Welcome to Egypt

Place: Nuweiba or thereabouts

Tunes: Whatever shit they play on the radio in Egypt. Lots of singing about a dude called “habibi”.

This day was a bit different. Not much driving, but a refreshing sea voyage instead. We were at the port at nine in the morning with a 13:00 departure. Normal hassles to get all of the paperwork sorted to exit Jordan. Lots of confusion about where to go and some wankers in uniform were playing around with our carnets not wanting to stamp them as they clearly had nothing else to do. Many monies were also spent just to get out of the country. You need to buy a form to apply for a permission to exit the country. And after filling the form, you return it to the next counter where you pay some more to get it stamped. After this you get a reciept that is inspected on a third counter. Still, all in all, Syria was much worse.

The ferry loading took at least one hour. In similar ferries in Europe it usually takes 20 minutes, but in Europe we do not have all of the papers, stamps, shouting and general chaos than what they have here. We must be doing something wrong in Europe as it's much more lively in here.


The ferry ride took an hour and they served the most pathetic chicken burger I have ever seen and they turned the aircon off - only in the restaurant where all of the foreigners were. Nice! We also met a Saudi motorist with a tuned up R6. Brave man. It was also an interesting discovery that this very same boat used to be a ferry between Helsinki and Tallin in Estonia. This was easy to determine as no-one had bothered to remove any of the signs in Estonian, Finnish and English.

Unloading took another hour and a half for no apparent reason and then we got to the terminal area. It looked much better than some of the borders we have been to with a degree of organisation about it and we were spotted by the tourist police, who are supposed to help out foreigners. This looks promising.

The pleasant formalities took five (5) hours after we got out of the ferry. The veterans of the transamerican trip last year said that they never saw anything this bad on that trip.

We went to immigration, got visas, got various permits to import a vehicle, vehicle registration, driving licences, insurances, licence plates and allah only knows whatever the fuck else. In total about 20 pieces of paper, countless hand-filled entries to said bits of paper and many many stamps. And money.

Interestingly, all of these papers stayed inside the port apart from our new licence plates in Arabic, the associated registration paper and our new Egyptian driving licences with no picture and of which we cannot read one word. Like in the Lebanon and Syria, it would be interesting to see how much of this circus is just plain theft by men in uniforms.

Of course all of the Arabs were trying to get past us in all of the queues and some just marched into the offices behind the counter as our turtle defence is getting pretty inpenetrable. The officials seemed to be completely uninterested in stopping them and served them as this is business as usual. Try that in with Finnish customs and you will get shot.

Our police friend seemed to be happy just doing in the hours and only pointed us to the next counter. Only one guy behind a counter took our papers in and did not let any others push their papers on top of the pile. I am not saying that the tourist police did not do his job, but he was not particularly efficient with it. 

Also, at the end of it all we were wandering, if we should leave a tip or not, but as this guy is a government official doing his job, we should not have to give him one penny. And he should not take it even if we would offer it but instead he might throw us in jail for bribery. Many more forms to fill I am sure if you have to go to jail in Egypt. We did not give him anything and he did not ask for anything, but he did look a bit disappointed when we left ...

... to get to another check of all of the papers and stamps we just got in the port 50 meters away by some different police officers before they actually let us out into Egypt.

All of this makes you feel really welcome to this country.

After some sightseeing in the port town in the usual style, we got to the seaside resort, which was most nice and excellent. A big seafood dinner was arranged and everybody pretty much passed out after the meal.

All in all, it was a normal day. Technically, we are still in Asia, as Africa begins after the Suez canal, so I am sure that Egypt will apply for membership in the EU some time soon.