Things to Do in South Sudan (2026)

South Sudan · SS

Khor Magwong

Deep in the remote wetlands of Jonglei State, South Sudan, Khor Magwong is a wadi — a seasonal riverbed that fills with water during the rains and reveals cracked earth and scattered pools in the dry months. For most of the world, this place simply does not exist on a travel map, and that is precisely what makes it magnetic for a certain kind of explorer. Here you stand at the edge of one of the planet's last truly unmapped landscapes, where the rhythm of water and dust dictates everything around you. Khor Magwong sits within the vast floodplain system that feeds the Sudd, one of the largest freshwater ecosystems on Earth. Fishers in the surrounding Jonglei wetlands have logged activity here, and the water channel itself — ephemeral, shifting, alive only part of the year — is what draws the curious. It is not a destination with a gift shop or a boardwalk. It is a quiet line on the land where life concentrates seasonally: birds, fish, cattle herders, and the occasional intrepid traveler who has chartered a 4x4 and a guide from Bor to find it.

River

South Sudan · SS

Adar River

The Adar River, known to the Dinka people as the Yal and sometimes called the Khor Adar, is a seasonal tributary that drains the vast Machar Marshes in Upper Nile State and feeds into the White Nile just upstream of the town of Melut. For travelers drawn to places untouched by tourism infrastructure, the Adar offers something rare in East Africa: a living demonstration of how a river system breathes with the seasons across one of the continent's great wetland complexes. Imagine arriving in the wet months and finding broad grassland plains transformed into shimmering channels of brown water, with cattle grazing at the edges and the distant call of migratory waders echoing across open sky. In the dry season, the same river narrows to trickling threads between cracked mudflats, leaving behind a landscape of sculpted sandbars and shallow pools that concentrate wildlife along its banks. This is not a destination with a visitor center or a marked trail, but the river itself tells the story of the Upper Nile floodplain in a way few travelers ever get to witness.

South Sudan · SS

Gondokoro

Gondokoro is a quiet island and former river station on the east bank of the White Nile in Central Equatoria, South Sudan, about 1,200 kilometres south of Khartoum and within today's Juba County. On the map it is now a modest, largely defunct locality, but on the page of history it looms large: for most of the 19th century it marked the very limit to which ships could sail up the Nile from Egypt, and the point at which the road to the heart of Africa became an overland one. That single fact made Gondokoro the great jumping-off stage of the Victorian race to find the source of the Nile. Ivory traders, Austrian missionaries, explorer-rescuers and famous travellers all gathered on its banks, and it was here, in 1863, that the mystery of the river's origins was effectively handed from one expedition to another. To visit or simply to locate Gondokoro today is to stand at one of the most storied crossroads in the exploration of Africa.

Finding your next place…

A little more
of South Sudan.

Khor Magwong

Adar River

Gondokoro

Finding your next place…

A little more
of South Sudan.

Khor Magwong

Adar River

Gondokoro