Some desert

Place: New Moon resort, South or Suez city.

Tunes: More Underworld.

Easy driving amongst the mountains and on the Sinai desert (if that’s it was). Late departure after most of us had a bit of a swim in the seaside resort we were staying in. The owner recommended a longer route we were originally going to take and promised that this road was the best in Egypt. He was right. Desert, cliffs, mountains, good asphalt and not a lot of traffic.

Roadblocks are something that started appearing on the road in Syria and break the rhythm every 20 minutes or so. Why these things exist, I have no idea of. They seem completely pointless. I have to assume that they exist to remind everyone on a regular basis of who is in charge and to give the soldiers opportunities to extract some extra cash from people to supplement their piss-poor salaries.

A basic check-point consists of a man with a gun, some barrels and possibly a traffic cone. More elaborate ones will have an additional man that has a mobile telephone in his hand and if you are in Syria or Jordan, also another man may be standing on the back of a pickup truck equipped with a 7.62mm or .50cal machine gun. If you go more and more fancy, you may have concrete obstacles, a booth with a second man speaking to the first man with a mobile and any number of “hangaround” people in various uniforms and vests. In Egypt, you can replace the pick-up guy with another guy standing in the shade with a Mossberg 500 shotgun (or a locally made piss-poor copy).

One idiot with a van tried to push me off the road today on the best road in Egypt. I was so much into the music and riding the bike at that point that I simply reacted and dodged is murderous manouvers "in a natural way" as some might say, without any thought and almost without noticing it. 
 
If I had been listening to the lawn-mower tune of the bike, I probably would have shat myself as I saw the van get closer and closer and shown the driver every international hand gesture I know. Whatever the situation was, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol should be standard equipment for adventure travel and it should have been used today to put that fucking muppet away.


The Red Sea coast seems to be full of abandoned construction projects. Huge seaside resorts and apartment buildings. I guess the Sheiks run out of cash even in Dubai. 


The rest of the day was not that eventful and we made it to the next hotel in good time. This place was much less nice than the previous in every way and had definately seen better days.