Day 11

Up early to see the dawn, with our camels nearby, then Ali prepared breakfast including omelettes over, of course, the fire. Back to base and off to our third oasis, Al Kharga, for lunch and a visit to the local christian necropolis which is reckoned to go back to the second century - all in mud brick, previously covered in plaster with some of the paintings still visible (but decidedly crude by pharaonic standards).

It was then that we started our long, long journey west to Luxor and the Nile. The local police were adamant that we had to be escorted out of town (or so we just thought). In fact, they insisted we had to be escorted all the way - the bad part of this was that we had to stop at each police checkpoint and then be handed over to a new local team who, after quite a long delay, would take us on to the next. The result of this was some five hours of driving through the pitch black - just the road ahead and not a light anywhere apart from our headlights, and those of our armed escort. Not an experience I would wish to repeat many times in my life, although Rose and Karina made us all some excellent sandwiches in a very bouncy bus! Finally crawled over the Nile and into our hotel some time after 23.00. By universal acclaim, the best reward we could give to Ross who had been driving all day was to give him all the Xmas cake that we had left (not that there was by now a great deal). Memo to self - if ever doing this again, bring lots of really rich fruit cake. I think everyone else jumped almost straight away into the pool below our rooms, but I just went to bed .