Traveller's Tales - The Journal

Today we wandered around the city doing some errands we needed to do before heading into Sub-Saharan Africa. We were on a quest for a sink plug today (which are amazingly hard to find in Cairo). We only got one after I played a demented version of Pictionary with the Egyptian shopkeepers in an attempt [...]

We’re both getting a little tired of the chaos and filth of Cairo. Today we wandered around the city looking for the Tanzanian embassy. No such luck finding it because in my infinite wisdom, during the planning of this trip it didn’t dawn on me that we wouldn’t be able to read any of the [...]

We were up at 6:15 this morning to pack our stuff in preparation for the eight hour hell bus ride across the Sinai to Cairo. We walked out into the main intersection of the village and as we were looking for a cab to the bus station we found a cabby who said he’s take [...]

We went over to Dahab City today with the intention of snorkeling in the “Blue Hole”, but it was too windy so Sarah went to the bank and changed some money instead. We walked back to our Bedouin village and went and lounged among the palms again. That afternoon Sarah and I rented a mask [...]

We didn’t motivate much today, we sat under the shade of the palm trees along the beach reading our books and playing backgammon. Each of these lounging areas is directly in front of one of the restaurants, so each of the merchants has a monopoly on the folk lounging in front of their restaurant. The [...]

Hurgurdah to the Sinai – We woke up at 6:30 a.m., packed our stuff and made a very silent exit from our hotel before the manager could tell us the ferry was full again. We got a minivan to the port and arrived at the boat just as the last of the travelers were getting [...]

Bought our tickets to the city of Hurgurdah, the port city for the ferry across the Red Sea to the Sinai, and once on the bus we met two other groups of people we’d seen before. Rob, Edward and Simon (from the felucca trip) and these other guys. When comparing the priced of our bus [...]

This morning we woke up at 7:30 a.m. and rented some bicycles to go see some of the ancient Egyptian wonders situated across the river. We took our bikes and jumped on the ‘locals ferry’ which cost each of us 50 pts (US$.15) to cross the Nile. We started riding down the asphalt through the [...]

This morning we had breakfast, our last with that excellent fig jam Adel had brought along, then it was ashore to find some way to get to Idfu. We’re sitting in Adel’s village waiting for a friend of his to drive us to Idfu, then on to Luxor. If we wanted to sail to Luxor [...]

Today we sailed all day, and Adel let me sit and steer the boat up the Nile for an hour or so. I sat on the mats watching the world pass as I zig zagged the felucca up the river with my foot on the rudder. We pulled up to shore in the late afternoon [...]