When we arrived in Sharm we were ready to leave 5 minutes later. Since the place is now 10 kilometres of solid hotels we could hardly get to the beach let alone find anywhere to stay, but it just happened that paying a visit to the Old Port to book our ferry to Hurghada we found a beautiful, secure camp site in the car park for the Ferry. Under 24 hour guard from the Egyptian police we asked if we could camp overnight and they said “welcome to our car park”. 5 minutes walk into town and 200 yards from the beach it couldn’t have been better, even the view over the bay at night was sparkling. From here it proved an ideal base to explore the whole place. There are certain places to avoid like the plague, but the Hotels on the beach at Na’ama Bay with the brassy walkways and bars between them meant you wouldn’t have to walk very far for the evenings entertainment and we quite enjoyed the bustle.. Sharm is about 50% more expensive than Dahab, and after 4 days of snorkelling we spent 2 nights in Ras Mohammed, a protected nature reserve 30k from Sharm, where the diving is even better, and you can camp here for $5 per night. So now we have our own desert to camp in and our own coral reef to swim in. 10 minutes around the cove come 10am, it’s a different story, with the scuba and snorkels boats arriving like the Spanish Armada. Owing to the fact that Egyptian customs wouldn’t let our van in for more than a month , and worse the permit can only be extended for another month at your original port of entry, we were looking to stay around here for a month and then renew on December 18 giving us time to see Natalie and Cairo etc, but inactivity is a bit boring so we decided to do this round trip across the Sinai peninsular..Suez turned out to be fascinating but only for one day. We had a hotel right on the edge of the Suez Canal, and we just ship-watched until we were bored, and then set off for Cairo about 150k away.Cairo is just manic, as motorways are shared with horses and donkey carts, but we came through un-fazed even after being viciously undertaken by a donkey cart on the Egyptian equivalent of the M25.Apart from pyramids, the museum and the Nile, Cairo is not much of a tourist spot but we were here to get our visas for Sudan and Ethiopia.Getting the Sudanese Visa involved the strangest story to date on our travels. To get a Sudanese visa you first have to get a letter of introduction from the British Embassy. We thought this would be easy enough and as we were queuing, Janet met a very nice English/Egyptian lady who needed to travel to Sudan with her Saudi husband to sort out some legal matters regarding some land his father had given to him. He was with her and said that since they were going next to the Sudanese Embassy they would come with us and he could help with translating, and maybe even speed things up for us.Naturally we said yes and Janet and her new lady friend walked on ahead whilst I walked with the Saudi guy exchanging stories about Jeddah...which was where he was born.When we got to the Embassy I could see Janet was itching to tell me something and when we were on our own she casually mentioned that the people we were with were Ossama Bin Laden’s son and his wife. His name was Omar Bin Laden and he was a very pleasant and quietly spoken man, but when you looked at him he would definitely have won an Ossama Bin Laden look alike competition.We really liked them and Omar even lent me 200 US dollars when I didn’t have enough to pay for our Sudan visas, although I paid it back pretty sharpish. The Cairo camp site is a real overlanders site with people coming and going all the time..some North and some South. We are picking up lots of tips over the evening camp fire.. | 