Day 211 Egypt 17/4/2011, Aswan. Bike maintenance, supplies shopping, a dip in the pool and a lot of packing.

Hooray our last full day in Egypt! We are sorry to anyone who likes the country, but it has to be our least favourite place in the world. We have met some nice people, but they have been so overwhelmingly outweighed by the hassling, money grabbing, thieving, lying rest of the population, that we will never return. For anyone planning a visit I would say book a five star hotel complete with tours, see the sites from the comfort of an air-con bus and never leave your hotel unless there is a fire and you have to! Better still, stay at the Luxor hotel in Vegas and visit the British Museum, all the best stuff is there anyway! Rant over, back to our day.

I finally got round to changing Debs' tyres for the wider Marathon extremes. Hopefully they won't slow her down too much, at least they won't sink so badly when we encounter sand.

With the tyres changed, I went to go and buy some petrol for our stove. I hope I have bought petrol, it was all a bit confusing. Every other country we have been to has had fairly well marked pumps. Egypt it seems is different. I wanted unleaded petrol but making the attendant understand was a bit of a struggle. I really must look up the word for unleaded in Arabic!

Mission completed, I went back to the hotel to get Debs so we could go supplies shopping.

Once again it was bit of a effort to find a stall that didn't quote ridiculous prices, but eventually we managed. Having a much better idea of what everything should cost certainly helps.

Back at the hotel I was greeted by a flat tyre on Debs' bike. It was better that we spotted it now than in the morning, but it was still pretty annoying. This time after fixing the puncture, I took her bike out for a ride to make sure it was ok. This served the useful purpose of checking our route out of Aswan for tomorrow morning. To prove that there are still some nice people around, I was invited in for tea by a shop keeper who had worked as a fisherman in Grimsby. He told me that it was his dream to return, which seemed like a strange thing to say about Grimsby!

In a cheerful mood, I cycled back to the hotel and went to meet Debs on the roof for a quick dip in the pool. It was lovely to escape the heat for a while, but our bags aren't going to pack themselves, so for me at least it was only a quick dip.

While I was happily spreading my gear all round the room, Debs was getting stuck in the lift! It was a slightly traumatised Debs that eventually made it back to the room. Fortunately despite no one coming to help when the alarm button was pressed, she eventually managed to get it to go down to the ground floor and then wisely walked back up. We hope it is working later as I don't fancy carrying all our gear downstairs tomorrow morning. I suspect Debs will be taking the stairs though.

It may be some time before we get to blog again so take care all. The next entries will be from Sudan.