Egypt

At 3 am we drove from the car deck, following the donkeys and the rest of the Germans mobile zoo onto Egyptian, and African soil. We’re here – we made it to Africa, but we’re really not sure for how long.

The bureaucracy is incredible, it took us 30 minutes just to figure out how to get our passports back – we then had to find the visa office – who told us to buy a visa in the bank and return… After a few queues, we had our visa’s, now for the car – eventually we found a tourist policeman, who took one look at the carnet de passage and called his boss.

Bugger.

The boss arrived and with a big red marker circled the words “EX EGYPT” on the carnet – plan a) already screwed then. Playing dumb (which was our plan) was easy as we’ve only had a few hours sleep. The official who noticed that we had an invalid document for Egypt, apologised and said:
“You cannot enter Egypt, maybe in the morning at 9am you can speak with the automobile club in England and get a valid triptych”
(triptych means carnet here)

Daniel and I were exhausted, it was the middle of the night, and it seems we’ve travelled for such a long way for nothing – there was no bribing these guys, they were doing their job to the letter – and not able to “work something out tonight” despite all our attempts.

Sunday 8th April

Daniel slept in the front of the land rover, I slept on the roof, At 8:50AM I awoke, surrounded by Egyptians, all with puzzled, curious looks, feeling not so refreshed we went (as instructed) to the Automobile Club of Egypt booth. No-one there – and mixed reports of when they would be there – some said 10am, others 1pm. We’re exhausted and nervous – still intent on bribing our way into the country, for now we’re forced to wait some more.

We’re now smoking about 40 a day each… There’s not a lot else to do whilst enduring bureaucracy.

We eventually found a helpful tourist policeman, who listened, and suggested a few ways to get into the country – sounding promising – although his preference is for us to call the RAC in England and obtain a valid carnet – to do this, we’d have to wait 2 days for them to be in the office – it’s Easter Sunday today, and tomorrow everything will be closed. Oh and I’d have to find £36,000 from somewhere.

The two day delay probably helped us – no-one wants us here any longer – we’re smelly, and we’re making the place look like a campsite. Eventually we were introduced to a man who can issue a new carnet de passage. – amazing. $400 and 2 hours later I had in my hand a carnet valid for travel in Egypt for 7 days. Outstanding – it looks as though we’ll get in after all. It’s difficult now not to get our hopes up – but we keep reminding ourselves that we’re not yet through – there’s still many steps before we can leave the port and the customs police.

One of the final steps is to get Egyptian plates for M, I tried not to get my hopes up as we affixed the plates using whatever we could find (there’s no standard number plate fixings), but couldn’t help feeling we were just moments away.

Our fixer had to pull in a few favours to get us through, but at 3pm, after affixing our new Egyptian plates we were told to start our engines. Could this be it – have we done it? All  we have left to do is hand the promised bribe over to our friendly policeman and we’d be in Africa – not just the port…