We Wander — Mark & Meghan's World Travels

About a month ago, our main camera lens (Canon EF-s 18-200mm IS) gave up on us. Something has gone haywire in the circuits, and it no longer focuses or registers light properly with the camera, and effectively reducing it to a heavy glass paperweight in our bag. Needless to say, we’ve been very frustrated, but two people have come to our rescue over the past 4 weeks. While we were still with the Oasis truck, Becky kindly lent us her fancy Canon 10-22mm wide angle lens, which was a treat to play with when visiting Egypt’s ancient temples and tombs. Since joining Toon in Jordan, he’s generously offered up his newer/fancier/still working Canon DSLR to us whenever we’ve needed to capture a moment, and he’s also sharing all of his own photos with us. We’re still using our 50mm prime lens with our DSLR and our little Sony point-and-shoot to capture our wanderings as best we can, but we’ve been spoiled now, and a point-and-shoot simply doesn’t satisfy anymore. So this post is to say a big thank-you to Becky and Toon for helping to keep this website populated with pictures. We would have missed out on so many great photographic opportunities without you both!

We’re hoping to find a Canon service center in Istanbul next week…hopefully something can be done to bring our ailing lens back to life!

My previous post was dedicated to gushing about Petra, a tourist attraction that simply blew me away. But as you can imagine, I’m not alone — over 400,000 tourists visit Petra annually, and if you’ve ever met “tourists”, you’ll know that they are at their worst in big groups. Crowding, shouting, and a general lack of consideration for others is often the rule rather than the exception in these situations. It was the one thing about visiting Petra that I most dreaded, because nothing can ruin your day quite as quickly as being surrounded by a hoard of loud, ignorant, disrespectful people, all vying for the same photographs, the cheapest Coca-Cola, or the cutest sand bottle. But the most amazing thing happened on our visit to Petra: this dreadful hoard simply didn’t appear. We enjoyed a very long, very relaxing day, in relative peace and quiet. Obviously this had a large impact on how wonderful our day at Petra was. How did this happen? Are we just the luckiest travelers around? Or did we do something right? Let me tell you how we “did” Petra, in the hopes that other travelers might have equally wonderful experiences.

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Our first stop in Jordan after meeting up with Toon was Wadi Mousa, a small town nestled in one of Jordan’s many fantastic valleys. This valley is special, however, because hidden deep within the sandstone formations at its bottom is the ancient city of Petra. Many of you will be most familiar with Petra from its starring role in the film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, where it was used as the setting for the final resting place of the Holy Grail. But let me preface this post by saying this: even if you thought Petra was impressive in that movie, it can’t even hold a candle to the wonder of this place in real life. Petra is more impressive by an order of some magnitude than nearly everything we’ve seen so far in our travels, and that’s saying something. It makes the Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela look like the work of amateurs. It even humbles the great Temples of Angkor Wat, and shifts the ruins of Rome and the Great Pyramids of Giza down the list to make room at the top. Petra is, to put it bluntly, awesome. I hope I can do it justice here…

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After our wonderful week in Dahab, we crossed over the Red Sea by ferry from Nuweiba to Aqaba in Jordan. Africa is behind us, and we are looking forward to new adventures in the Middle East. It turns out that even the traveling part of our next leg will be an adventure — while we were traveling through the Sudan, we met two Belgians, Toon and Ragna, that were driving up from Tanzania and headed in the same direction as us. Our paths crossed several times while we were still on the Oasis truck — we ended up on the same ferry to Egypt, and at the same camp site in Luxor. While we were in Cairo, we got an e-mail from Toon (or Tony, to us English speakers, since we have a tendency to butcher foreign names) saying that Ragna had decided to head back to Tanzania, and that he had two spare seats — would we be interested in joining him in his yellow van? We didn’t hesitate. It was one of those spontaneous travel moments that you hope for, and we jumped at the opportunity. After a few emails, we met in Dahab to compare schedules and see if it would work out for all of us. Although Toon left Dahab before us, we reconnected only a day later in Aqaba, and we were off together, sitting three across the front seat. Our plan is to travel together through Jordan, Syria and Turkey, as far as Istanbul if things go well. We’re excited! The van is great, and Toon has a spare tent and mattresses, so we can camp as we go. We’re looking forward to an excellent road trip together — so it gives me great pleasure to introduce Toon and his yellow van, our new travel partners!

It brings us great pleasure to present the inaugural edition of the Oasis Overland Cape Town to Cairo Truck Awards! Everyone on this list spent at least part of the past four months with us, striving every day to earn the awards presented here. So let the boasting and toasting begin! Without any further delay, may I present (drum roll please)…

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Another milestone reached — where do the days go? Our Oasis Overland adventure has ended, and our wanderings are now taking us up through Jordan and Syria. Head over to our Breadcrumb page to see our latest routes.

After 400 days:

Average speed over land: 43.5 km/h
Equivalent time spent in transit: 72 days
Fastest mode of transportation: Train (68 km/h average)
Slowest mode of transportation: On foot (2.1 km/h average)
Kilometres left to go: unknown…

 
Cairo, Egypt: the place is synonymous in many peoples minds with one thing — or perhaps more exactly, three. It is home to the Great Pyramids of Giza, those icons of Ancient Egypt that are now over 4500 years old and still standing. As we drove into the city of Cairo, the peaks of the Great Pyramids could be seen as hazy silhouettes above the skyline of buildings What a sight! They seemed to welcome us, as though driving the length of the African continent had served only to bring us to this moment. It was the end of our journey with Oasis Overland, but only the beginning of our experience in the Middle East, of which Egypt feels more a part. On our first night in Cairo, we had the trip end party at a nearby hotel, and enjoyed Egyptian food and wine along with each other’s company. But it was the morning that we most looked forward to — the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World awaited us.
 
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After nearly four months of driving through Africa, the last leg of our Oasis Overland truck journey had finally arrived. We set out from Luxor after a too-brief visit and headed into Egypt’s Western Desert for four days of travel on our way to Cairo. I have to admit that it was a leg of the journey that I was not too excited about at first. Our time in Aswan and on the felucca had gotten me used to the trappings of civilization again, and I didn’t relish the prospect of heading out into the unrelenting heat of the desert for another stretch of several days. On the other hand, there were a few things to look forward to on the way: we would be driving through the White and Black Deserts, and hopefully getting a few more nights of desert bush camping along the way. This was the home stretch, and Cairo was the ultimate destination, the end of our marathon overland crossing of the African continent. Only one little desert left to cross…

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After arriving in Egypt via the overnight ferry across Lake Nasser, we spent three very relaxing days in Aswan. Compared to the Sudanese desert and Wadi Halfa, our accommodation in Aswan was pure luxury: our room had A/C, an ensuite washroom with shower, a fridge, clean sheets, good mattresses, a rooftop swimming pool, and even cold beer! On reflection, that description might be misleading to some: if, for example, you’d booked 2 weeks off of work to travel across an ocean and live in high style in Aswan, you would likely have considered the hotel a little shabby, maybe rough around the edges, or just straight up disappointing. But after a week spent camping in the desert in 47¬∫C heat, believe me when I say that it was a palace in our eyes. Welcome to Egypt indeed!

Feeling recovered and somewhat less cooked, we departed Aswan not on the big yellow truck, but on a felucca. For anyone who has never heard of a felucca before, it’s a sailboat, and there are hundreds of them on the Nile in Egypt. We had two boats for our group, each one big enough to hold about 12 people plus a crew of 3. What was in store for us was two days and nights of sailing on the Nile. It was something we’d been looking forward to for some time, but it well exceeded our expectations.

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Here’s a photo of the wording on the photography permits we had to obtain in the Sudan. They don’t mind if you take pictures of the sand, but pretty much everything else is off limits. Oh, and you’d better only photograph sand that makes the country look good. Or else.