Overland to Egypt

Le voyage, c’est la part du rêve (Xavier Roy)

[Illuminated sign spotted at Gare de Lyon, Paris]

Day 1: London to Milan

It’s an obvious point, but the great thing about not flying to Egypt is that I don’t have a plane to catch; I don’t have to rush breathless to the airport at 5 in the morning. I get up at 9, do a few chores and leave at midday. Leisurely travel. Discouragingly, the 12.19 from Kingston to Waterloo via Wimbledon has been cancelled. Ditto the 12.34. I have to get the 12.31 via Richmond instead. Notice that, with Cairo my distant destination, I am fretting a good deal less than my fellow passengers, who are due for lunch in New Malden in half an hour.

Get to Waterloo at 1.30. Take the 3.11 Eurostar to Paris and reach the Gare du Nord just before 7. Take the sweaty Metro to the Gare de Lyon, where I face my first decision. Where to go from here? I have set off with what might be called an outline journey plan: to head for Cyprus and take a cruise ship to Egypt from there. The overland possibilities – through Libya or Syria – were ruled out by two of my less endearing characteristics: fear and laziness. “You mustn’t go through Syria, it’s dangerous,” the delightful features desk administrator told me. She found a receptive audience for her warning. In any case, getting a visa would have been a fag. I got a visa for Egypt, wasn’t that enough? So head for Cyprus, I thought, and take a pleasant cruise across the Med. I knew there was at last one weekly boat to Port Said and thought, once I was there, I might stumble over others.

I knew, too, that Turkey would feature in the itinerary, but hadn’t quite decided whether to get there by rail through the Balkans, or by boat from southern Italy via Greece, though the lure of Istanbul made the Balkan route more likely. But one step at a time – I thought I’d aim for Milan first and take the train v boat decision there. Poring over my railways-of-Europe map, Lyon looks an enticing possibility as a staging post en route to Milan, but the man in the ticket office at the Gare de Lyon redirects me to Paris de Bercy, a 10-minute walk away. There on the platform and due to leave at 8.20pm is the Paris-Venice express. It’s full but the (thin) controller tells me to get on and he’ll find me a berth. Am put in with three shocked-looking women. “Are you going to be sleeping in here?” says one with a look of dismay. ’Fraid so. Eat a large supper in the dining car, drink half a bottle of Italian red and take the cramped top bunk, dozing fitfully through Switzerland.

Day 2: Milan to Trieste

Wake at 5.30am in Milan. Another four hours to Venice. More to the point, another hour and a half until the restaurant car opens. Reach Venice at 9.30am, bang on time after a 13-hour journey (cf the Kingston-Waterloo service). It’s just starting to get warm and the crowds have yet to block the bridges over the Grand Canal. Pay obligatory visit to St Mark’s Square – I was last in Venice in 1979, also oddly for two hours – before taking the 11.43 to Trieste. Not sure why I choose Trieste – the James Joyce connection perhaps. But I feel very tired, have no desire to stay in tourist-heavy Venice and am captivated by the name and edge-of-Italyness of Trieste, which I have never visited before. It meets all expectations – beautiful, sun-kissed, relaxed, festive – and I spend the rest of the day eating, shopping – buy a pair of Moroccan sandals in a street market – and, best of all, sleeping. Choosing to go to Trieste means, de facto, that I will now go through the Balkans; it would be illogical to take the train south through Italy from here. I appear to be making decisions subconsciously. Trieste my talisman.

Day 3: Trieste to Zagreb

Leave Trieste, reluctantly, at 8.54am. Short train journey to Montfalcone, where I have an hour-long wait in already brilliant sunshine, then catch the 10.26 to Zagreb – the Venice-Budapest express, a big, airy train with proper compartments, one of which I have all to myself. The downside is there is no restaurant car, and I eat wafer biscuits from the trolley service until I feel sick. By the end of the five-hour journey – this is a green trip, remember – I’m a little concerned that I’ve filled the metal rubbish container with one plastic mineral water bottle, two plastic cappuccino cups, two plastic wrappers which formerly encased a delicious brioche-like sweet called Buondi, and the similarly empty biscuit packet. The environmental damage is unlikely to be offset by my thoughtfulness in fertilising the soil of Croatia through the hole beneath the lavatory bowl in the WC.

Reach Zagreb at 3.45, where I face a conundrum. Do I go immediately to Belgrade, on a train that leaves in 45 minutes and takes six hours, or stay here for the night? I order a pizza at the station buffet and ask them to be quick, to leave the Belgrade option open. They aren’t; I miss the train; the end I willed, of course. My punishment is that Zagreb proves unfulfilling, full of extraordinarily beautiful and unobtainable women. Even the cathedral is closed.

Day 4: Zagreb to Belgrade

Buy a handy map of Turkey – in Serbo-Croat. Catch the 11.10am to Belgrade. Have started to have doubts about this route. Maybe I should have gone from Brindisi to Athens and then on to Izmir in Turkey by sea, skipping Istanbul. The train is half an hour late; the prospect uninspiring. Dugo Selo, Banova Jaruga, Slovonski Brod, Sid – why doesn’t the sound of these places enthrall me? I don’t know whether to be worried or reassured by the presence of an armed policeman on the train. Offer the man opposite me a game of chess. He doesn’t play. Bang goes my theory that everyone in eastern Europe loves chess.

A matronly woman in my carriage shares her lunch with me – home-made cream cheese and ham rolls and spicy little cakes. She notices I am reading a book by Hemingway. “Old Man and Fish,” she says. Then she points an imaginary gun to her head and fires. Thus we cover both work and life in a couple of sentences of broken English.

Reach Belgrade at 5.40. Immediately take to it, despite – or maybe because of – its rather wrecked appearance. Lots of government buildings, destroyed by “allied” bombing in the anti-Milosevic war, are still shells. A barman tells me later that most have been sold to property developers, who are waiting for land prices to rise. Someone is making a killing.

Day 5: Belgrade to Istanbul

Catch the 8.40am to Istanbul. Have been dreading this 24-hour train journey. Am installed in a small sleeping compartment that the Turkish guard tells me can accommodate four. Heaven forbid! Dread three hairy Bulgarians getting on. But my fears prove unfounded – have the compartment to myself the whole way and share the carriage with a lovely Australian woman, on a six-month Euro-tour, an earnest American and his Canadian wife, and a long-haired Italian thirtysomething on his way to Kathmandu. We bond, we leap off the train in Sofia to stock up on beer and sandwiches, we laugh at the lengthy passport check at 3am on the Bulgarian-Turkish border. We are enjoying the experience!

Days 6 and 7: Istanbul to Mersin

Arrive at Istanbul at 10am, feeling remarkably fresh after an interrupted, lager-fuelled night. Want the full Turkish experience, so check into a Best Western overlooking the great cathedral of Aya Sofia. Shop in the Grand Bazaar (useless fake Adidas trainers and T-shirts that turn out to be too small for me – don’t trust Turkish XL) and get a haircut. Turkish hairdressers pay great attention to hair in the ears and nose. May become a regular here.

Have lunch beside the Bosphorus and tell the restaurant’s greeter I am heading for Egypt. “A rubbish country,” he says firmly. This seems a little harsh and I wonder about the reasons for his animosity. “A rubbish country,” he repeats. Eventually it dawns on me he is saying “Arabic country”. He sits down to chat and I ask him if he can tell the nationalities of the people who are passing – the potential customers he has to tempt in. He tries not to approach Turks, because they start berating him. I point to a dark young man with sunglasses and a rucksack. “Tourist?” I ask him. “No, terrorist,” he fires back. You have to laugh.

Spend the afternoon “doing” the sights of Istanbul – Aya Sofia, the Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque. Luckily, they’re all right next to each other, so you can knock off 1,500 years of history in about four hours. Fantastic city. Sorry to leave. Especially sorry to leave the bed I’ve paid for, unruffled. Have decided to take the overnight coach to Mersin on the southern Turkish coast, which leaves at 10.30pm. My aim is to take a ferry from Turkey to Cyprus and a boat from there to Egypt, but the coach next to mine at the bus station is going to Aleppo in Syria, and in a way I wish I was on it. The overland route is more certain; my romantic notion of jumping on a cruise ship may be barking. But I have no visa for Syria, and had been put off by its “axis of evil” reputation, so the sea it must be.

Arrive in Mersin at noon and have a brainwave – find a commercial vessel heading for Egypt and pay them to take me as a passenger. Go to the port and find a young man who works for a shipping company; he introduces me to his boss, who just happens to have a ship, the Al Zahraa, leaving for Alexandria that evening. He tells me where it is docked and I rush off, excitement mounting, to talk to the captain. When I see the Al Zahraa, I know it will take me – that I will be in Egypt in a little over 24 hours.

How wrong I am. The Egyptian captain is friendly, gives me mango juice, offers me a meal, but he says he can’t take me: he has no free berths and, in any case, the government frowns upon cargo ships taking passengers. Dejection: instead of sailing for Egypt, I’m stuck in noisy, dusty, let’s-rip-off-a-seaman Mersin, dog-tired and depressed about my prospects of ever seeing a pyramid. Six hours later, after a dead-to-the-world sleep, sitting on my balcony, surveying the twinkling lights of the strip of parkland that separates the hotel from the silent sea, I have recovered. The Al Zahraa will have sailed by now, but it was not meant to be. Roads – and sea routes – not travelled should not be dwelt on.

Day 8: Mersin to Limassol, Cyprus

Look, I’m sorry. I take a taxi the 100km to the port of Tasucu. I intended to take the bus, but I was late – there is only one ferry a day, at 11am – and sleepy, and the taxi-driver was insistent, stopping the taxi on the way to the bus station at Mersin to bargain with me. My punishment for lazy, ecologically unsound thinking is that he smokes continuously.

Have perfect breakfast – olives, water melon, tomatoes, bread, cherry jam, coffee – at the harbourside before boarding the ferry. Two-and-a-half-hour crossing to Girne in Turkish northern Cyprus, then take a creaky minibus to the divided city of Lefkosa/Nicosia. Crossing the “Green Line” from north to south is disappointingly easy – the Cypriot High Commission in London had said it would be impossible – and I take another taxi to Limassol on the southern coast. It’s after six and the taxi-driver tells me there are no more buses that day, but I suppose he would say that. As soon as I get to Limassol, I know I have made a terrible mistake. The staff at the port, where I enquire about ships to Egypt, are unhelpful; and the bars are full of Brits drinking Carlsberg, watching Manchester United against Tottenham live on TV and periodically shouting “Stick it in the back of the net, Soha”.

Day 9: Limassol to Girne

The Mr Fixit in the travel shop adjacent to my hotel, on whom I’d pinned all my hopes, can’t fix it. There’s no cruise ship to Egypt for five days; there’s nothing to Haifa in Israel, which I’d hoped might offer an alternative route; travelling on a cargo ship is pie in the sky. I’m sunk. Five days in Limassol would drive me mad. “Why not fly to Cairo from Larnaca?,” Mr Can’t-Fixit suggests. “It’s very quick.” He just doesn’t get it. It’s going to have to be Syria, visa or no visa. Pack, wave Limassol a desperate farewell, take the bus back to Lefkosa, and another bus to Girne, where in the cemetery I see a gravestone inscribed with the bathetic phrase “Seashells were his passion.” I’ve missed the daily ferry, so check into a hotel full of beetroot-red Brits. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Spend the afternoon by the pool, which has a built-in bar in the water. Drink so much lager I can hardly swim back to the side of the pool.

Day 10: Girne to Antakya

Wake at 6am, not quite knowing where I am. Think I’m on a ship and can’t work out why it’s not moving. Catch the ferry at 9.30am. Much rougher crossing this time and generalised vomiting. Relieved to reach Tasucu at 1 and take the bus to Antakya, where I intend to go to the Syrian consulate and negotiate a visa. Reach Antakya – the site of the great Roman city of Antioch – at 7.30pm and receive the distressing news that the Syrian consulate is a further three hours away in Gaziantep. Am about to take another bus when God appears, in the shape of a tall, balding, stern-looking man who asks, in so-so English, what I want. “A Syrian visa,” I say self-pityingly. “No problem,” he replies, “you’ll get one at the border for $20.” And, by the way, here’s a bus ticket to Damascus for 10 Turkish lira (about £4). He also drives me to the centre of town, finds me a hotel, and tells me to wait for the shuttle bus in the morning. There must be a catch.

Day 11: Antakya to Aleppo

There is, but I don’t discover it immediately. First, I make an 8 o’clock pilgrimage to St Peter’s Church, built in a rock face overlooking the city. St Peter’s – built by the man himself – was founded in 50 A.D. and is reckoned to be the world’s first Christian church. My prayers fall on deaf ears, however, because a couple of hours later I’m chucked off the bus – no visa. “Try the consulate in Ankara,” says a man with a big grey moustache. Thanks, that’s a 12-hour drive away. Am in despair, then God reappears, makes a call, gets me a taxi that will take me to the Syrian border, and asks for 3,000 Syrian lira. (I never did quite work out what the Syrian lira was worth.) God is oddly keen on Mammon. As the taxi is about to leave the bus station, God runs over. “What about the 10 lira for the bus ticket?” he says. “Don’t worry about it,” I reply, trying to smile. God is having his little joke.

The taxi stops briefly at an office for more form-filling and passport-checking. I take the precaution of cutting up my press cards and throwing them down a drain. Probably symbolic. Then we drive the 40km to the border, steering a careful course through the hundreds of lorries crossing into Syria. The lorry drivers are lying under their trucks or playing backgammon in the shade. They will be in this vast queue for up to five days. We negotiate the Turkish side and I am left with the Syrians.

The police are surly, but then a real god appears – Mohammad, the tourist liaison officer, whose office I sit in for the next four hours. We discuss politics, religion, but above all poetry. He studied English literature for a year before the need to earn a living forced him to give up, and on his office shelves are copies of The Canterbury Tales, The Tempest, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse, The Old Curiosity Shop and L P Hartley’s Early Victorian Novelists. We argue, play chess, recite Shakespearean sonnets and listen to Mohammad’s colleague Sami’s computerised CD collection – he is a big fan of Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Demis Roussos and the Dutch ballad singer Réné Froger.

Mohammad plays a reasonable game of chess, given that he hasn’t played since doing army service 10 years earlier, but I have a won endgame when, with a bit of pushing from Sami, the visa materialises. It costs, with tips, about $90. Anyway, I’ve got it and Mohammad is willing to resign. I promise to send him some books – after four hours he feels like a friend. It’s 5.30pm and, conveniently, Sami is finishing work and can take me to Aleppo in a friend’s car. He also knows a fabulous hotel, called Dar Halabia, a converted Arabic mansion next to the souk, and parks me there. By 7pm, I am sitting on the terrace, drinking chai and listening to the extraordinary cacophony of calls to prayer that fill the darkening sky. Syria – country of Chaucer, Demis Roussos and the muezzin. Is George Bush aware of this complexity?

Day 12: Aleppo to Amman

Leave Aleppo on the 8.30am bus for Damascus. Good progress until suddenly, just outside Homs, something falls off the underside of the coach and it slithers to a stop at the side of the road. Terminal. We are instantly picked up by a fleet of passing minibuses and taken to the bus station in Homs, where we are put on to another bus. This one does make it to Damascus, by 1.30, and after lunching in a café with a couple of friendly policemen, who let me try on their hats (much too small), I take the 3 o’clock bus to Amman.

Meet a Jordanian on the coach who insists I stay at the hotel in downtown Amman where he spent three years recovering from being shot during a robbery. It is hot, noisy and pleasingly cheap, with a friendly night-porter who tells me that to make ends meet he does seven jobs. The hotel has no restaurant, so hit the heavily policed streets in a not very successful search for food. End up eating felafels on a street corner with a store owner who seems perplexed that I can’t speak Arabic.

Day 13: Amman to Cairo

7am coach to Aqaba. First really irritating bus journey – sitting next to an obese young Jordanian woman with a “New York” baseball cap and forced to listen to moronic DJ on some grisly English-language pop station. Landscape unremittingly barren and blasted. Feel this last leg may be tortuous. My feet are blistered, I’m down to my last $15 and I slept badly in my hot little hotel. The best is over. Feel nostalgie for the delights of Demis Roussos and my friends in Syria.

Reach Aqaba at 11.15am to take the ferry to Nuweiba in Egypt, but problem. The ticket costs 33 Jordanian dinars (around $50) and there’s no ATM at the port. Go into town and I’ll miss the boat. Again God – or perhaps typical Middle Eastern generosity – lends a hand. Three Jordanian students, heading back to Cairo for the start of term, adopt me, lend me the money for the crossing, and ply me with Pepsi. One hands round delicious mini-pasties made by his mother, and, in a lovely touch, gives a couple to the man loading the luggage on to an unsteady-looking wagon. Islam.

Two of the students are Palestinians, and, perhaps unfairly, I quiz them on the search for a solution. One is, up to a point, a pragmatist – perhaps two states will work. The other, who has a tiny copy of a pre-1948 map of Palestine on a string around his neck, insists that Israelis must leave and the Palestinians reclaim their homeland. He cannot even bring himself to utter the word “Israel”. For him it is, will always be, Palestine – and there it is, clearly visible a few miles across the Gulf of Aqaba, the homeland he has never visited.

The crossing to Egypt only takes an hour; unfortunately waiting to board has taken almost four. Reach Nuweiba at 4.30pm. Amazingly, getting through customs, buying a bus ticket and waiting for the bus to actually start takes another four hours. By now I am being looked after by seven Jordanian students. Much discussion of God. I express my non-belief; probably illegal in Egypt. One, dressed in US army fatigues and a cowboy hat, tells me I will go to hell. But, with a huge smile, he adds that he hopes I will see the light and meet him again in heaven.

The bus finally leaves at 8.30pm, hurtling through the darkness of Sinai, with the students singing Jordanian folk songs and me failing to sleep in a seat that is marginally too small to allow every muscle to be relaxed simultaneously. Reach Cairo at 3am. It ought to be a great moment, but of course it isn’t and my main emotion is sorrow at having to say goodbye to my companions, lives briefly glimpsed.

Decide to book into a posh hotel overlooking the Nile – I think I deserve it, don’t you? – but have a tricky job convincing the clerk that he should admit this bedraggled, dirty, ill-shod figure whose credit card refuses to register. Get stroppy and tell him I will go next door to the Hilton unless he takes my word that I can pay. I hand over all the cash I have – I managed to get some from an ATM in Nuweiba to discharge my debts – and he lets me stay. The city still throbs, the 4am glass of white wine tastes sweet, the Nile looks lovely, the shower is glorious, the bed is vast …

Day 14: Cairo to Giza

… but I can only sleep in it for two and a half hours. Am picked up by a photographer (you must have proof that I made it) in a taxi at 7.30am for the 12km drive to Giza. The first sight of the three great pyramids is a shock because they suddenly appear on the western edge of the city, looking like ultra -modern buildings designed by a Foster or a Libeskind; 4,500 years old and the most state-of-the-art constructions in town. Get there just after 8 and have the place to ourselves, apart from a tattooed German woman who is already communing with the Sphinx and looks mildly put out by the interruption. She says it is her third visit and is evidently having a quasi-mystical experience.

Fight off the touts, start making the descent into the Pyramid of Khafre but find the claustrophobia and airlessness unbearable and hastily retreat; and take a camel ride around the site. Moses – it seems all camels are called Moses – is friendly, smelly and gives me an armchair ride, with a pleasantly soporific rocking motion. Would love to take up the camel owner’s offer of a ride in the desert, though am wary of tales that they sometimes charge five times more than the fee you’ve agreed to bring you back.

The ride around the pyramids at Giza is the end of the line – probably one (or do I mean four?) of the few truly environmentally friendly legs of the trip. The belching buses through the Middle East can’t have been any less destructive than your average jet, but travelling overland has certainly been better for the soul. Through the misty window of a slowly moving bus, this place that we associate with death and destruction emerges as a land filled with life and friendship. Now, how to get home? I wonder if the border between Egypt and Libya is open.

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