Day 8 - No shower. Siobhan and I washed each other's hair in a bucket.Poured water over myself with a jug,

It took us about two hours to drive from our bush camp in Arbi to Wadi Halfa and our hotel.Some of us dared to hope for a proper shower, some for air conditioning…I allowed myself to hope for nothing…and I was still disappointed.

We arrived at hotel Defintood, which was literally made from mud brick, with palm a palm frond ceiling.The walls inside were an off white colour, with the paint flaking off betraying the mud below.Siobhan, Kath and I were shown to our room, or more appropriately, our cell, where we would be spending the next three days and two nights, incarcerated.

Cell 28 at hotel Defintood, had the same off while walls and flaking paint as the reception area.The floor was plain dusty concrete and the ceiting palm from with a hole in it that was covered by a wooden crate.

The door was iron looked like something you would use for your garden shed, it had 28, painted on it in a red and while circle and locked with a common padlock.We had a window which opened into the corridor, which didn't seem to open and wouldn't have made a difference anyway as the corridor was just as hot as the room.We had a single ceiling fan, which was hanging onto the palm frond roof for dear life, which did little but push the heat around.

The three beds were made of woven rope and had dusty, flea infested mattresses with an even dustier sheet on top.Under one of the beds there was a motley old mother cat and her new born kittens, looking even hotter than we were.

Outside were the shower, which was literally a shower in a shed which had stopped working long ago, I remember looking at the shower head and thinking of Homer Simpson teasing an animal, "Here you go" he would say with a piece of food in his hand and then, "Just kidding!" and yank it away just a quick.We had a single bucket of water and a garden tape with hot desert water coming out of it to wash in.Hot water being the last thing we wanted to see after our time in the desert and hot water was all there was as the cold water had boiled in the heat.

I won't subject you to the description of the toilet facilities at this place, but suffice it to say, they were not the worst I have used, but that doesn't mean a lot coming from me now.

Kath, Siobhan and I were given the key to our padlocked room and sat on a bed each and just looked at each other, none of us saying anything, but all thinking the same thing, What the hell are we supposed to do in this hell hole for three days?

We did endure three days of this hell, which mostly consisted of walking around the small town in the unbearable heat and sitting in cafes all day.I did actually manage to make friends with a gypsy and an Egyptian guy called Ali who owned a couple of restaurants in town and I took the group there one night.During these three days my diet consisted of potatoes in a tomato based sauce and rice, for every meal.I kept some of us entertained with the movies on my laptop, on the last night I walked down the corridor yelling, "The 9:30pm showing of Troy is about to start in cell 28!"

Sleep was almost impossible, although the desert cooled down at night, the mud-brick walls clung to the heat for dear life.The first night I got up three times and went and sat out the front with some of the others, who were trying to stay up, until they literally fell over.On one of these occasions, I distinctly remember begging Sarah to take us back out into the desert.I ended up sleeping outside next to the toilet block with David, who helped me drag my bed out of my horrendously hot cell.This was a much stinker option with no privacy, but at this point I didn't care.The next night, this area was full of locals, so I ended up sleeping in the corridor next to Yngvar and Guys room, with in screaming distance, if I was disturbed.

In my boredom and during the madness of the situation, I wrote a joke yeah (joke that's what it was) suicide pact, in case we missed the ferry to Aswan the next day and had to wait another week in Wadi Halfa for a ferry.Some chose not to sign, due to the very real possibility something didn't go wrong and we missed the ferry.