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Egypt If a traveller has to ask, “why do you travel?” then he doesn’t really understand, he isn’t really a traveller. Instead he is someone passing through without understanding the process that travel takes you on if you let it. Travel might be for adventure, it may be to escape from something, it may be undertaken from a desire to explore and discover, it may be driven by restlessness or a need to see things that are new or different, it may even be explained by a need to learn about the world. If you let it, travel will teach you about yourself. It will challenge you to question who you are, what you believe and lead you to question many things that eventually are understood as mere fabrications, reality devoid of realism. Travel through Africa will undoubtedly take you on an inner journey of discovery if you let it. You will challenge your inner negativity, face fears and challenges, see parts of yourself that you would wish were not there and challenge your faith in humanity. If you travel with stubborn arrogance, Africa will either cut you down or merely let you pass through without truly discovering why you came in the first place. You cant tell Africa what to do, it will tell you how things are to work. You tend to look back at what you have achieved with a different perspective when you leave Africa than the view you had while you were in the midst of the journey of discovery. At the time you feel tired, it gets you down, you feel negative, you feel challenged when things go wrong, but it wouldn’t be an adventure without hardships. You look back and smile, that is Africa. Egypt highlights a few realities about our adventure as it now stands. Firstly it is the close of a large chapter. It is the completion of the Cape to Cairo section of the journey. The Cairo to London leg is neither as strenuous or as long (or so we think). It closed the chapter without any celebration. We reached Cairo without fanfare, another day in another city on the continent. Just another day on the road. While somewhat of an anticlimax, it was tinged with some sadness. Africa was behind us, the reality being inescapable, and the loss of the spirit of adventure somewhat disheartening. The second thing that Egypt highlights is the total fabrication and exploitation of the tourist experience. There is a marked distinction between adventure and tourism. The latter is often constructed, contrived, created upon fabricated fantasy, always ready to exploit an opportunity for profit. In one day in Egypt we see more tourists than the rest of Africa combined. Adventure is fighting through the crowds to get a reasonable photo of something that has been snapped thousands of times already, reproduced postcard images of something that is important because the tourist industry tell us it is important and therefore worthy of alleviating us of some of our valuable foreign currency. It is a shame because the sites in Egypt are incredible. The reality of the importance of the tourist industry hits home when you learn that tourism accounts for a staggering 20% of GDP in this country. The Egyptian government is incredibly paranoid about protecting the safety of tourists; more on that later. Egypt began with the end of Sudan. We had spent a few days in Wadi Halfa staying to partake in local wedding celebrations. The people here are so amazing. They invite you into their homes, treat you as one of the family and show you such kindness and hospitality that you have to stop and pinch yourself to see if it is all real. We loaded Truckasaurus onto the car barge and then watched it leave from the deck of the passenger ferry. We arrived in Aswan the next morning (we took a cabin with a/c on the passenger ferry as a meagre attempt to celebrate our anniversary) but had to wait a further two days for the car barge to arrive. This gave us time to see some of the sights rather than spend three days on the barge, trying unsuccessfully to sleep in the roof top tent as it was battered by high winds, roasting in the sun on the open deck during the day and having to shower in the toilet with a bucket. While we waited for our car, a trip down to Abu Simbel shocked us into the reality of the tourism machine in full swing. Travelling at high speed on a bus in a tourist convoy, one of several thousand ready to descend on our prey at dawn, feeling more like one of the wildebeest in the Serengeti migration, stampeding across the river trying to avoid the crocodiles which in this reality took the form of curio sellers hungry for a fat juicy victim with no idea of the real price of things. That’s the other thing about Egypt. The prices are never fixed. If you are in a tourist area, the rule of thumb that we found was to remove a zero from the price first offered and that is about what you can end up paying. 100LE becomes 10-15LE. We were in a shop in Aswan and knew that the local price for a 1.5L water was around 1.5LE. We knew that we could get them down to 2LE which was fine by us given that often they wanted 10LE or so at first. An Italian tourist came into the shop as we were buying our water and asked the shopkeeper how much for a 500ml water. “For you only 2LE” was his reply. I was right next to him and he had no worries about ripping a tourist off (charging her three times the price) in front of another tourist. Getting the car into Egypt we had heard was a nightmare. We decided to hire a local person to help with the translating and running around. It was definitely worth it as we ended up getting our cars several hours earlier than expected (based on experiences of other travellers) and we endured a lot less stress. The process goes something like this. Car arrives. Wait until someone decides that we can now unload the car. Park the car. Go into customs and fill in paperwork. Wait. Go to another office and pay 512LE (around AUD100). Take receipt back and fill in more forms. Take paperwork with you, go in a taxi and head for the police station and proceed to fill in more forms, pay some money, get a small piece of paper, go to next office, hand over small piece of paper, pay some more money, get some more small pieces of paper. Take the small pieces of paper to another office; get them stamped. Take now stamped small pieces of paper to copy man who copies forms, passports and carnets. Take copies back to original office where they are filed away in an archive room from which they will never be found for a thousand years. Tourists come to Egypt to see the old temples, pyramids, mummies and treasures of antiquity. In the future people will marvel at the ancient files and archives that will be Egypt’s legacy to the future millennia. Anyway, take another form and go to the traffic centre to pick up an inspector. Take him with you back to the port where he inspects the car. This inspection actually involves him sighting chassis and engine numbers. Because he couldn’t get to our engine number (hidden between aircon and turbo), he just takes an imprint of any other number he can find. We didn’t care, so long as he was happy we were happy. Take now happy inspector back to his office, get more paperwork and take this back to the police station. This goes into our file in the archive office (we think it was our file, we didn’t care really so long as it made the filing person happy). Head to insurance office, which is on the other side of town. Pay another 512LE for insurance (we hear it is a fraction of the price if you come from Jordan). Take this paperwork back to the police station, more shuffling of the paper in our file, some prompting and we get our Egyptian plates. Take these in a taxi back to the port again, cable-tie these over our plates, fill some more forms in and then after an inspection of the contents of the car we are free to hit the Egyptian roads. Our local translator was great. Not only could he speed the process up, we got to go behind the counter of the police station instead of having to line up with everyone else and get shoved from window to window in an attempt to find someone who knew what we wanted and what form we needed and what bit of pink paper matched with what bit of green paper. It is all in Arabic, there is no English. Next on the Agenda was to rectify our rear shock problem. I had designed in my mind a bracket to adjust the height of the rear shock mount. We found someone to make it on the outskirts of Aswan and after much sign language and drawing designs with a stick in the sand we had two somewhat rough but strong brackets that have done an incredible job of creating massive amounts of extra travel on the rear. When we return home I am thinking of having a more visually appealing set made up and looking at selling them along with a kit to tweak the front travel as well. We headed from Aswan and decided to head for the coast at Marsa Alam. The idea was to stay somewhere nice for a few days to celebrate our anniversiary (and I could get a few dives in as well). We made it as far as Edfu without having to get stuck in a convoy (we had taken the back roads out of Aswan to avoid the major police checkpoint and talked our way out of the other checkpoints along the way). At Edfu our luck ran out and we were unable to talk our way out of an escort, which is better than a convoy I suppose. The convoy system was implemented to help safeguard tourists after the attacks in 1996. There are some extremist elements that would like to decimate the tourist industry in Egypt so all tourist buses and coaches’ travel at set times between major attractions in convoy with police escort. Ad to this a large number of checkpoints and travelling between places can be a little tiring. After waiting for an hour and a half for fuel and another hour for our escort to be ready (an escort is basically a police car that drives in front of you to your destination), we were on our way to the coast. The only trouble was that we had nearly 300kms to travel and the sun was almost below the horizon. We drove around half the way at which point the escort stopped and let us continue on our own saying that he would catch up with us. We drove and drove and didn’t see anything behind us. Seizing on the opportunity we looked for a suitable spot, pulled off the road, drove behind some large hills and camped in the desert for the night. We much preferred a beautiful night alone under the stars in the comfort of our ARB rooftop tent to the prospect of arriving in town, waiting at a checkpoint and then trying to find a place to stay late at night. We figured that if they asked us at the checkpoint where we had been we would act dumb and just point ahead and say “yes, yes, Marsa Alam, yes, yes”. We ended up staying at a dive resort for a few days. While expensive, it was a nice break for us even if it ran a little too much like Faulty Towers for our comfort given the price. Still, I did some nice diving and Jacinda and I both took a breather for a few days. Heading back towards Luxor we got stoped at a checkpoint and they insisted on us taking a police officer along with us as protection. The smallest police officer we have ever seen was lifted up into our back seat, smiling meekly. “Has he got a gun?” I asked the officer in charge. “No gun” was his reply. “Well how is he supposed to protect us without a gun?” I replied imagining him hiding under the car should trouble find us, Jacinda and us fighting the attackers with large rocks and iron bars, a technique we had learned in Kenya (Our machete was no longer with us, left behind in the desert after our inspection to enter Egypt revealed that they were illegal in this country and it was more paperwork to leave it at the port and far easier to for the police officer to let us through with a wink and a quiet “don’t let anyone see that”. The same fate had befallen Jacinda’s much treasured purse sized pepper spray). “Don’t worry,” he replied “he can phone us if there is trouble.” Obviously he just needed a lift an hour up the road to the next police checkpoint. If they had of asked we would have said yes without the need for the charade of protecting our safety. If only the Kenyan police force had been so concerned for our safety we would have been a few thousand dollars heavier in the wallet and less mentally scarred. Once we dropped off our new found cargo, we talked our way out of further escorts and arrived in Luxor to the sight of even more tourists. There were hundreds of luxury ships docked along the Nile, a cavalry of tourist horse carriages and slick curio salesmen waiting to lighten your wallet with shit you don’t really need anyway. “Buy this badly carved stone cat, it is crap, it will only collect dust on a mantelpiece back home, you can get one cheaper up the road, but the only better memento of your trip is a Sphinx snow dome, and we have sold out of those”. We saw the Luxor and Karnack Temples along with thirteen thousand other tourists. Apart from having to push through the crowds, have feet trampled on, get blinded by dozens of stray camera flashes, they are amazing relics from antiquity. A trip to the Luxor Museum and the Mummification Museum are also must-sees in Luxor. Jacinda had to be careful of the Egyptian Wolf. I could not leave her alone, even in the main streets as the wolf in a real danger. The Egyptian Wolf is around 1.8m tall and speaks fluent Arabic. He will whistle of chat up anything that has ovaries and considers marriage as a mere challenge to be overcome when the husband is not looking. I think Jacinda has grown somewhat tired of the unwanted attention and staring (even though she has been covering up and dressing conservatively). Egypt is an amazing place though. you fall in love with it very quickly and accept it warts and all. Leaving Luxor we decided to head to Cairo via the Oasis route through the desert (Some 1,500km or so). We spent most of our time driving through the desert, chatting to police about soccer in order to avoid the prospect of escorts and camping in the middle of nowhere in some awesome bush camps. The highlight was undoubtedly the White Desert. This place is a series of white chalk rock amongst dunes and canyons. We spent the night in a magical spot. As the sun went down the area around us turned shaded or orang and pink, the wind dropped off and the stars exploded out from the darkening sky. What topped it all off was that we had cold beer in the fridge. Egypt’s one big advantage over Sudan was the ability to camp in the desert and pull out a few cold beers to watch the sunset. The photos do not do this place justice. It is a small section of some truly incredible landscape. The neighbouring Black Desert, while beautiful, fails to compare with the White Desert. It will go down as one of our highlights of the trip. We have spent an estimated 80% of our trip driving into the wind; Egypt is no exception. One day through the desert we achieved 8.5km/L without a hint of wind. We fuelled up as the wind hit us, turned north and proceeded to achieve only 6.9km/L. If we had done the trip in reverse we could have saved 500L of fuel if not more. The one positive though is that diesel here is AUD0.15/L. No that is not a misprint, 15 cents per litre. Arriving in Cairo we hit the maddening traffic and chaos that is a city of twenty million people without rules and order. We chased down a new second battery for the fridge (that was our third, due to we think the battery being too close to the exhaust and turbo combined with corrugations. When we get home I will move it to the rear of the car). We headed out to see the Pyramids and enjoyed an authentic tourist experience. We get there to find they close at 4pm. The only way to get in is to hire a horse or camel. We get talked into a trip that also includes the light show (from a distance), we talk the price down by 75% but still know we are getting ripped off. We take a camel (Jacinda is allergic to horses who are much more comfortable in my opinion), we head off, see the Pyramids from the distance from the back of the camels, take some photos, get stuck in a sand storm, Jacinda gets blisters on her backside, we watch the night show, miss half the sound and walk away disappointed but happy that we had a true Egyptian budget tourist experience. Heading from Cairo we decide to spend the remainder of our time on the Red Sea coast. We headed under the Suize and down to Sham El Sheik. What a shock. This place is a playground for the rich, full of resorts, tour buses and general madness. We lasted twenty minutes before we made the decision to head for Dahab. Dahab is a little gem. I loved it when I was here the first time and didn’t want to leave. With the increase in tourism there was a risk that Dahab would be ruined for me, but thankfully while it has chaged a lot, it has still retained the essence of what made it so great. Streets have been paved and there are more accommodation and dive options, but you can still sit on cushions on the beach, the atmosphere is relaxed, the main strip is closed to cars and you end up wanting to spend more time here than planned. We have ended up spending several days here, doing a lot of really nice diving, relaxing and resting up after nearly nine months on the road. We will probably run our visa down here before hitting the road again. Egypt has been fantastic. While it can be hard work it is amazing. The police, while constantly trying to protect tourism, are incredibly friendly. Spending a few weeks in Dahab has really put the icing on the cake. Unfortunately we have now officially left Africa (both geographically and definitely culturally – that happened when we entered Sudan). While it was hard work at times and somewhat challenging, it has a way of capturing you. You only realise the grip it has on you much later after you leave. Maybe the Middle East will do the same. Costs and Stats Kilometres travelled to date:      30,210km Litres of fuel used:                            4,347L Average cost of fuel:               AUD$1.16/L Cheapest fuel:                         AUD$0.15/L Unofficial best fuel economy:        8.8km/L Average Fuel Consumption:             7km/L    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water1.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water2.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water3.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water4.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water5.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water6.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water7.mov    http://discoeverywhere.com/doc/Under-water8.mov Egypt Part 2 I am writing this with a little sadness. We have been in Dahab for over two weeks and today is our last day. We have spent the last week or so inventing excuses to extend our stay here. We overstayed our visa (there is a grace period) and we have decided to stay right up until our car insurance papers expire for egypt. Dahab is amazing. we have spent our time either reading and having massages (Jacinda) or diving every day (Paul). it is incredibly relaxing and if we didnt have the car we could stay here for a few months or so without any trouble. We both agree that Dahab is one of the highlights of our trip and definitely our favourite place to stay. Thanks to all the crew at Sinai Divers, they are a great bunch and have shown us a ot of the beauty under the waves of the Red Sea. We have added a gallery to show some of the underwater shots. Hopefully it might entertain a few people. Reluctantly we must drage ourselves away from the diving and relaxing, hit the road and head for Jordan. We will take a little piece of Dahab in our hearts (as opposed to some tourists who buy little bottles of coloured sand). While it has changed a lot since i was first here, it still retains enough of its original character and has added fresh  attraction (if you can ignore some of the expensive resorts that are springing up). Beautifull.