“I have had some really good luck in my life”......hmmm, followed by;
“Our luggage would be worth quite a bit” – two days later we are robbed leaving us with just the clothes we were wearing, my camera bag, a red m&m man and a towel.
“At least our house is going well” – two weeks later out tenants move out and we loose close to $4000 in lost rent and re-letting fees
“It would be scary to come across a lion on foot” - a week or so later I spot a lioness in the beam of my head torch whilst making my way (on foot) to the toilet
“At least out new tenants have moved in and nothing seems to need fixing” – the next day we hear about all the things needing fixing, and then the air conditioner blows up in a storm!
“At least neither of us is sick”,- a week later I am in a Kenyan ambulance screaming through traffic en route to Nairobi Hospital.
“I have never had a memory card corrupt” - one and a half weeks later I lose all of my pyramid photos.
From this stage on I am being really, really careful about what I say....
We were on the main promenade of Dahab when I was valued at 5 camels, I found the experience similar to how a second hand car may feel. After being hassled from one end of the boardwalk to the other to buy towels, shots, shisha, souvenirs, dinner, drinks and anything else they could sell, I was starting to block out all form of attempted conversation heading my way when I head “You, lucky man! I give you five camels for her” hmpf! I think, ONLY FIVE CAMELS! , Spencer (being the wonderful husband that he is) turns around and says, “No, that’s too much!” thank god the man does not quite understand, lest the price go below FIVE camels....then he says “OK, ten camels” again hmpff...from me, I wouldn’t even get to see any of these ten darned camels and I cannot say that I would be excited to marry an Egyptian man, they are just downright dodgy! Although has someone offered me one camel in exchange for Spencer I may have had to think about it following his attempted sale of me for less than five camels!
We left Dahab at 7am prepared for a reasonably painful day of ‘officidom’ (nope, not an actual word...err, well until I just invented it now....the Harvey dictionary states that the word means ‘a large number of people trying to look official and efficient whilst actually doing very little’ and a complete lack of any systems in the border crossing. We arrived at the border just after 8am, and spied a ‘public Bath Room’ hmm, well is that a bathroom, like as in a bath in a room, or a toilet in a room? We were never to find out, the door was locked and due to this some misfortunate, caught short people had left their calling card right at the door step, yep, just left their cables laying right there for the world to see! This was an indication that the day was not going to go so well! We sat in the truck on the side of the road for roughly an hour before moving to the ferry terminal. Upon entering the ferry terminal we encountered our first dose of ‘officidom’ for the day, but by no means the first ‘officidom’ witnessed around xray machines in Africa. Out your bags on the conveyor belt, empty your pockets of anything that may be considered a weapon, walk through the metal detectors, pick up your bag off the conveyor belt as the alarm is sounding, alerting anyone who may care to the fact that you may be carrying a hidden bomb under your t-shirt......err, no, just go straight through, seems in these parts you are pulled up if you don’t have a concealed weapon of some description!
From there we enter passport control, a large hall with seemingly every male citizen of the Middle East standing with their passport in hand, there is no movement in the lines. We are summoned through to the front (well I think someone may have been, I was just the sheep, tagging along with the pack and asking no questions) we push our way past close to a hundred men to the front, feeling quite pleased about our foreign status which has allowed us to push to the front and quite glad that we don’t have to line up like everyone else and try to be oblivious to the stares directed our way. We get to the front to be turned around and push our way back past the stares and men, men, men....looking through the hall we discover that there is not one woman apart from the ones in our group...another scan...nope not one! I announce that it’s because they are all locked in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, but I guess that it’s just because women are not allowed to travel unaccompanied by men and they have to stay at home to care for the kids...phew, at this stage I am yet again thanking my lucky stars to be born an Aussie with the right to do well what I please! Son times our movement along the line, 2m in 15 minutes, hmm not bad! But we hadn’t actually noticed anyone pass through, we decide that the 2m of movement was due to the compacting of the line and not through any form of work from the officials.
Eventually I reach the front of the line, in his height of ‘officidom’, the official starts flicking through my passport for my Egyptian visa....It’s on page 34, in the heat of his ‘officidom’ the official had skipped over 22 blank pages! From there we enter a waiting lounge, the word ‘lounge’ being used quite loosely however, more appropriate would have been ‘sitting upright on wooden plank seats to save yourself from a back injury’. We waited here for five hours, I had the misfortune of falling asleep on my left hand side, impossibly wedged between to planks of wood, my shoulder still bears stiffness from such a silly move! Groups of locals line up to catch the busses the 200m to the ferry, being foreigners we are lucky to wait until last and then be loaded onto buses, the group spread about three buses. We are able to sit down, although he seats are set out so as to fit as many in as possibly and even with my back against the backrest of the seat my knees are uncomfortably pressed against he back of the seat in front!
In the next few minutes I realised just how accustomed to this area I have become, we are all sitting down, the military man then attempts to load as many locals as can stand in the aisle, one of the locals is not at all happy that he is not allowed to sit beside one of the foreign men, even though there is a seat empty. Military man not at all happy, he starts shouting, other man starts grumbling (will add that the military bloke had a machine gun hanging from his shoulder about three meters away) He keeps yelling, eventually enough locals are standing in the aisle for the official to decide that he has displayed enough ‘officialdom’ and gets off the bus, we don’t even break in conversation....it’s an ordinary type of day in these parts!
We arrive at the ferry, and at another queue! Again our passports are checked, again I have to instruct the man to flip past my 20 odd empty pages to my Egyptian visa, then we are on the ferry and in yet another queue! A man tries to get Spencer to ‘check’ his daypack in....no way hosay! Never see that sucker again if it’s left in that pile!” He keeps his bag, they look at my cranky pants face and don’t even ask about my camera bag (honesty a hippo has more chance of flying into parliament house after winning a federal election than someone prying my camera bag from my side!) We line up to have our passports checked yet again and then we are onto the ferry, and a very nice ferry at that! We take up the conformable lounges, leaving everyone else to the less luxurious areas and before we know it there are laptops coming out of every bag whilst people start editing photos, watching movies, TV series and just general time wasting. We were told that if we lined up at the little window with the Arabic writing above it we could get our Jordanian visa for nicks, (yup, I’ll believe that when it happens!) eventually we are told that we must sit down and one person must line up with all 16 passports....all good, we don’t see the passports again, but a man comes out and asks Spencer to come to the window, there he receives a piece of paper, in Arabic, but with ‘16’ written on it. Hmmmm.... I am still incredibly paranoid about passports so am not feeling all that comfortable to hear that they are sitting in a pile on the counter and that we can collect them from the immigration office when we dock in Jordan. I am contemplating a life in limbo between the borders of Egypt and Jordan when Ronald goes to see what he can find out....same story. We also hear that Mark and the truck are on the next ferry, the truck has to be searched and go through an x-ray machine before it can cross borders, there was also a problem with the height of the truck, it wouldn’t fit on the earlier ferry, so had to come over later. We arrive in Jordan at 6pm, pass through immigration and the mandatory x-ray machine and metal detectors complete with their mandatory buzzing alarm and mandatory complacent guards displaying excellent ‘officidom’ and we are outside, to wait for Mark and the truck. We place bets on what time we will be at camp, me being an optimist goes for 9.40pm, it was the earliest bet....one of the pessimists (not sure who this was) bet was closer to midnight. We passed the time with a game of tag, to the amusement of the locals. The game petered out as a group of travellers more used to sitting on a truck got tired of actually moving! The truck appeared around the corner at 10.36pm “four minutes to get on the truck and to camp.....umm, not going to happen!” It was really not going to happen as there was still paperwork to be done and our passports needed to be checked again, this time for the Jordanian stamp, mine landed on lucky page 20 something, only bypassing 10 empty pages. Now I don’t think I’m alone In feeling that a passport should be a chronological record of the bearers international movements. Governments make it pretty straight forward by actually showing a faint divider on each page, so that 4 stamps can be placed on the page, from top to bottom, left to right (well right to left for those Arabic officials..Arabic is written from right to left a weird sight to view after a lifetime of watching people write from left to right!) If passport stampers all over the world had abided by this guideline we all may have been in bed ten minutes earlier that night! After pulling out of the port we hear someone shouting near the back of the truck, wondering what the problem is a couple of people stick their heads out the side door, truck starts reversing...ha ha, we were heading down the wrong side of the road, or well, the right side of the road in Australia... of the left side of the road in Jordan....It had obviously been a long day for Mark. I figure an easy mistake to make at night, when signs are in Arabic and in Australia it would be the right side of the road....or the left!
Shortly after we arrive at camp, time to pitch the tents, ours smells pretty bad after being packed up damp from My Sinai and left to fester for six days. I head off in search of the toilet, now I have never been good with directions and I am defiantly getting worse. “Down the hill and around.......”blah, blah, blah, blah is all I hear....just like Bart Simpsons dog, or the attention of a goldfish. I just figure I would find my way, how hard can it be....well it only takes about ten minutes to find the toilet, then on the way out I struggle to find my way back out of the place, but it’s all good, there is a local man there to help me and of course he has to lead me by the arm and of course he has to stroke my arm from shoulder to wrist in the dark! I shake him off in a similar fashion that I shook off a monkey that decided to sit on me along with four of it’s friends years ago, (I will add that this man didn’t hit the ground with as much momentum as the monkey did) (Evil little bastard monkey...I haven’t forgotten you or what you did to my favourite red zebra t-shirt...I’m coming back to even the scores soon!) The next afternoon I discover that I have inadvertently made my way into the hotel next door, twice, to use their toilet; no wonder the man was escorting me off the premises!
Early the next morning the wind picked up, breakfast was a bit of a windy affair, my jumper still bears some weet-bix to prove this. We headed into town, Aqaba. As we drove it just got more and more windy. I started to get worried about our tent, we had added pegs (only the second time we have used pegs in Africa, with the exception of Mt Kilimanjaro) I had also put four rocks in the tent, to weight it down, Spencer had added a huge block of concrete along the side taking the full brunt of the wind. I wished I had put our sleeping bags back in the truck, usually when leaving camp unattended we will put them away, just that they are expensive and the pain still lingers over having to replace our last stolen ones. Spencer and I have a walk around town and the dust storm just gets worse and worse. The Red sea is kicking up waves I would think impossible had I not witnessed them myself and we are plagued by the constant stream of sand in our eyes, even wearing sunglasses! After failing in our initial attempt of trying to find an ATM we are wandering the backstreets with all manner of flying objects coming for us. The scarf that I have tied around my head flies off and blows back up the street, I may be getting older, but the wind was no match for me, I smash a merrel walking shoe onto it and lock it safely in my bag! We head for the shelter of McDonalds with the promise of a caramel sundae and free wi-fi, McDonalds does not disappoint! Eventually we are joined by some of our fellow travellers seeking similar luxuries. I voice my concern over our tents and say that we should have placed bets on whose tent would be standing, someone says that Spencer and my tent would be the first down as it was taking the full force of the wind...not a good thought, I mentally prepare myself to collect my tent from the main street of town after it has blown the five kilometres from camp! We drag ourselves out of McDonalds and get blown down the street, luckily to an ATM, then to a mini-mart with real conditioner and phone credit....now I just have to add one of life’s absurdities here, I just spent 6 days in the seaside town of Dahab, which is a tourist destination which generally caters well for tourists and was unable to find hair conditioner...seriously, they had every different type of shampoo ever manufactured but they were missing their partners in crime! No conditioner!
We get back on the truck and before we reach the camp we see the bottle green of an Af Trails tent rain cover lying in the hills, oh dear....Several of us are pointing out the side and wondering “who is the unfortunate person who has to collect that? And more importantly, where is their tent?” We park in camp to see the damage, Our tent is still half standing, but the cover has blown off, but thankfully still attached so no walking required of us!, Pat and Tanja’s tent has broken a pole, yep the metal pole had just snapped. Son’t tent cover was found under Ak’s tent which had wedged against a fence, Burbs and Gabs had a hard time dragging theirs back against the wind, Ish’s tent was not to be found. He and a few others set out across the hills in the direction where we had sighted the rain cover, after a while it was found and took five people to carry the thing back against the wind. Burbs did a bit of ‘windsurfing’ on the top of a hill, the wind was strong enough to hold him up on an impossible angle! Mark moved the truck and we placed our tents between our truck and an old Oasis overland truck parked nearby, the sand in tents was amazing, almost a full dustpan came out of ours!
I had yet another crappy nights sleep, the wind kept pushing the tent into my head and filling the tent with sand. I had my Maasai blanket along the side of the tent; by the morning there was so much sand on it that I couldn’t even see the stripes! We headed back into town, Spencer and I went straight for the Turkish baths that a few others had visited the day before. I was in it only for the sauna, can never beat a sauna! So a Turkish Bath goes like this;
- Get undressed and into whatever costume you wish to wear while you get handled by big Jordanian blokes (called Hairy knuckles by AK) I went for the bikini and wished it was a little bigger, the same can be said about the piece of cloth that was to cover me...not modest enough in a Muslim country I’m afraid.
- Head for the sauna, through a variety of tiled chambers, and not just any tiles, tiles with lovely patterns on them, the place even included a tiles fish pond complete with goldfish! The sauna is another tiled room, but hot, very hot, the hottest sauna I have ever been in and thats out of a whole lot of saunas! I start to feel like I’m standing on grass in Darwin during the build up and have to say feel a little homesick, then the heat takes over. The sauna is not ran by a heater type contraption like most others, it is heated by a hot water tap running into a pool so the humidity is right up. Sitting on the tiles is a bit of a manky affair, I choose the best spot, but decline to sitt here after I notice some stray hairs ont he wall that look suspiciously like pubic hair, ewwww! The tiles are slippery, I assume from years and years of overweight men sweating the asses off on them, I don’t think that there is a regular cleaning routine.
- After a good half hour in the sauna a big (yep, hairy knuckled) man comes and summoned me out, into the next chamber where I have to lay on the tiles. Here he pours water over me and starts scrubbing my skin off with a black mit, at this stage I realise that I am probably accumulating more dead skin cells from my travelling companions Turkish baths yesterday than is being removed from me! After scrubbing head to toe I am asked to roll over for the other side to be scrubbed. More water is poured over then a very soapy loofah is put to business, I can feel layer after layer of skin which has seen too much sun, dirt and not near enough showers being scrubbed away. One side is done and I am asked to turn over, HA! Soap, skin and wet tiles are a bad mix, I flop over trying to keep my material covering and modesty intact when I morph into a seal on ice and are propelled by some invisible force over the tiles and towards hairy knuckles! He stops me from falling off the tiles and continues to scrub the other side.
- The next step is a shower, I managed this without incident, surprisingly ad showers have been few and far between for me in 2010.
- Up next is the massage, again this went without incident. Although I still do get very nervous having massages in strange countries after my horrendous ordeal in Thailand years ago, my advice is “avoid oil massages at night from women in Thailand” and thats all I’m going to say on that matter. But back to the turkist bath massage, not bad, too much oil and maybe a bit too long spent on the inner thighs but overall a good massage.
- Last stop is to sit in material and towel and have a cup of tea consisting of half sugar, a touch of ginger a hint of tea and hot water
Feeling revitalised and having only half the skin cells we entered the baths with we headed off to Wadi Rum. The drive didn’t take very long, thankfully as it was bloody cold in the back of the truck, we heard that it has been snowing in Petra already, not good, we were hoping to get to Turkey before we had to deal with snow. That night we camped at possibly the best bush camp ever, about five kilometres before the gates of the Wadi Rum National Park. After a climb up the cliffs near the truck we huddled around the coals trying to keep warm and tracking the temperature on the new thermometer Spencer and I had bought that day (seemed a bargain at 5 JD).Kyle and Burbs found a front end loader tyre and rolled it down the hill then proceeded to attempt to roll Burbs across the desert floor whilst he was inside the tyre, only problem with the situation was that it was full of sand, he made about ¼ of a turn! Around this time unbeknown to us, some tents were on the move. Ish’s tent is now ‘munted’ (as said by Ish) so was one of the first to roll, AK’s tent was found upside down, stopped by another tent, his laptop was inside and is now not working that well.
Our Japanese co traveller had been seen wandering off into the desert not long after pulling up for camp, which was around 4pm. He had literally walked and walked and walked until he was a spot on the horizon (we estimated him to be 5km away at this stage) then kept walking until he disappeared. By the time it got dark everyone was getting a bit concerned (well some were). The background on the story is that he has dome the west coast on the truck, he only started with about $5000, of which he had to pay visas, national park entry fees, all tourist attractions, lunch everyday, meals when the truck is in a town and we are in accommodation and any other needs. Basically, $5000 is not enough by some way and he has been surviving on other peoples leftovers and dry noodles, he is emancipated and not in good health. In most peoples opinion he should have flown home from Nairobi as he only had a couple of hundred left then. The only tourist attraction that he has been into since Kenya was the pyramids and this was only due to the kindness of others buying his ticket, he had taken the truck there not intending on even going in! Really what is the use of even being here if you are not going to see anything? Whilst in Dahab he told mark that “I am a paying customer so if I run out of money you have to look after me” I initially didn’t believe this, until it was verified as true....but what cheek! Everyone else on the truck has saved and sacrificed things to be here, obviously they have saved and sacrificed more than this person, how can he expect any special treatment? He has done nothing to help himself, he has been trying to sell his camera, some people onto he truck have offered money (not good, but a fair amount) he has refused, someone else offered him money for an iPod, he refused, I tried to buy his card reader, again refused, he has sold his clothes and camera battery. Mark offered him 20pond to wash his overalls, he refused, preferring to starve and miss out on seeing what he came here for....needless to say there is little sympathy floating around the truck for him at this stage.
So he has wandered off, no water, not telling anyone where he was going or when he would be back, no torch, no warm clothes and not in good health. The general consensus in camp at that time was that he was a dickhead and selfish (there were other comments that I won’t repeat here). The desert was foggy with the occasional sand storm blowing in, so it wasn’t just going to be an easy process of walking towards the truck lights, they are just not that strong and they were facing the other way.
He returned just before dinner (of course he would, he hasn’t eaten lunch so needs to take the biggest portion of food of anyone on the truck) There was tension in the camp, he was unable to see the problem with him walking off for hours alone. I didn’t hear the ‘conversation’ between Mark and him clearly but it was heated to say the least, someone turned the music off for an eavesdrop, a few expletives could be heard the other side of the truck, the outcome.....he didn’t see the problem with walking off!
The following morning we drive into Wadi Rum, some of the most spectacular rock formations I have seem, we walked over loose sand for a good distance to see a canyon which was not as impressive as I had hoped. Spencer and I took a long detour through another gorge on the way back, we were fair stepping it out to get back to the truck, we must have walked over 20km and made it back right on 1pm. The gorge was lovely, and reminded me of Koolpin Gorge in Kakadu. We had come across a stray dog in the canyon, I had the fisheye lens on and went to take a photo of him, he lunged towards the camera and I took the photo right at the moment when he left a nose print on the lens! We were surprised to find him flowing us through the gorge and most of the way back to the truck.
After we left Wadi Rum for Petra we noticed the temperature steadily dropping, we had a quick stop after the first snow was sighted on the side of the road. I got my sleeping bag out and got in it, the back of the truck gets bloody cold, life got a whole lot better once I was in it! I was attempting to gain numbers for a mutiny, turn the truck back around and head for Sudan! Mark wasn’t that against the idea, just saying that he wasn’t paying for both ferries!
We arrive in Wadi Musa, near Petra, to our accommodation. No tents just a big concrete floored room for us all to bunk down in, but at least we have showers and toilets inside. Tanja and Alyssa cooked up a ripper three course meal, complete with roasted bananas filled with melted Mars Bars for desert, and to think I was worried about how we were going to eat up here! (local payment just seemed to cheap for 12 weeks of food and accommodation) After dinner the temperature was five degrees (not including wind chill).
