Right well I'll apologise firstly for the lack of action on this page until now; unfortunately the whole thing was in arabic and impossible to get in to. Problem solved!
We arrived in Alexandria last Tuesday morning having flown via Cairo and prepared to spend a good week trying to release the Land Rover from the port - the Egyptian customs/import system is notoriously bureaucratic and we hadn't heard a good word about it. Toby and I spent the first couple of days buzzing around the city with our Egyptian agent, Mohammed Abdul Aziz, from "government office" to government office getting various bits of paper stamped. This was a pretty frustrating process since queues don't seem to have been introduced here yet. Instead, everybody pushes and shouts and waves their papers in the air in an attempt to force their way to the front. Amongst this babbling arabic chaos you have to get passports, carnets, licences etc stamped but not lost. Luckily Mohammed was a pretty big chap and didn't seem to have too much of a problem in forcing his way to the front. So I think we have our agents size to thank for the fact that we were cleared in four and a half days and had the Land Rover released and ready to drive south on Saturday! We'd spent alot of time in Alex having last minute bits of kit altered, checked and made. Rob and Alex found a particularly cheap metal worker who was welding bits and pieces for us right up until we left. Fuel costs 9p a litre! It cost about 8 quid to fill up our tank, it would be over 100 in the UK...in fact its cheaper than water!
On Saturday night we arrived in Cairo, having driven the two and a half hour desert road from Alex. We stayed the night with some friends of friends who were amazing in putting us up at extremely short notice. An evening of air con, western food and a shisha bar ensured we were ready to hit the real road south on Sunday....but first the pyramids . We drove to Giza, just south west of Cairo and had a good look at the pyramids and sphinx, which were pretty impressive and just as you'd imagine, before heading east in the evening to the Red sea. The town we had been told to head for turned out to be non-existant...or "under construction" and after being kicked off the roof of a hotel we'd found to sleep on, we rolled out our mats on a car park floor (we didn't want to camp out of town as we'd been advised against it, "attack would be likely"!) So this morning we drove the 4 hours to Hurghada, a Red sea resort about half way down Egypt. The only hiccup was caused by a particularly miserable git of a policeman....and it may actually be quite a big problem. We were flagged down at one of the usual check points and the surly bastard confiscated our Egyptian liscence, claiming we'd been doing 118Kmph. Well firstly they had no way of measuring our speed and secondly, you'd be hard pushed to get a fully loaded Land Rover in the 40 degree desert to do this. We pointed this out, even offered him to drive it and see for himself...Alex produced his British officers ID card and claimed we were in a hurry to get to the British Embassy in Khartoum (you have to be pretty selective about showing that sort of ID) but still the miserable git refused to return our liscence..."smoothing the way" was denied and "insh Allah" we'll be able to pick it up in Hurghada tomorrow, along with a 10 quid fine. But the problem is that we just don't know if it really will be there, initially he was adamant that we would have to pick it up in Alexandria in a weeks time! Anyway we'll see....I'm rambling, so until next time....Harry
