Advisory - travel not recommended · checked 5 Aug 2026
South Sudan
Foreign ministries advise against all or all-but-essential travel to South Sudan. The 2018 peace agreement remains fragile, intercommunal violence and cattle raiding continue in several states, and armed banditry affects intercity roads. Photography without a permit has led to detention. Standard scores are suspended while this alert is active.
Official advisory →Read the advisory first: foreign ministries advise against all or all-but-essential travel to South Sudan, and after the political crisis of March 2025 several moved to against-all-travel for the whole territory. On the safest reading of that advice no part of the country is visitable at present, so this route is published for the day the situation changes rather than as an invitation for today. It is built entirely from places that received visitors before — Juba, the Mundari cattle camps at Terekeka, the southern edge of the Badingilo migration, Torit, the Imatong mountains and Nimule on the Ugandan border — and stays out of Jonglei, Unity, Upper Nile, Warrap, Abyei and the Bahr el Ghazal states, which carry the sharpest end of the warnings.
Juba
Arrive, and spend the day on paperwork rather than sightseeing, because the paperwork is what makes the rest of the trip legal. Foreign visitors are required to register with the immigration directorate within a few days of arrival, and a photography permit is issued separately by the information ministry — carry the paper copy, not a photograph of it. Your operator will do the queuing; you will still need to be present. Do not photograph the airport, the Nile bridge, any military installation or anyone in uniform, before or after the permit is in your hand. People have been detained for less.
The city, and the mausoleum
Juba was a river station and a garrison town that became a national capital in 2011 without ever being built as one, and it reads that way — tarmac for a few blocks, then graded earth. John Garang's mausoleum sits on the ground where independence was declared on 9 July 2011; he had died six years earlier in a helicopter crash, three weeks after being sworn in as first vice-president of Sudan under the peace agreement he had negotiated. Konyo Konyo market for the middle of the day. Jebel Kujur, the ridge on the western edge of town, is the standard evening walk, and the standard place to be told to put the camera away.
North to Terekeka
Eighty-five kilometres up the west bank of the Nile on a road that is graded earth for most of its length. Terekeka is the Mundari county town and the camps are on the flats between the road and the river. Arrive in the afternoon: the cattle come in at dusk, the dung fires are lit against mosquitoes, and the whole camp disappears into white smoke as the light goes. Every camp is somebody's property and somebody's home. Nothing here is a display, the visit is negotiated by your fixer with the camp before you get out of the vehicle, and the answer is sometimes no.
Dawn in the camp, then east across the river
Back out before six for the second half of the day the camps run to: ash rubbed into hides against flies and ticks, horns worked with the same ash, and the herds moving off. The Ankole-Watusi cattle here are wealth, bride price and social record rather than meat, which is the fact that explains cattle raiding everywhere else in this country. Then the long transfer: south to Juba, over the bridge, and north again on the east bank towards Mangalla, where the Badingilo country starts.
Badingilo
Badingilo and Boma have been managed since 2022 under an agreement between the wildlife ministry and African Parks, and the reason is what an aerial survey found across this landscape: an estimate of roughly six million white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle and bohor reedbuck, announced in June 2024 and described as the largest land mammal migration on earth. It is a landscape survey, not a Serengeti-style day out — there is no road network to speak of, sightings depend on where the herds are in the cycle, and the northern reach of the migration lies in country this route does not enter. What you get is grass to the horizon and, if the timing works, a great deal of it moving.
Back to Juba, and the archive
Out by mid-morning and south to the capital. Give the afternoon to the national archive, which holds the administrative record of this territory back into the condominium period and which spent years in a leaking tent before it was catalogued, boxed and rehoused with outside conservation help. It is a working archive rather than an exhibition, so access is arranged in advance and is not guaranteed. If it falls through, the university bookshops on the Yei road are the substitute.
East to Torit
A hundred and forty kilometres on the Nadapal road, part sealed and part not, into Eastern Equatoria. Torit is a small hill town with one large fact attached to it: on 18 August 1955, four months before Sudanese independence, the Equatoria Corps mutinied here rather than accept transfer north, and the seventeen-year war that followed is generally dated from that morning. There is no museum. There are people in the town who will tell you where the barracks were, and that is the whole of the memorial.
Up into the Imatongs
Sixty-five kilometres south-east and about twelve hundred metres up — Torit sits around 600 m — on a track that was built for a colonial forestry station and has been maintained by nobody in particular since. Gilo sits in the trees at around 1,800 m with the remains of the plantations around it — conifers put in during the 1940s alongside the montane forest they were planted next to. The temperature drops far enough that a blanket matters. This is the wettest corner of the country and the track is the reason the route runs in the dry months.
Kinyeti
Mount Kinyeti is 3,187 metres and the highest ground in South Sudan, and the walk up from Gilo is a long day rather than a technical one — out before first light, back after dark, with a local guide who knows which of the old cut lines still go through. The forest on the way up holds birds and butterflies that belong to the East African montane chain rather than to the plains below, which is the point of standing here. If the group is not up to the full climb, the shorter walks around the station and the plantation edge are worth the day on their own.
Down to Nimule
Off the mountain and west through Magwi towards the Ugandan border — roughly 180 kilometres of earth road and a full day of it, with the surface deciding the timing rather than the distance. This is returnee country: a great many of the people along this road spent years in settlements in northern Uganda and came back after 2005, and again after 2018, and some of them have gone back over the border since. Nimule sits at the point where the Nile enters South Sudan: the Albert Nile crosses from Uganda here, becomes the Bahr el Jebel, and runs north towards Juba and the Sudd.
Nimule National Park and the Fola rapids
The park was gazetted in 1954 and covers a little over four hundred square kilometres along the river, which makes it the smallest and by some distance the most reachable of the country's protected areas. Elephants use it, and so do hippo and Uganda kob; the numbers are a fraction of what they were before the wars and the rangers will tell you so. Fola rapids, a few kilometres downstream of the town, is where the Nile drops through a rock gorge in a single loud stretch — the site that has been surveyed for a dam more than once and has not been built. Ranger escort is compulsory and the escort is armed.
The Juba road
A hundred and ninety kilometres of the one substantially sealed highway in the country, which is why this leg takes three and a half hours and the day before it took six. It is also the road every import into South Sudan travels on from Mombasa and Kampala, so you will spend the drive behind fuel tankers. Back in Juba by early afternoon, which leaves the margin you want before an international departure — there is exactly one airport and there is no second flight.
Good to know
Start with the advisory, because it governs everything else. Foreign ministries advise against all or all-but-essential travel to South Sudan, and after the political crisis of March 2025 — the detention of the first vice-president, fighting in Upper Nile, embassy drawdowns — several moved to against-all-travel for the entire country. The 2018 peace agreement is still the legal framework and it is not being implemented on schedule. Travelling against that advice will almost certainly void ordinary travel insurance, and specialist cover for a country under an against-all-travel warning is expensive and comes with conditions you should read. Check your own ministry the week you would travel, not the month you book. This page does not replace that, and it is not an argument that you should go now.
Independent travel is not realistic here and it is not a matter of taste. There is no tourist infrastructure to fall back on, no scheduled intercity transport a visitor can sensibly use, and the permits below are not obtainable by a person who has just landed. The only practical way in is a registered South Sudanese operator with its own vehicles, its own fixer and a working relationship with the state authorities on the route. Ask what their communications are: satellite phone or radio, and a named contact in Juba who knows where you are each night.
Visas must be arranged before you fly. An e-visa system exists and a letter of invitation from a registered sponsor inside the country is the normal supporting document; a visa on arrival at Juba is issued only against prior written approval, and turning up hoping for one is how people get put back on the aircraft. A yellow fever certificate is required for entry — since 2016 it is valid for life and no country may demand a booster.
Two permits matter more here than in most places. Foreign visitors must register with the immigration directorate within a few days of arrival, and photography requires a permit from the information ministry. Carry both on paper. Even with the permit, bridges, the airport, government buildings, military installations, police, oil infrastructure and anyone in uniform are off limits, and detention over a photograph is a routine occurrence rather than a rare one. If you are asked to delete something, delete it.
Malaria is falciparum, chloroquine-resistant, year-round and present everywhere on this route including Juba; prophylaxis for the whole trip is the standard advice, and the Imatongs are not high enough to change it. Assume all water is untreated. Medical capacity is thin to nonexistent outside a couple of Juba clinics, so the meaningful insurance question is not treatment but air evacuation to Nairobi, and you want that written into the policy rather than assumed.
Money is US dollars in cash — clean, unmarked, post-2013 notes, in a mix of denominations. The South Sudanese pound has lost most of its value repeatedly, cards are accepted in a handful of Juba hotels and nowhere else, and there is no ATM you should build a day around. Bring everything you will spend, split between two places, and expect to pay for fuel in dollars outside the capital.
Season decides whether this route exists at all. The rains run roughly April to November, heaviest between July and September, and outside the sealed Juba–Nimule highway the roads are earth: the Terekeka run, the Magwi road and the Imatong track all become impassable rather than merely slow. December to March is the window. Move only in daylight, never at night, and treat a late start as a reason to shorten the day rather than to drive into dusk. That is a security rule before it is a road-surface one: armed robbery and ambush on intercity roads is what the advisories mean by banditry, the Juba–Nimule highway and the Juba–Torit road have both seen it, and both of them are on this route. Convoys do not run after dark for a reason.
One last honesty. This route deliberately does not go to the Sudd, to Bor, to Malakal or to Boma, which are the places a reader of the feature below will want to see. They lie in the states carrying the heaviest advisories and, for Boma, in an area where intercommunal violence has continued through every ceasefire. Charter aircraft out of Juba can reach airstrips in all of them, and the fact that it is physically possible is not the same as it being defensible.
Shorter or longer?
Add three days from Torit: 180 km east to Kapoeta in the dry country towards the Kenyan and Ethiopian borders, where the Toposa keep cattle in a landscape that turns to dust for most of the year and where the artisanal gold workings around Nanakanak have redrawn the local economy since the 2010s. It is a harder, hotter extension and it needs the same permits plus local clearance arranged before you leave Juba.
Juba, Terekeka and the Mundari camps, the southern edge of Badingilo, and back. Keeps the two things this country is most worth the trouble for, drops every road day over four hours, and means you are never more than half a day from the one airport that flies out.