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Currency: Egyptian Pounds
Cost of diesel: 8p a litre
21/08/06
What can I say about entering Egypt? Firstly make sure you’ve got a spare 4 hours, enough Baksheesh (not what you are thinking, it means bribes!) to fund a small war, plenty of water, a good pair of shoes for all the walking you have to do and plenty of patience!
Getting out of Libya took about 5 mins. We then headed towards the Egyptian side of the border. Firstly about 10 casually dressed men walk up to you, demand your passport and that you open the car. After ascertaining that they are actually policemen they just couldn’t be arsed to put their uniform on today you comply. They then ask if you have any guns and make you take everything out of the car to check. Once they are happy you are made to drive about 3 yards forward, the policemen walk next to you so they can check you visas. This takes about 30 minutes. Next to check the engine and chassis number. You drive another 4 yards forward and some poor grease monkey comes out and has to take impressions of your engine number (Land rover in their wisdom put this in the most difficult place to find anywhere, and once found impossible to read) and the chassis number. You pay £2 for the privilege of this happening. Then you take the rubbings to his boss who has to come out and check that they have been done properly. This also takes about 30 mines. Next you go back to the first policeman, who still has your passport, and show him the stamp the big boss has given you that confirms your car is the one on the carnet that you are trying to import. The policeman then writes some indecipherable words on the bottom of your carnet and you are free to move on to the next stage. This is the traffic license police building, which is handily situated about 2 hundreds yards away (it was about 42 degrees at this point). Once here you pay another £2.5 to have all you documents photocopied about 1000 times. Ok so far?
Memorial at El Alamein cemetery
Now you walk back to the main building, negotiating the 5 million people that seem to have chosen today to enter Egypt with everything they own either on their head or their car (see photo). You enter a dingy dark building to find the big big boss who will stamp the carnet. When you eventually find him he is too busy and he sends you away with a hearty “come back in 30 mins” ringing in your ears. As it is too hot to stand anywhere and all the shade is taken up you walk the 200 yards back to the car to wait the 30 mins. Back you go at the required time only to find that it is now prayer time and he is no-where to be found. After 30 mins he appears. Looks at your documents, takes all the photocopies, stamps one part of the carnet (you need 3 stamps) and sends you back to the traffic license building to get insurance, after taking £50 from you for what I never quite established but he was pretty adamant that he wanted it!
We walk back to get the insurance, and after parting with another £5 you get the number plates and the insurance. Put the plates on the car, walk back to the carnet man and show him the insurance. He then stamps all of the carnet but still won’t give it back as you then have to get an Egyptian driving licence. Where do you get these? Oh, that’s rights, back at the other building. So you walk back, part with another £5 get issued with your licence and then walk back to carnet man to show him, at which point he gives you a huge grin, grandly announces that it is all done and we can leave! Finally you walk back to the car and are allowed to enter Egypt. Not before you go through 2 police road blocks that are within spitting distance of each other where they both check your visa and driving licence!
There is no way in hell we could have done this on our own and thankfully the Egyptians have thoughtfully provided loads of official helpers at the border to aid you. The guy we had was really friendly and we would probably still be there if it wasn’t for him. He did ask for nearly 2 weeks wages as payment but I managed to get this down to £5. Probably far too much but he had been really helpful and had been there with us for about 4 hours so it seemed fair to me.
You enter Egypt at a place called Salloum, which is a beautiful town situated in a bug curving bay. You drop rapidly down about 400m’s to the coast and get some pretty amazing views. Then it is 250km of flat, featureless desert to Mersa Matrouh, where we spent the first night. Unfortunately it is local holiday season and everywhere was booked. We finally managed to find an apartment to rent for the night for about £13, which was ok. We never planned to stay in Matrouh for long because the goal is to get to Alexandria
22/08/06
We left Matrouh early for the 300km drive to Alex. As you head east you start to encounter all the Western tourist resorts, there are loads. We stopped for lunch and decided, very adventurously to sample the local food, by having a stuffed crust chicken supreme pizza at one of the numerous pizza huts that are to be found in these resorts! What? My stomach’s not quite up to eating camel and goat yet!
Halfway to Alex in El Alamein and you guys know I love my war stuff so we stopped and spent a couple of hours looking around there. The museum is excellent (so of the English translations take a bit of work to understand though!) and the war cemetery is amazingly done. I’m not sure how many are buried there but it is a huge amount, and like any war cemetery it is unbelievably saddening just how many of the graves are of unknown soldiers. I know this is going to sound rather sad and geeky but it’s really strange (and again saddening) to have looked at the war memorials in northern France and then travelled 5000km to look at war memorials of British and Germany (and all the many other countries) soldiers that died fighting in the same war. I know it’s not called the world war for nothing but it is only when you actually travel the huge distances that this war covered that you can start to comprehend the enormity of it. Well, maybe only for me anyway.
We are now in Alexandria. It’s lost some of the colonial charm that it once had but it is still a cool city. It is enormous. It stretches for 18km along the coast (I know this because we got lost and ended up driving nearly all of it trying to find the hotel) and as with any city is absolutely buzzing with life. We are staying in a place the Lonely Planet recommends called the Hotel Union which is very nice and at £9 a night you can’t really complain. The best thing about Alex? The fact that a pint of beer is £1 and the bar is about 250 yards from the hotel. It goes without saying that we went out for a few last night! I think today will be a quiet day! Tomorrow we’re off to look at the Catacombs and do a wreck dive in Alex. harbour. Then on the 25th we are heading to the eternal traffic jam that is also known as Cairo.
You shouldn't have hired a van when you moved house, Rees, you could have got more then this on the top of your Mazda
24/08/06
The more time that we spent in Alex. the more it grew on us. There is a really nice feeling to the city. It is very laid back and the people are really friendly. We did 2 successful dives. One of the Pharos Lighthouse (which was one of the original Seven Wonders of the World) and the City of Cleopatra. Unfortunately they were both destroyed in an earthquake and are now underwater, hence having to dive on them. There were lots of big blocks and a headless sphinx under the water. However, the vis was pretty poor so it was quite hard to see everything. Then we dived on an amazingly preserved Italian Bomber from the war. Vis at this point was about 2m’s. The bomber was completely intact and there was a suspiciously obvious gas mask in the cabin that we ‘found’! Still, it was a good dive and hopefully we’ll the chance to do more later in the trip.
That evening we headed into town for some beers and found the legendary Spitfire Bar. This bar has been going for over 120 years and was a popular drinking haunt for British sailors and RAF pilots in WW2. The owner is very friendly and we spent a good few hours in there!
I didn't know my brothers had been in town
Alex Harbour, our view from the hotel
27/08/06
We picked up another guide in Alex to take us to Cairo and it turned out to be a godsend because we’d never have found our hotel. We have a good hotel that is opposite the Egyptian Museum and right in the middle of town. If you look through the bridge supports and around the huge advertising hoardings you can see the Nile and so you can justifiably say we have Nile views.
We’ve managed to ‘do’ all the sights in the last 2 days. The old Islamic section was cool. Really narrow streets with everything you can imagine on sale. The pyramids, even though you’ve seen them a thousand times, still amaze you when you see them for the first time. Especially seeing as our first sight was driving through the crappy suburb of Giza. You round a corner and suddenly they are in front of you. The romantic view that they are out in the desert and surrounded by endless sand dunes in sadly gone now. They have been swallowed up by the rest of the city. I was here 15 years ago and even since then the city has grown hugely. Still they are brilliant and we took so great photos (thanks Ficky!).
We went ona night cruise up the nile on one of the many Feluccas that are around. In reality these are barges with an outboard at the back, covered in christmas lights and use a generator to power the stereo that plays aweful Egyptian music at 100 decibels. We sat on one just as ahuge arguemnt broke out between the owner and a woman passenger. We don't know what ti was about but he wanted her off the boat. This went on for ages and she wouldn't leave. His soiution. Get all the other passengers off (about 50), turn the lights off and leave the woman and her family sitting in the dark!
So we got on another one and started our 'cruise', as we left the engine started making funny noises, i said to Amy that i thought the thing was running out of fuel. As i said it we ran out of fuel. Now the Nile flows fast and pretty soon we were doing a good 4 -5 knots in the current heading towards one of the huge bridge supports that span the river. We were about 20 ft away from it before the bloke got the thing going again. With that we quickly went back and decided not to go on another one!
Cairo
A pyramid!
Spent all of today (Sunday) getting our Sudan visas. Needless to say the guy who was supposed to be sorting it out did nothing and I was panicking that we’d struggle to get into Sudan. However, although it is a long drawn out process it was fairly straightforward. We needed a letter from the British Embassy to accompany our visa. They are very accustomed to doing this and it only took an hour. However, when you get the letter it is brilliant. Basically it is a very politely worded rocket from the British Embassy to the Sudanese Embassy telling them that seeing as everyone else in the world accepts passports a valid document to use as supporting evidence for a visa application could the Sudanese Embassy please do so as well and stop sending people to the British Embassy to get this letter! When we handed it over they didn’t even read it. We filled the form in, gave 100 US dollars each and came back a few hours later. We did have to get everything photocopied which meant a frantic scramble around Cairo trying to find a ‘Xerox’. Sudan’s one was broken. Eventually a really helpful guy gave us a lift to the poshest hotel in town and we were allowed to use their business centre. This place was a 300US a night 5* place and feeling rather out of place and grubby we got everything done.
Seeing as this basically took all day we are going to the Egyptian Museum tomorrow and leaving Cairo for the Great Western Desert and a string of beautiful Oasis’ on Tuesday. We're very much looking forward to getting some fresh air. The air here is so polluted. You can see the smog everywhere and in the evenings when it is really bad everytime you got out your eyes actually sting and start to water. It's a cool city but I couldn't live here because of that. Plan is to hit Luxor on Friday and then Aswan on Sunday to catch the ferry across Lake Nasser on Monday.
Our 'road' through the desert. See the marker post in the bottom right corner? We followed them for nearly 150km.
Sphinx and pyramid
29/08/06
Today (Tuesday) is a day that will be burned in my memory for many years to come. It started well. We left Cairo as planned at 09.30 to do the 400km to Bahariya Oasis. We left the government car park where we had left the car, went for about 1 minute before a woman in a Lada tried to cut us up, failed and removed the back of her car on our front bumper. It would have been amusing for the fact that it didn’t even take the paint off our car, but totalled the back of hers. This was done right in front of a policeman so I though we’d be ok. The woman went absolutely mental at me, the police confiscated by passport and told me that seeing as I was a tourist I’d have to pay her off. I complained and he said “what you going to do about it?”. So I ended up having to pay her £25 for the privilege of her crashing into me. Still, her car was knackered so we came of best! Guess I can call that my first road kill
As has been the occasion many times we couldn’t find the right road, so we asked at a local garage for directions. They gave us very clear and detailed directions where to go. What they forgot to tell us was that they didn’t actually know the way and didn’t want to upset us so they simply gave us direction to a place they did know! We realised pretty quickly that we were going to wrong way and whilst we were considering what to do were stopped by the police. We told them where we wanted to go and we were told that they’d take us. So we followed them for about 100km, going in the right direction according to the gps. We headed straight into the desert after them until we reached this sand road turn off. They pointed to the road and said to go up there for about an hour and we’d find the main road to the oasis. This did all correlate with the gps so we decided to give it a go. What we didn’t realise was that this road actually did an enormous 200km loop through the desert until you came back to where you started! We headed off and the road got smaller and dustier until it all it became was a series of sticks planted in the sand at 50m intervals that you had to follow. There was no road, no-one had been down there for months and it started to get really sandy. We were driving across proper sand dunes and over dry valleys and it was very exciting but bloody worrying. We were properly in the middle of no-where and could have been in serious trouble had we broken down. We had food and water to last us for a while but that was only some consolation. This was the first time I’d driven in sand and although it is great fun, I’d rather have done it on my own terms. It took us 4 hours to get back to where we started and we had no idea where to go next. I’m really pleased you can trust the police. I’ve no idea why they sent us up there. There were no turn offs that we missed; it was just completely the wrong way.
We then stopped at an army barracks to see if we could camp in the area and all these young men came out and started to get rather too friendly with Amy so we had to beat a hasty retreat from there! It was beginning to get dark at this point and we knew we had to get to the nearest town. We could see the road on the gps but were buggered if we could find a way to get to it. We kept on driving through these really tiny villages, with everyone looking at us as if we were aliens, until the road just stopped and we’d do the smallest 3 point turn and head back to find another way across. We did this so many times until we finally managed to get through one tiny village onto the main road. Rejoicing we started to head south, but every town we came to had no hotels and no camping. It was about 9pm by now, and we’d been driving solidly for nearly 12 hours. We kept on going through all these towns until finally we were stopped at a police check point. The police nearly had a heart attack when they saw us.
They couldn’t believe we’d got there. You aren’t allowed to drive south of Cairo without an escort and we’d managed to do about 200km without them. Thankfully they weren’t annoyed with us but said we had to get to a hotel and they would take us there. Unfortunately it was in the next town about 150km south. What then followed was about 50 police escorts, one car would take us 10 km, and then swap for another and another. Still we were going the right way. Suddenly the escort stopped, got out his car, walked over to us and said “now we have a drink”. It was midnight at this point and we really wanted to sleep, but not wanting to be rude we followed him to this road side stall. The policeman ordered him to make us a drink and we got a pint of sugar cane juice! A couple of sips are nice, but a pint is revolting. However, everyone was so pleased to see us, a crowd of about 50 people turned up, that we had to drink it! Finally at 1.30 in the morning we got the hotel in Asyut and crashed out. We had ended up driving 700km and spending pretty much 16 hours in the car solid!
30/08/06
Today we headed south to Luxor. Although this is only 250km, it took 6 hours because of the crap roads and police convoys. We had the luck to get a police car that had a flat tyre and could only do 10mph, that was really fun! All the police have ak47 that they just rest on their laps and one of the guys had his pointing straight at me, every time we went over a bump (about every 10 yards) I would get a tad worried because they seem to see these bumps as a challenge and don’t really slow down to go over them. This bloody gun was flying all over the place!
Anyway, we got to good campsite in Luxor and have met a couple of English lads who are overlanding to Cape Town in a discovery. We’re going to hook up with them for the next 6 weeks, until we reach Kenya. This means that we can do the desert road to Khartoum, which is a 400km drive straight across the Nubian desert (you follow the train tracks, a train passes along the track once a week so if we had a serious problem we’ll be ok) It is supposed to be an excellent drive and something I really wanted to do, but not with one car. Now we can so that’ll be cool. They’re good lads as well we got to know each other in the time honoured fashion of having a load of beers last night!
2nd September
Today we did the 250km drive down to Aswan. This turned out to be another mission! You have to go in convoy, the convoys leave at 7am and 11am. We actually arrived in time for the 7am one. However, as we had heard, it raced off too fast for us to keep up with and by the time we got to the first police check point they refused to let us through as we weren’t with the convoy. What followed was round after round of lengthy negotiations trying to get through, all to no avail. We eventually gave up and drove the 25km back to Luxor. We went to the traffic police to try and arrange a private convoy. Again we had no luck. However, we did meet a complete loon of a felucca captain. This guy spoke fluent English, complete with English spoken with a French, Italian and German accent. As we had time to kill we decided to go in his felucca up the river. All the way up he quoted Shakespeare and sang Simon and garfunkel songs to us. It was all very amusing.
Anyway, we caught the 11am convoy and had a pretty good 3 hour run to Aswan. We ended up having a policeman (complete with ak47) in the back of the car for the last 50km. He was trying to learn English and his way of doing this was either to point at things and get us to tell us the name, or, in the case of animals, make the appropriate noise and we would have to guess what it is and tell him the name. There is something rather surreal about a 40 year old policeman armed to the teeth making donkey noises.
Camping at Adam's home
In Aswan we camped at an amazing traditional Nubian place called Adam’s Home (I don’t think Adam is a traditional Nubian name, but we never got to the bottom of where the name came from!). We spent 2 excellent days here and also managed to sort out our tickets for the ferry to Sudan. I won’t go into that little nightmare, all that needs to be said is that the ticket guy had us over a barrel and we also got fleeced for loads of money! Ali and I also went for a swim in the Nile after being shown a safe place by a local farmer. This guy also came swimming with us and afterwards invited us back to his house for tea. We sat next to the river, under some mango tress and drank green tea, it was amazing. He also showed us his cows and donkeys which he was very proud of!
Swimming in the Nile and the side of the Nile valley
4th September (the day of the ferry!)
We were ordered to arrive at the ferry port at 09.30am. It was made very clear to us that we should on no account be late. We arrived on time, did all the custom, carnet and visa formalities. This was all surprisingly easy for Egypt and we were done by about 11am. We then had to wait until 6pm to put the cars on the ferry! In this time these crazy Germans turned up in a brand new defender that they had bought simply to drive to Cape Town. They were planning on doing this in 8 weeks!
When it was time to get on the ferry we noticed pretty quickly that they only had one metal car ramp. Unless we were going to wheelie onto the boat we were in trouble. They way they got around this was to move the barge until it was level with the pontoon. They then put an oil drum between the boat and the land and then laid old knackered pieces of wood between the land and the boat. The photos probably explain it better but it was bloody scary. Once on the pontoon there was only about 3ft of room behind the cars before the water. It was all a bit of a nightmare. However, compared to getting off it was a breeze!
On the ferry itself there were no cabins left (the Germans and their towel had got the last one!!) so we had to sleep on the deck. This is all well and good but there was about 15cm square left up top due to the 5 million other people on board. In the end the Germans were absolute legends. They let us go through the first class bit onto the bow where passengers aren’t normally allowed. They then helped us argue with the captain until he gave up and let us sleep there. When it was all over the Germans disappeared for a bit and then reappeared with a 4 pack of beers and gave us a couple! Tremendous!
The night itself was fairly uncomfortable, see the photos for where we slept! However, it was better than being on the floor because every so often the captain had to release some ballast and pumped tonnes of water out of the tanks and onto the deck of the bow where it created a lovely swimming pool about 3 inches deep before running off the side. I’m sure whoever designed the boat didn’t design that little feature! Ali and Henry were sleeping on an air mattress that took on the characteristics of a lilo every time it flooded. There were significantly better off then the couple of Egyptian blokes who sneaked on to the bow when it was dark. They laid down their little rugs and went to sleep, only to be rudely awakened at 2am by a small tidal wave courtesy of the captain and his ballast issues. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast!
