Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
my first stop on the final leg of this voyage. Before setting off, I checked my bag: camera,
memory cards, satellite phone, all still intact. The only thing missing was the envelope of
cash. That was still hidden in the major's back pocket.
You win some, you lose some, I thought, relieved to have finally broken through.
But this wasn't the last time I would get ripped off in Egypt - and five hundred Sudanese
pounds was the least of it.
'For you, I'll do a special price,' said the man at the end of the telephone. 'Thirty-four
thousand dollars.'
My jaw hit the ground.
The man on the line was called Tarek El-Mahdy. I'd been put in touch with him by
Moez, and his words came back to me now: 'He's probably one of the few men in that
country you can trust. But that said, he's Egyptian, Lev - he'll want cash, and lots of it.'
With over three million kilometres of off-road travel under his belt, Tarek was the go-to
man in Egypt. He ran a tourism outfit called Dabuka, taking wealthy clients on 4×4 sa-
faris into the desert. Many of his punters were rich Americans and Princes from the Gulf,
and he knew how to get things done. What I needed were the security clearances to leave
Aswan and all the support the security would need, transport, food and safe accomodation,
to continue the expedition - and it seemed they didn't come cheap.
'Anything is possible,' he said in broken English, 'but it takes money. And it'll take at
least twenty-one days to get the necessary permissions. Whatever you do, Lev, don't try
and leave Aswan. Believe me when I tell you - you are under house arrest. Well, I mean,
hotel
arrest . . .' He laughed at his own joke.
After escaping the border police, I had checked into the Mövenpick Hotel on Elephant-
ine Island, a small island in the middle of the Nile, so named because of the elephantine
boulders that form its banks - and because, long ago, it used to be an ivory trading station.
The hotel looked like an airport control tower, a hideous incursion into the otherwise spec-
tacular setting. I had been here for less than two days, but already I could feel the eyes of
the Egyptian authorities on me. As I took a felucca across the river, I'd noticed I was being
followed - and, as I checked in, the same man sat in the hotel lobby, pretending to read
a newspaper as he kept his eyes on me. The next day, when I tried to leave the hotel, the
manager himself asked me to join him for lunch. It was an odd request, but it wasn't until
he began a barrage of probing questions over the first course that I realised he was, in fact,
a government agent, tasked to write a report on my movements. What Tarek was saying
made me anxious: the prospect of not moving for three weeks made me want to be sick.
This was the last place I wanted to be stuck.
'How do you get to thirty-four thousand?' I asked.
'Well, you'll need an escort and a guide. Turbo will be perfect for that.'
