The road was in a terrible state with potholes and corrugations for the best part and a mixture of desert and rock for the rest. The army check -points that were every 50 km were quite amusing. Anyone who decides to attack Egypt on this front has a massive task in hand- a collection of extremely bored decent blokes who have approximately 4 bullets between them (and absolutely no interest in using them). We had a laugh and a few games of football on the way, whilst waiting for the usual bureaucracy from checkpoint to checkpoint (Mike Burton- your Italian football was donated to a much appreciative group of soldiers in the Western Sahara). The views throughout the desert were, again, spectacular.

Landy, was handling the road well, eating up all thrown at him. This was until we smelt diesel and suddenly lost a lot of power. We managed to get it to the next checkpoint where we spent a while with some soldiers and attempted to fix a fuel injector, then replace a tyre, then returning back to the original problem (for those in the know, it was the no.4 injector pipe, AGAIN). Eventually we gave up and called for a mechanic to collect us from 100km away. We had an Egyptian-English-Japanese domino championship with the soldiers and our highjackers, whilst waiting for our saviours. Eventually they arrived and patched up Landy good enough to last the remaining 100km.

The next day was spent adding another international service to Landy's belt. He has now been touched up by mechanics in no less than 6 countries and is looking increasingly smug about it. The following day we cautiously attempted the drive to Fafara, another Oasis town, passing through the Black Desert and White Desert on the way. No prizes for guessing that the former is a desert and quite black and the latter is of a white'ish nature. From yet more fabulously misjudged directions we drove around for a few hours before finding the correct path for the surreal White Desert.