Farewell Egypt

It seems almost impossible to imagine, but somehow our month in Egypt has just about finished. We're back in Aswan, packing up the vehicles, and on Monday we get back on to the ferry that will take us, once more, into Sudan. It will be a very sad moment. Egypt has been special for all of us, in so many different ways, and taking leave will be hard. Although we'll all, no doubt, be back again at some point in our lives, it's hard to imagine when next we'll have the chance to visit it with our own vehicles.

Egypt is not a country that does things by halves, and many of the things we've seen here have been at the extreme edge of the spectrum. Including:

What we wished we'd been driving in the Cairo traffic! (From the El Alamein museum).


1. The traffic. Overlanders the world over describe Cairo traffic in tones of hushed awe, and with complete justification. In most countries, traffic flows (or jams, as the case may be). In Egypt, it doesn't so much flow - more of a kind of roaring, as of a mighty and unstoppable river whose waters cannot be held back by anything man-made. God help you if you try to go in the other direction!

Everything in Egypt is VERY, VERY BIG!

2. The scale. Everything is so vast. Two days ago, we walked in somewhat bewildered fashion around the Karnak Temple, which is just incomprehensibly large. It's not simply "one of the big ones" - it is, quite categorically, the single largest religious structure ever built, anywhere in the world. One of its temples alone could accommodate the cathedrals of St Paul and St Peter, and still have space left over for the Taj Mahal. And there are 16 temples on the one site! As we leant against a 3,000 year old stone column, rising up into the heavens above us, we felt like dwarves standing in the middle of a giant's chess board. It was very humbling.

3. The sense of history. These ancient Egyptians were really something. Their empire may have ebbed and flowed a bit, but the pharoahs stayed basically in charge for nearly 3,000 years. That's five times longer than the Roman empire, ten times longer than the British empire, and several hundred times longer than the Bush empire (thank goodness!). We were impressed when we saw structures built by the Axumite kingdom in Ethiopia that were over 1,500 years old. But when we saw similar structures from Egypt which had been built fully 3,000 years earlier than that, we were overwhelmed.

We've experienced many other extremes, too, not all of which were entirely welcome, but which combined to make Egypt a pretty unique destination. These included:



Finding shelter from the cold anywhere we could. Here, some of the boys are using the cars as windbreaks.....

Some of the coldest nights of the trip, as temperatures in the Western desert dropped to nearly zero, while the wind ripped through our summer sleeping bags and wafer-thin tent walls....

More tourists than we could have possibly imagined. After so many experiences in Sudan where we were the only visitors, it was a shock to arrive at the Valley of the Kings to find bus after bus after bus disgorging its load of package tourists from the the former Soviet republics. At times were completely silenced by the sight, and even little Max (not known for his sensitivity and tact) felt compelled to ask me "Daddy, why are there so many fat people in the world?". I was, I must admit, temporarily at a loss for words!

Bureaucratic befuddlement on an epic scale. Everywhere we went we had to submit names, ages and passport numbers to a selection of bemused public officials, none of whom appeared to have any idea as to why they were collecting his info, but who nevertheless knew it was their job to do so. Tourism is a big earner for Egypt, and they treat tourists with what they would probably consider to be extraordinary levels of care and attention, but what to the rest of us appears to be little short of harrassment. In one desert oasis we were tailed by a carload of armed policemen who were, genuinely, trying to be helpful but whose presence was so ridiculously irksome we were tempted to lead them on a merry goose chase far out into the middle of the desert. They would certainly have followed us!

We are very sad indeed to be leaving this all behind. The rest of Africa will, I fear, seem so mundane and banal by comparison. But still, I'm sure there'll be ways to liven it up!

Plans from here include a rather hasty transit through Sudan (whose President was this week indicted by the ICC in the Hague, and who therefore has something of a grudge against the rest of the world right now - a grudge we sincerely hope he won't take out on us!), and thence down into the south western corner of Ethiopia for what will undoubtedly be another of the trip's highlights, the wild and woolly Omo Valley.

Till the next one, then.

Gus