This tannery in Khartoum is thought to have been owned by Osama Bin Laden
I am standing on a street in central Khartoum in some pain. The soles of my feet are burning. I'm wearing shoes - but it is 45C in the shade and I'm in the sun. The tarmac outside the hotel is like a frying pan.
The name of the hotel is the Acropole and not the poshest in town but it is easily the most friendly. It was built in 1954, two years before Sudan's independence from Britain.
Half a dozen fans rattle energetically on the hall ceiling - like whisks struggling to stir the thick air.
In the manager's office there is a thank-you letter stuck to the wall - a reminder of this country's frequent famines.
Influx of oil workers
It is on headed note paper with Band Aid in big letters across the top. There are jokes scrawled below about call girls and vibrating beds and a Bob Geldof signature.
I have to register with the Ministry of External Information. Seven bored foreign journalists are already there - sitting on broken furniture, watching the news on television, waiting for permission to film something... anything. There are lots of forms to fill out.
I noticed a duty-free shop on the drive in from the airport. It sells cooking oil and plastic garden furniture. Alcohol has been banned here since 1983, when a hardline Islamic government took over.
But things are changing. After dark, Khartoum may still look like a ghost town but it doesn't sound like one.
These days, you can hear parties going on almost every night, says George - the owner of the Acropole hotel.
Since Sudan discovered oil a few years ago, the influx of foreign engineers has driven the price of beer down.
'Undesirables' thrown out
A crate of under-the-counter beer is now $60. A foreign diplomat offers me a large whisky.
There are other changes too. Osama Bin Laden was asked to leave in 1996. Carlos the Jackal has left too.
The suburbs are no longer home to half the world's terrorist groups. The government says it has thrown out 3,000 undesirables in the last few years.
I ask if we can film Bin Laden's old jet plane - sitting on the airport tarmac. That may be difficult comes the answer.
We try to film on the street the next day with a government minder in tow. More than a dozen security police still race out from nowhere - demanding to look at our documents.
My official minder is Mohammed who invites me to a party at midnight when it is cooler.
We start arguing about New York. Mohammed, like most other Sudanese I've spoken to, is convinced that Israeli agents destroyed the World Trade Centre. Even the Imam was talking about it in his weekly sermon in the mosque.
Whirling dervishes
Mohammed and I eventually agree to disagree. His final argument is that Arab terrorists could not have done it - they are not organised enough, he says.
That evening, just before dark, we visit an old cemetary on the edge of town. A dirt road snakes through the graves.
In the middle, a group of men are beginning their weekly dance - or perhaps trance is a better word. These are the whirling dervishes - members of the Sufi sect of Islam.
A young dancer wears what looks like a leopard-skin dressing gown. The atmosphere is joyful and increasingly frenzied. I time a white-bearded old man who spins himself round, fast, on one foot, for 16 minutes without stopping. His heel digs a hole in the ground.
There is a dust storm the next afternoon. The huge Pepsi billboard two blocks from the hotel is almost invisible through the brown air.
We drive to the ruins of the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory - destroyed by American cruise missiles in August 1998 - as part of President Clinton's response to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam earlier that month.
A neat footpath has been swept through the dust. But the rubble lies exactly as it fell - a monument, I suppose, to American aggression.
Sudan still denies that the factory was making chemical weapons. Privately, most diplomats in town now seem to agree that Washington got it wrong - relying on dodgy intelligence reports, possibly from Egyptian agents.
A crowd of men come out of a Khartoum mosque. A young man with a whispy beard holds out an open box. There are pictures of Mujahedeen fighters on the front of it. A few people put money in.
When the crowd has passed, I ask him what he is doing. He looks up slowly. "Collecting money for terrorists," he says, staring hard at me now, waiting to see how I react.
I stare back, and ask: "How much have you collected then?"
We relax. Each has called the other's bluff. Prejudices have been quietly probed.
"You know I wasn't serious," he says quickly. I nod.