Oil rich and on the divide between Africa and the Middle East, Sudan is one of Africa''s most inaccessible countries. Coghlan takes the reader from Khartoum, former home of Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin-Laden, to the Nubian desert to the rebel-controlled swamps and jungle lowlands of Equatoria. He takes us with him to the mountain ranges of Darfur and the forgotten national park of Dinder and on a fifty-year old steel sailing dinghy racing on the Blue Nile.