Day 79

Sleeping location: Sand dunes 15km N of Nabq, Egypt
Distance (km today/total): 73 / 6238
Estimated climb (m today/total): 800 / 55700
Armed escort: two trucks, four police, five soldiers
Day in three words: Unnecessary VIP treatment

We enjoyed our second final breakfast at Dahab Divers and made our way out of town at a sensible hour today. On the way out I picked up an Egyptian SIM card so we wouldn’t have to rely on wifi all the time; this went smoothly and wasn’t too expensive, but the guy looked well shady and is probably tracking me across Egypt now. We made it to the checkpoint by about 9.45am and expected a swift passage as we’d already gone through all the formalities the day before. Nope. We were left sitting around for an hour and a quarter before a police van pulled up with our friend from yesterday, at which point we were immediately allowed to leave. It soon became apparent that we had effectively been waiting for the police van, as it now began following us closely with two police in the front and two soldiers in the back. Unfortunately for them we had a long hot climb up to 750m, and soon they got sick of travelling at 10kph and settled into a rhythm of zooming ahead a kilometre and waiting for us. They were pretty much always within eyesight from then on.

Halfway up we stopped for coffee/dates and Rebecca casually mentioned that she’d seen a copy of Mein Kampf for sale in a shop the day before. There seems to be a lot of love for Germany in Jordan and Egypt and I really hope it’s not for...err...the wrong reasons. From the top of the climb we had a gradual long descent on a nice surface, similar to the one into Dahab but with a tailwind rather than a headwind this time, so we zipped along at 40kph and generally had a whale of a time. This brought us to another checkpoint, which was thankfully a lot more efficient than the last one. We got through with minimum fuss and they filled our bottles with cold water to boot. One of the chiefs kept introducing people to us, always getting a laugh from the other soldiers when he said the name, so I assume he was saying the Arabic equivalent of “Captain Wanker” and “Corporal Bellend”. Here we were transferred from our previous escort to a new one (two police, three soldiers toting AK47s) and set off down the hill again. 

Weirdly the wind immediately picked up - maybe the checkpoint had been keeping it out. The combination of sea, sun and valleys round here seems to give the wind a mind of its own, and for the next 15km it came at us from every possible direction. I was going slightly faster than Rebecca and the escort clearly decided that she was more of a risk, so they stuck with her and let me go off to face the alleged dangers myself. When we reached our turnoff they deemed the new road to be safe and let  us go off alone, which was good as we were worried about how wild camping would work with them around. Maybe they couldn’t be bothered to drive down a very sandy track, because this is what the road soon became. The surface varied quite a lot and it was quite fun picking a route, but we got really bogged down in the soft sections and it took a while. Soon it became clear that we wouldn’t make the beach by nightfall so we made camp in some dunes a few km from the sea.  

Annoyingly the mischievous wind was still around and took great pleasure in flinging sand everywhere. We ate some sandy food and spent some time looking at the stars, which were absolutely amazing because the moon hadn’t risen yet. The entire Milky Way was visible, I think for the first time in my life. We then had a long discussion about how light bounces/bends off/round things and what this meant for our eyes right now. We wanted to sleep al fresco but were forced to put the tent up (with outer!) to protect our poor faces. The dunes were so remote that the nearest phone antenna was in Saudi Arabia, at least 15km away, so my phone reset itself to Saudi time and I thought we had lost an hour somehow.