village at Sanam with a local investor.

What Sudan's Red Sea reefs hold

The reef property was inscribed in 2016. It joins two marine national parks, Sanganeb and Dungonab Bay with Mukkawar Island, across 260,700 hectares and a buffer zone of 504,600 hectares, linked by 125 kilometres of coast with mersas, inlets, fringing reefs and reefs offshore. Sanganeb lies 25 kilometres off the shore in water 800 metres deep, and UNESCO describes it as the only atoll-like feature in the Red Sea. It has 13 distinct reef zones. The species counts in the listing are 300 fish, 260 corals, 11 marine mammals and 20 seabirds, and dolphins, sharks and marine turtles live on the atoll. Sanganeb was declared a marine protected area in 1990.

Dungonab Bay lies 125 kilometres north of Port Sudan and became a park in 2004. Its coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds and mudflats feed what UNESCO calls "a globally significant dugong population", and whales and manta rays gather there in season. The listing names the pressures that come with people: the two villages on the coast, salt working, oyster farming and possibly pearling, and, with more activity by residents and tourists, damage from anchors, boats and diving.

Suakin, about 50 kilometres south of Port Sudan, was the region's chief port before it. The old town on its island was built of madrepore, coral rock taken from the sea bed, in houses of up to four storeys with a white plaster finish, doors of Java teak and carved stone hoods above them. Buildings in the Egyptian style put up from the 1860s had no plaster covering and decayed quickly, and the town fell into ruin; the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt had already found two-thirds of its houses ruined in the early 19th century. On 17 January 2018 Turkey was granted a 99-year lease over Suakin island, with plans to restore the Ottoman port town, and in 2022 the online project Sudan Memory published photographs, architectural drawings and a 3D reconstruction of it.

When the rain and the haboob arrive

Rain in the Nile valley and the interior falls in summer. The Sudan Meteorological Authority puts the share of the June-to-September season at more than 80% of the country's annual rainfall and more than 95% in the central and northern regions, and it announced its forecast for 2024 at its first national climate forum, held on 3 June 2024 at the Coral Hotel in Port Sudan. Khartoum's rainy season runs from July to September and brings an average of 161 millimetres a year, and Atbara averages 74, from showers in August. Around Wadi Halfa and along the Egyptian border, years and even decades can pass with no rain at all. The FCDO warns of flash floods in the rainy season from July to October, which can cut areas off by road, those south of Khartoum among them, and can hit dry wadis so that many are passable only on a major road.

The heat peaks just before the rain. Khartoum's average highs in May and June are 41 °C and temperatures can reach 48 °C, while January nights average 15 °C. The haboob, a dust storm that drives a wall of yellow or red sand and clay ahead of it and can cut visibility to zero, strikes central Sudan from May to July, as the moist south-westerly air first arrives.

The coast keeps the opposite calendar. More than 90% of Port Sudan's rain, an average of 76 millimetres a year, falls between October and January, most of it in November, and summer temperatures there pass 45 °C. At Suakin the easterly winds of October to December bring occasional downpours, and 445 millimetres fell there in November 1965.

What the law asks of visitors in Sudan

Photographic identification, a passport for instance, has to be carried at all times. The FCDO advises against photographs in secure areas and names the places where a camera or a phone camera should not be used: government buildings, military installations, public utilities including petrol stations, and sensitive sites such as bridges and airports, where plain-clothes security officers work. A licence may be needed for satellite phones, recording devices, radio transmitters, and powerful cameras or binoculars.

Non-Muslim women are not required to wear a veil or cover their heads, and the advice asks men and women alike to dress modestly, with particular care during Ramadan and at religious sites. Gaafar Nimeiry enacted sharia in September 1983 and marked it by pouring alcohol into the Nile, and on 12 July 2020 Sudan abolished the alcohol ban for non-Muslims. The FCDO's wording is that non-Muslims may drink, though not in the presence of Muslims, and that arrest is possible whatever the circumstances. Same-sex sexual activity is illegal, and so are relations outside marriage and sharing a hotel room with someone of the opposite sex who is neither a spouse nor a close relative. Inviting any guest into a hotel room is against the law, tourist police patrol the hotels, and the advice is to hold business meetings in the lobby.

Foreign credit and debit cards are hard to use, and most banks and cash machines will not pay out on them, so the FCDO tells visitors to bring US dollars dated 2006 or later, since older notes are not exchanged. British pounds are rarely changed, and changing money should go through banks or official bureaus.

A UK photocard driving licence is valid for up to three months. Roads, even main ones, may be unsurfaced or potholed and shared with pedestrians, donkey carts and rickshaws, and at night there is generally no street lighting and many vehicles have no lights. Accidents are common, and the FCDO names rickshaws and amjad minivans among the hired transport that carries a high risk of them.

Wikipedia's account of Sudanese food records that water, tap or bottled, is the most popular drink, one traditionally given free to anyone from large clay pots set out in the streets. Tea ladies sell strong coffee, sometimes poured from the jabana pot, and black tea, often with milk, and karkadeh, a cold hibiscus tea, is made at home on hot days.