Location: Camping in the Salma Motel, Cairo, Egypt (N29 58.187 E31 10.535)
Miles travelled: 306 miles
Weather: 32ºC – Hot, hot, hot
Today we mostly listened to: Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
We left the Riveria Chalet this morning around 11am after catching up on some washing and filling up Monty from a jerry can we filled in Libya. After initially being excited by the place when we arrived we were soon disappointed by the lack of internet (that was promised when we arrived) and the breakfast of kidney beans (yuk!).
We motored on to El Alamein to look at the Commonwealth cemetery there. It took us a while to find it as the sign posts were quite bad, but I was determined not to miss it! We finally arrived at 3pm but found the gates shut and locked – bugger! A guard then appeared to tell us it shut at 2.30. But we’re in Egypt now so a small bribe later and we were let in. It was extremely peaceful inside and we spent a contemplative half an hour wandering around the graves.
It was nice to visit the place of Pop Muskett’s one and only wartime story he ever told my brother and I. The infamous ‘snake in the tent’ story goes down in history (it wasn’t a snake by-the-way, just a belt draped across his legs which his wartime buddy bludgeoned to a pulp in the darkness of their tent). We never tired of the story.
After that we ploughed on through to Cairo as we’re keen to get Monty in to the Land Rover dealership before the weekend (Friday and Saturday). Getting closer to Cairo the traffic mounted until we were fully in amongst the six lanes of traffic (across two lanes) with horns beeping, lights flashing and the pyramids in sight. A bit of navigation got us to the Salma Motel where we are now camping for the night. A pasta supper and of course gin followed.
