Monday, March 23, 2009

Egypt – Friday morning with the guys

Friday morning in Cairo meant always to meet with a group of guys to go for a motorcycle ride in the desert. Meeting point was the house of Marc in Sakkara located next to the desert.










When I called Marc, for the first time after 18 month, I was happy to hear that the group still meets on Fridays for the desert ride. Marc invited me to come over and join them on the Friday trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my motorcycle cloths with me but Marc offered me to use his Quad and Zaki gave me a helmet. So I was ready to go.

I came like always early and Marc’s place filled quickly with cars and motorcycles. I was happy to meet some old friends and also to see a lot of new faces. After a coffee the “Sakkara KTM Club” left for the desert. We had a perfect morning in the desert and I realized how much I had missed these Friday mornings in the last two years.











Thanks Marc to let me use your High Performance Quad. It was first time for me (I don’t know if I told you before) and a of lot fun too. I hope we can repeat this once more while I am in Cairo and good luck to all of you.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Egypt - Sharm-el-Sheikh & Cairo (01.-15.03.2009)















"Welcome to Egypt!" These well-known words will follow us during our whole trip through Egypt. Everybody seems to know these words, even those who don’t speak English. After the time-consuming and complicated immigration procedure we are finally on our way to Sharm el Sheikh, the main touristic area on the Sinai Peninsula. The drive through the mountains in the morning light is breathtaking and we notice that a lot of money has been spent to improve the roads. After all these long weeks in the tent we have planned to stay at the Hilton Sharks Bay resort, a very nice hotel where we have been before.



We enjoy the very nice hotel and our wonderful suite and get a lot of things done in the town like washing our clothes, taking care of our blog, calling all our Egyptian friends, just relaxing at the wonderful pool and enjoying the delicious food. After driving 8000 km it’s also time to do the service for the Toyota. “Welcome to Egypt” – this also means our first flat tire since 8000 km, but it turns out to be a loose valve, which is quickly fixed and the tire is inflated with our compressor.






After 5 relaxing days (unfortunately 3 of them have been very windy and cold), we leave for Cairo. Saying good bye to Sharm is not easy. We have enjoyed the great hotel with the extremely nice and helpful staff as well as the fact to have great food without sand in it. Nevertheless, our blog is called “through Africa” and after 6 weeks on tour, we are eager to leave Asia and cross to Africa which we do through the tunnel under the Suez Channel.






Cairo welcomes us with light traffic due to the fact that it’s Friday. Quickly we find our way to Marianne Morsi in Maadi, a very nice German lady who rents a room in her flat. We enjoy her warm hospitality and really can recommend this nice accommodation. Maadi is a lovely suburb of Cairo close to the Nile. This is not the real Cairo, since it is very clean, green, organized and quiet. A lot of beautiful shops and restaurants etc. can be reached by foot. It turns out to be also the perfect place for Thomas to reach his former dentist since after eating delicious peanuts, he lost a part of a tooth due to cavity and has to see him a couple of times. Delicious peanuts, but expensive!! This incidence is unbelievable, since he had been to the dentist in Dubai on the 24th of December 2008 for a final check-up to prevent exactly this from happening during the trip. “Welcome to Dubai”.


















We thought there should be no Cairo Blog without some pictures from the Giza Pyramids.

















We spend a lovely time in Cairo seeing a lot of friends and visiting touristic sites in Cairo which we had never visited before or for a long time. We have an exceptional view over the city from the Cairo Tower.


























But the real highlight is a visit to the old Islamic Cairo around Khan el Khalili, the historic bazaar in Cairo. During our many previous visits to it, while living in Cairo, we noticed that renovations of old buildings had started, now we see that a very good job has been done. We are happy that our friends bring us there at night, and we are overwhelmed by the beauty. A part of this area has become a pedestrian area and everything has been not only renovated, but is also very nicely illuminated. We walk for a couple of hours, enjoying the feeling how beautiful Cairo must have been in the past. We are the only tourists, lucky to have these wonderful friends who know this place and show us around. A delicious dinner in the excellent traditional Naguib Mahfouz restaurant makes this night perfect and unforgettable. Thanks a lot to our dearest friends Nasser and Hala for this extraordinary night we surely will never forget.











Unfortunately, the plans for our trip are getting upside down. Our container from Dubai seems to be lost between the oceans. We have to extend our Egyptian visa and the temporary car licence now, which seems to be a real challenge. We have to go to the “Mogamma”, the huge government building that even plays a role in the cartoon “Asterix and Obelix”. Thanks god we don’t have to carry big stones like Obelix while being sent from window to window, until, after 3 hours, we are told to come back in 4 days! We decide to use the waiting time to make a trip to the desert. The evening before leaving we have a nice dinner in Helwan, in the Tata restaurant we know from our old times. It’s a small and simple restaurant with the best shrimps and calamari one can imagine. We even meet Claudia’s friends from Helwan and spend a lovely time with them talking about the good old days.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Jordan (18.-28.02.09)














Jordan welcomes us with a very cold morning (-1 C°). We go directly to the German Theodor Schneller School in Amman which seems to have the only campground in Amman. Victor, the housekeeper, tells us that the campground is still closed until April, but offers us a room in the school’s guesthouse. The room is very basic and cold, but at least it offers us hot shower and a bed and – very important – free internet! Since it’s still early, we decide to go downtown by taxi and get a first impression of the city. After waiting 15 minutes for a taxi we simply enter the next local minibus which is a nice experience. After changing once, we even reach exactly our destination, the Roman Theatre, and we are proud that we made it! We have an extensive look at the Theatre, the Citadel and the bazaar. Coming home, Victor surprises us with an electrical heater in our room and the bad news that rain and even snow is expected for the next days. The next day, Friday, we have another tour through Amman, this time with our own car. It’s really a very nice city and we enjoy especially the bazaar which offers absolutely everything…



The next morning we wake up from the sound of rain and find already a small lake in our room. We pack the car and leave for the Dead Sea. While going there, the rain intensifies and mixes with hail. Unfortunately, we can’t see the beautiful countryside, but at least it’s much warmer down at the Dead Sea. We decide to continue going south, hoping the weather would improve. It’s very impressive to see normally dry wadis turning into torrents. The dark sky gives it a dramatic touch. Further south, the rain stops, but is replaced by another sandstorm, so we end up at the Red Sea in Aqaba. After sunset, we find a nice campground close to the beach. The only other guests are two couples from Braunschweig, Thomas’ hometown. Thomas has almost tears in his eyes (we had a long discussion about this remark…)
















The next morning, when we have a look at the local newspaper, we know that we took the right decision (snow in Amman!). The more we enjoy a really lovely day in Aqaba (this time it’s Claudia with tears in her eyes, looking over to Egypt and not being there yet).





Since we changed our plan upside down, we have to extend our car insurance which turns out to be a very big challenge. The insurance company in Amman tells us to go to the licence department in Aqaba. When we ask the tourist information office, they tell us we can do it in an insurance office around the corner. There they tell us (and all this in Arabic!) to go to the harbour, where they send us from one gate to the other. At the end, we even convince the security officers to let us in without an extra permit. After 2 hours, we arrive at the right office, but the insurance officer is sound asleep behind his desk!! With the help of some other employees, we wake him up and finally get our insurance extension within five minutes…

Finally we can go to our next destination, Wadi Rum, a very impressive landscape with red rocks, desert and millions of tourists! Shocked about all these masses of tourists, we quickly leave the visitor centre and find a camping spot in a completely empty part of the desert. We are sure to be outside the protected area of Wadi Rum, but the next morning a park ranger tells us we are just inside the park (500 metres).











So we buy an official permission to visit the park, which is really worth seeing.
Back at our campground Thomas finds his destiny: every herdsman who passes by with his sheep or goats or camels gets a free tea or coffee. We get the feeling the word of this new desert cafeteria spreads quickly, since more and more Bedouins are passing by. We enjoy a lot their company. Even the goats love our place and come to drink our dishwashing water…























But anyhow, the next morning we close the coffee shop and leave for Petra…


The trip to Petra is already breathtaking. A steep road climbs up to the mountain range and follows it all the way to Petra. Again and again it offers marvellous views. Finding a campground is not easy in Petra. The only one is under maintenance and closed. We find a Bedouin camp which is rather crowded and we are afraid of their entertainment program at night. So we prefer to hide between the rocks above Petra, since wild camping around Petra is forbidden. Our place is at 1400 metres, so it gets really cold and at 7 pm we are already in our sleeping bags. The next morning it’s not easy to leave the tent early morning with temperatures around 0. But we want to arrive in Petra before 8 am, when all the tourist buses come.

Petra is chosen as one of the seven world wonders and is without doubt Jordan’s most valuable treasure. It’s a waste unique city, carved into the cheer rock face by the Nabataeans more than 2000 years ago. The day in Petra is very impressive, but very tiring as well. We walk around, look at all the major attractions, climb mountains and even the 950 stairs to the Monastery from where we have a wonderful view. At the end we walked 16 kilometres and are completely exhausted when we leave Petra in the late afternoon. We are very happy to arrive at our old campground in Wadi Rum, and the next morning from there to Aqaba, definitely our last station in Jordan. We are surprised to hear that the day after we left Petra, the road we took from Petra was closed due to heavy snowfall! So we escaped exactly at the right time!














We had decided not to write always about the weather, but especially in Jordan this plan doesn’t work! Back to Aqaba, another heavy storm which made us change even our trip to Egypt. In the morning, we go to the harbour to get the speed ferry to Nuweiba at 1 pm. We are told they will not take cars today due to the rough sea and we have to take the slow ferry at midnight! We could understand that for the day before, but today, the sea is flat like a mirror and we cannot imagine that the weather is different in Nuweiba which is only 60 km away from us. So we wait another 3 hours, still hoping they change their mind. But without success! We come back to the harbour at 6 pm, buy our tickets, and wait again… at 9 pm our car is loaded to the ferry and after waiting another 4 hours we finally leave at 1 am. When the ship leaves, the sea became really rough, and the ferry takes 4 hours to Nuweiba (the speedboat would have taken only 1 hour). Sleeping is impossible in an overcrowded restaurant with hundreds of people listening to their mobiles, having loud discussions, and children running around the whole night…

We are happy to enter shore in Egypt at 4.30 am. We are very positively surprised to have our Egyptian visa within 15 minutes, without any waiting time. But fortunately, we didn’t know what is lying ahead of us… we drive our car to customs like the other (only) 9 cars. The customs officers do only a rough check of our car, all others have to totally unpack their cars. So we assume that we should be out within one hour. But now we find out that the customs office for the paperwork is not open yet and we have to wait another 2 hours! When finally the customs officers arrive, we find out that the insurance agents will only come later… And all this waiting in a very cold and windy weather (again the weather). At 9 am we finally leave the harbour after 4 ½ hours and are happy to be finally in Egypt.

Even with the mixed weather, we had a great ten days in Jordan. We really enjoyed the spectacular nature as well as the very friendly people we met, especially in the desert and mountains. We covered 1400 km and endless hours walking.