Sudan, and the Nile

I didn't have time to be a tourist on my many visits, but I had promised myself one photo of each country to put a s a background on my desktop. Once in Sudan, the only thing that popped to mind was the Nile. I finished a meeting early and decided to talk a walk on the Nile (I was complaining of the heat and walking at 3pm, how can you be so strange). I spotted a big and wide location on the Nile at Touti Island, it was huge and I thought this was the perfect shoot, the widest location on the Nile I have witnessed. Well I was mistaken, I later purchased a map of the city and discovered that this was the Blue Nile, which although brings more water to Egypt, is smaller than the White Nile. Now that was significantly wider. I decided to go and take photos of it. I hired a cab after a meeting and asked him to take me to the two bridges that cross from Khartoum to Um Dourman to take photos of the Nile from there. He stopped at the first bridge and I crossed the road and took photos. I would add that my felling of how nice and kind Sudanese are made me leave my bag in the cab, which I would usually never do. We went to the other bridge, which was the older metal bridge, on the way back and after crossing to take photos of the bridge and the Nile I was hopping back into the cab. I noticed a sign, "Military zone no Photos". I hopped into the cab and after a few meters was stopped by the Police. They were horrible, and my mistake was to be patriotic about my roots and Arab origin and I told them I am Egyptian (I should have played ignorant and said I am Canadian). The guy was so silly and started fooling around with my digital camera, and out of fear he would spoil it I showed him how to delete photos and he went on deleting them. How stupid, what can photos of the Nile do to national security, didn't they hear about Satellite photos and Google Earth. He eventually erased all the photos and all I had left was the photos of the Blue Nile, so I thought they are good enough.