all systems go...

just got my sudanese visa. wooohooo. quality. was worried i wouldn't be able to get it due to my connections with israel. no... not my big nose. but rather the fact that i had been there recently. this means that we will be able to complete the cairo to cape town tour by land. the romantic way. no flights.

just have to wait for miguel's credit card to arrive in cairo. should take about a week. a learning - one of your first checkpoints when travelling to a dodgy foreign country should be to ensure that the expiry date on your credit card isn't 8 months old. so off to dahab this afternoon to do some diving. which will be good. and bring back some memories. mango lassies and banana pancakes. the canyon and the big blue. jimmy the switch.

otherwise travel has been uneventful. stayed at bianca's hostel for the night in eilat. she treated me like a son-in-law (after having tried to set me up with her daughter in tel aviv). she cooked me dinner and breakfast. and made me coffee and vitamen drinks. and let me sleep in the double bed. it sure was great.

at the border i met some politically active irish dude who had been working for a non-violent palestinian organisation in hebron in the west bank. he had been detained by israeli border control for 4 hours. a japanese dude who he met on the bus to the border was also detained. just cos they were talking. unlucky. told me a story about a girl he worked with who went through the border and was detained: she suddenly heard an explosion and asked what it was - the border police and performed a controlled explosion on her backpack. clothes, toiletries, shoes, books, laptop, everything up in smoke. was a good laugh.

frank never fails to impress. got to the hostel in cairo. the dude let me into the room and was chilling out waiting for the guys to come back. suddenly the door burst open and in marches frank dressed in a long white arab gown down to his ankles, leather jesus sandles, sporting a shaved head and a wispy ginger beard, munching dates with one hand and waving the koran around in the other. quality. had a good chuckle to myself.