The impression left after a stay at the [Grand] Khartoum Hotel varies according to the direction from which it is approached. The visitors from the north were dissatisfied and full of complaints: “There ought to be more bathrooms”; “Fancy, I have no locks on my door!”; “Did you ever see such a suite of furniture?”…
-A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo, 1907, Mary Hall
My tour group stayed at the Grand more than a century after Mary Hall and the complaints were just a bit less pointed: “The wifi is slow”; “My room’s air conditioner is noisy”; “The breakfast sausage is from last night’s dinner”…and I had no answer for any of them. Just wait, I might have thought, until we get to Nubia and our glamp tent camp blows over in the high wind and we have to stay in the house of the Umda, the village big man, the ladies sleeping in the hareem and the gents in the mafraj, sharing a single squat toilet and brushing our teeth with Nile water drawn straight from the river.