Adding one more county: Israel

We are now exactly one week away from flight from Cairo to Athens. Today we are sort of flying blind. As I explained to Joshua, we have no idea where we will be sleeping the night or even what country we will be in. Depending on what happens with border crossings, we might end the day in Jordan, Israel, or Egypt.

After breakfast at the hotel, we set off in a crew cab style pickup truck. Our driver, it turns out, has a brother in Edmonton and has visited there (in the winter no less). We have some great views as the road climbs out of Wadi Musa. Our driver kindly stops at one particularly panoramic lookout for me to take some quick photos. We pass goat herders at the side of the road in places. Looking at this barren land, I am amazed that anything can survive off the few tufts of bush.

After the hills, we enter a relatively flat expanse of dessert called “Wadi Rum”. This is a sort of Lawrence of Arabia desert with sugary fine sand and large dunes set between ranges of mountains. After the mountains, we pass through part of Aqaba before turning off, past checkpoints with machine gun mounted pickup trucks, to the road to Eilat.

We weren't sure exactly what would be happening next, but after paying the Jordan exit tax, we found ourselves walking across a stretch of no mans land between Jordan and Israel. One the Israeli side, security was tight as you might imagine. Our bags were x-rayed, unpacked, re-x-rayed, and hand searched. It probably didn't help that I had a small leaflet, given to us in one of the tour offices, entitled “The Islam Religion” (which they asked me about before searching my bags for the fourth time).

Despite the security, Israel felt much more familiar and Western than any of the countries we have visited recently. There were women as well as men operating the x-ray machines and everything seemed quite systematic and professional. Despite the security precautions, they staff seemed relaxed and friendly, offering to help us repack the bags.

Once we were through security, they called a cab for us and were able to tell us roughly what we could expect to pay to get to Eilat or to the border.

Unlike the falling apart taxis of Egypt, the taxi here was in excellent condition and actually had a meter making bargaining unnecessary. Our driver told us that we would need a visa to get back into Egypt, but that the consulate processes these in about half an hour so we headed to Eilat and the Egyptian consulate.

Once at the consulate, we were right back in the world of Egypt again with a dirty room where smoking civil servants pushed paper slowly and explained as little as possible. For the visa, they wanted passport size photos which we had, but I had no idea where they were packed, particularly after our repacking at the border. As it turned out, we were able to find them relatively quickly when we hauled the suitcase off the roof of the taxi -except for Evy's, which we replaced with a cut out segment from our travel card !

The Egyptian officials had said the visas would take “a few minutes” but we were still there with the taxi meter ticking about 45 minutes later. We talked to young American travelers while we waited. They were heading to Egypt next and were hungry for information. Finally our visa arrived and were hurried back to the taxi.

Israel looks very much like a typical North American city right down to familiar stores like “Toys R Us”. It is certainly cleaner than neigbouring countries and seems greener too. We obviously didn't see much in our short visit, but is amazing how much you can take in in a brief interval.

We followed a heavily fenced waterfront for several more miles, past the Club Med resort and square rigger sailing charter sailing ships, to the Egyptian border. The whole stretch seemed like part of the Mediterranean had been misplaced and landed in the Middle East. Having now made it to the border by about 1 pm. We relaxed for a moment on the Israeli side, having a coke at the cafe, before heading back to face Egypt again.

After the incredibly tight and professional security on the Israeli side, the Egyptian security consisted of a lone bored looking official operating a dirty old x-ray machine. The only thing they seemed interested in was my GPS, which they eventually decided wasn't a bomb.

Once we cleared the security area, we we hit with the usual barrage of taxi drivers. When I said that we wanted to head to the town area, one tried to say that the fare was $20 US. The others than agreed that this was a good deal. We told them that we had been to Egypt already and that a more than fair price would be 20 Egyptian pounds - about $4 US. Finally the driver agreed. He explained that there was no real town - just hotels. He suggested one he could take use to. Normally I would never go with a cab drivers suggestion as they get a commission to deliver customers to certain hotels, but with no real plan we went along with it. As we headed off, we hit another security point were they made us pay 65 Egyptian pound per person as a entrance fee, effectively wiping out my reserve of Egyptian money.

The hotel was a quite swanky resort. Seeing that they were almost empty at this time of year, we were able to talk the price down, but now had to head back to find an ATM to pay them (the hotels here almost never take credit cards unless you are staying at the Sheridan, which is, incidentally, where we went to find an ATM).

The hotel rooms were decent, but nothing special, though they did have an amazing view of a medieval castle on a small island just off shore. This is obviously like the Riviera of the region as there were several multi million dollar luxury yachts anchored just off shore. Unlike Dahab, there is no real town here and thus no place you can walk to. The resorts are quite spread out and have their own, overpriced stores for a few essentials. We explored the shoreline, with Joshua and Benjamin skipping stones, before it finally reached dinner time and we could get some food.

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