Where's Dan

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I've been active enough, I landed at Cairo Airport late one night and tried to bike into the city 30 odd kms away and despite plenty of local 'help' I got horribly lost and ended up throwing my bike on the roof of a cab (they have racks) and sharing a ramadan snack with a cab driver who dropped me down town amongst the mayhem, a couple of days in Cairo doing the sights and I joined up with another solo traveller for a train trip to Luxor (the hassle capital of Egypt) for a couple of days and Aswan, on the banks of a beautiful bit of the nile, for a couple more. All sorts of ruins, temples, tombs and some sailing on the Nile made this a fab little side trip, plus some camel riding in the desert.

A 14 hour train trip back to Cairo followed in quick succession by a 9 hr bus ride to Dahab and I was closing in fast on the Kornflake Kid. But when I got to Dahab I found in VERY hard to leave, went snorkelling around the reefs of the town, the lagoon and the blue hole with reef sharks among other things, and all without a wetsuit. And there was kite surfing. And some of the best eateries I've ever found, ever. Ill definitely be returning here. So after 4 days of that I tore myself away and biked to Newiba to catch the Jordan ferry, which took 2hrs to get ready, 1.5hrs to cross and another 2.5hrs to get everything sorted at the other end again, the post fast banquet on board after docking cleary not helping things. Biked into Aquaba and crashed for the night. I then caught a bus to Wadi Mussa, Petra for a couple of days exploring the old stone cut city and hanging in the cave bar before bussing again to Aswan. A quick tire change and I was on the road, back on the bike for the border crossing, but with ramadan timings I was informed at a check point that the crossing would be well closed before I got there so I decided to head off to the dead sea for some high floating in the salt laden water. I arrived around dinner time and swam for a couple of hours watching the sun set. It's so cool, you can't even swim properly cause your feet stick up in the air. Getting dark now and I tried the cheapest Hotel in town, by it's size it didn't looking promising and as it turned out it had rooms as low as $140 US, great, so the side of the road for the night it was then. At 390m below sea level it was a touch warm. But I hung with the security guards on the gate and then the local indian hotel employees and made a bit of a night of it, so did the mosquitoes. Early next morning I got up, had breakfast with the guards and headed for the border. This involved some very quite back roads amongst farm settlements and families living permanently out of rough tents all side animals, which was OK, but not so great was the seeming requirement of each of these farming families to have a massive aggressive dog, or team of dogs, stubbornly devoted to protecting his/their farm from would be evil passers by on pushbikes. Thanks to this hurry-along I arrived at the border in a timely fashion and received the infamous third degree, as expected before passing into the holy country and of to catch Kees, which I did later that evening.

Photos to follow, sometime later on, as I had to rely on friends cameras.

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Comments

[Henry Toh]

Henry here in Chicago
Dan! good to know you made it back to Cairo after travelling with you to Luxor and Aswan. I am back home in Chicago now, just emailed you pics from Egypt and Morocco. I'll mail you a CD or DVD will all the pics soon. Enjoy! Henry.