32. Tunisia - 4 April to 9 April 2010 With only a one-week visa for Tunisia, our first priority was to organise the ferry across to Sicily from Tunis, which we had been unable to do on-line, maybe just as well with our shorter than anticipated stay. So in our last country on the African continent, we headed north from the border towards Tunis and immediately everything felt different, as we've noticed it so often does the moment a border is crossed. In this c...

31. Libya - 29 March to 4 April 2010 Our border crossing into Libya went surprisingly smoothly even though it was three hours before we were on our way. On the Egyptian side it was a labyrinth of paper work and bureaucracy for the vehicle and the returning of the Egyptian licence plates. On the Libyan side we unwittingly enlisted a very helpful 'fixer' who voluntarily, as it turned out, helped us with all the ins and outs of entering Libya. This included a ...

30. Alexandria, Egypt - 16 March to 29 March 2010 Back in Cairo, with a day to spare before we were to run the gauntlet of the Libyan Embassy again, we caught yet another taxi into the city to spend some time in the souq of Khan al-Khalili, a market which sells everything to anybody, both locals and tourists. It is a labyrinth of narrow alleyways and courtyards and easily confuses, but we found Fishawi's Coffeehouse, an institution which claims to have been serv...

29. Sinai, Egypt - 5 March to 16 March 2010 It felt good to be out of busy, bustling Cairo and on the hectic highway towards Sinai, where in no time the drab urban landscape changed to one of desert with occasional apartment complexes in the middle of nowhere. We were heading for the Suez Tunnel - just another tunnel - but definitely a different experience if you are lucky enough to sight a ship seemingly cruising through the desert, only visible from about the ...

28. The Western Desert Route to Cairo, Egypt - 23 February to 5 March 2010 Rather than the Red Sea coast, we decided to travel the Western Desert route to Cairo from Luxor, as we had heard it was a spectacular drive, especially the White Desert, famous for its brilliant white limestone formations that are the remains of microscopic marine animals deposited 80 million years ago. There are four oases on this Western Desert road. Magically, the water found in thes...