The following day we drove 500km straight through to Cairo. Arriving late at night we found Cairo to be the most hectic place we have been so far. Hours were spent trying to find our way through the one way system. You would think it was impossible to miss but we struggled to find the 3 gigantic pyramids.

The local police were fairly friendly and let us park outside the pyramids for the night. The next morning we strolled round them peacefully for approximately 23 minutes before every school kid in Egypt arrived along with their teachers. The first day in Cairo also saw landy claim his latest victim, this time a small finch had been impossibly inserted into the radiator grill, it was given a proper burial on the pyramid plateau.

Nights in Cairo were spent searching for seedy bars along with Dan and Steve, 2 fellow Brit's who literally drove into us at the pyramids (complete with a very 'bird pulling' feminine 'Landette'). These boys were more than happy to sample the nightlife in Cairo with us. This consisted of a selection of dodgy bars followed by a choice of extremely dodgy belly dancing clubs. Their particular favourite night club had possibly the worst display of any attempt at belly dancing in the world. It would be impossible to describe how bad this was but a brief comparison would be that of a lethargic tortoise making a half baked attempt at moving. Basically, it was horrendous. Landy at this point had been looking smugger than usual parked outside the equivalent of Buckingham palace, complete with personal armed guards and search lights. Returning in the early hours in a taxi we were stopped by a slimy looking bloke wearing seventies style clothes and acting like Starsky and Hutch. After a few too many beers (is there any such thing?) we responded to his questions in our usual manner. For example, “sod off and who are you anyway”. Of course we knew he was a plain clothed police officer but what the hell.

The next day was spent camped at the German war cemetery at El Alamin. Obviously this was a sobering experience even for two travelling alcoholics.

After a couple of days travelling and staying at non descript places we landed at Siwa oasis, 380km from civilisation (and from our reckoning 320km from the nearest place to buy beer!) Pretty cool place to basically chill out and watch the sun go down. Spent the last night on the hotel roof with Peter (Dutch journalist who lives in Beirut) watching life go by or in this case watching life stand still.