The dramatic finale

So, in conclusion.

We are halfway to London, according to the little plane icon on our seat-back monitors. Half way means we're probably not going to get diverted back to Cairo. Let me illuminate why I feared that might happen.

Last night was... I daren't try to capture the evening within a single adjective. Matt and I are glad, so very glad, that we're on this plane, and heading to England, and heading finally for home. I really struggle to think of anything I've wanted more.

I tried to capture yesterday in the previous post. We'd had the sandstorm of course. Something I didn't mention was that I was freaking out a little because I thought I might get a little asthma, or even an attack, as last time I got one it was dust related. There was no escaping this dust. I pulled my soccer shirt around my head and tied it behind my ears, which proved to be a pretty good filter, though occasionally I could feel the crunch of sand in my teeth, so some was getting through.

On our trip up to the border post, the taxis were stopped, so we caught a ride with a local in the tray of his ute, which was covered with a tarpaulin canopy. We were approximately half way along the journey, deep in the storm, the road disappearing into swirls of dust tens of metres from the car, when the engine died. The guy got out. The hood went up. He was tinkering around for a while. The storm raged on. Eventually Matt thought we might be able to give him a push start, so we jumped out and had a look to see what he was up to under the hood. He was hand cranking the radiator fan. The storm was whipping our clothes, pulling the shirt from my face. I did pause to think that a doctor, performing my autopsy, might have a little chuckle at the poor judgement. An asthmatic, push-starting a car in a dust-storm on the Egyptian-Libyan border. Ha ha.

The rest happened, and we got away, but like I said, the night proved uncomfortable. One of the irritating things about Egypt is that extremely few people know English to any functional level. A lot of people can say hi, anyone and everyone can and does say 'welcome' (the seemingly mandatory response to sighting a foreigner), but to find someone who could tell us why the policeman is escorting us to Cairo is a rare bird indeed. In fact, we only knew of one person in the entire country who could definitely give us a translation: Mrs Summer, from the Egyptian Auto Club, in downtown Cairo. So, without her help, we were left to dream up our own paranoid fantasies.

There were a lot of accommodating happenings to help fuel our fears. In one of the brief conversations I had with our man, I said I was going to try to get some sleep on the bus. To this he replied: 'no sleep for you'. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Following a short interview with him Matt suggested two possible scenarios. One, he's just on his way to a town called Marjoun. Two, marjoun is the Arabic world for tailing someone, namely us. A short time after this the bus driver came down asking for tickets. Our man didn't have a ticket, but most emphatically indicated that he was with us, 'hosting' us. Amusingly this wasn't on with the driver, and a mild disagreement followed. Our man seemed to get a ticket. So it was scenario two.

I tried to get some sleep, but it was fitful sleep, and I woke up as our bus was pulling off the highway towards the town of Marjoun. I was starting to freak out a little. So it was scenario one and scenario two. He's hosting us to the town of Marjoun, where we'd live out our days in a desert jail; we were still so very remote. It took a while to get to the town, and by the time we stopped at the guard post on the town's border I was on the verge of losing it. Calm down Rhys, what would Indy do? I looked around for the assembled police squad, open paddy wagon ready for the new visitors. Nothing. And our man just got off, shaking our hands before doing so, and walked off into the darkness. Maybe, there was nothing there, and he wasn't tracking us at all. On the rationale that there could still be another stop in town, I decided to withhold joy until we'd hit the road. We moved a little further on and stopped at the town's main bus station. A group of 8 guys got on, and placed themselves between us and the door. One of them introduced himself, and Matt asked him who he was. His one word reply was 'police'. The nightmare continued.

This was the worst leg. It took us another 7 hours to get to Cairo, from 2am to 9, and I slept poorly. I was trying to think how this was going to play out. Were we already under arrest? Were we going to be frogmarched to a grubby hole in the ground until 6 months later when word of our tragedy trickled to the outside world? Some things didn't make sense. Why so casual? If we weren't under arrest, what were they going to do, follow us around? We had the idea that they didn't want us leaving Egypt until we'd settled the bikes at the border. Or something. More horrifyingly, the boss of the border guards seemed like the kind of guy that would concoct a charge. We knew he wanted the bikes, demanding our keys before we left. We refused, no way was I going to let that joker near our wheels. We may have slighted the wrong man.

We got to Cairo and the gridlock traffic only heightened the sense of expectancy. Moving at 5kph when there could be a set of handcuffs at the end of it is an emotional experience. Suddenly we recognised where we were, near the Ramses Hilton, a block or two from my old hostel. We decided to get out, and potentially disrupt the pigs' welcome party at the main bus station. Our 'guard' was sound asleep. I chose to wake him up, just so he didn't look bad amongst his cohorts, 'letting the marks escape'. The first thing he did was say 'welcome', then he got up, stepped off the bus, and just walked away. I couldn't believe it.

It's hard to imagine the scale of the reversal of our apparent situation. Whereas previously I was furiously trying to work out how we might resolve the legal crisis, using the Auto Club, the Australian Embassy, and our shipping agent, while trailing a police escort or even while under arrest, now, it seemed, we were free. We agreed that this exceeded our predicted best-case scenario by a considerable margin.

The rest of the day was fine. It was steeped in the knowledge that our final test would come at the airport customs, if the border guard boss had flagged our passports, but we knew this was a little extreme. It may sound silly here, but we knew Egyptian police were corrupt, and we didn't know how far that corruption extended.

We got through, had a few ales at the airport bar, and wanted very badly to be on the plane. And eventually, when we were on that plane moving upwards through the sky, we sat and marvelled about how very nice it was. We also concluded that our journey was, finally, over, the rest being the formalities of international air travel. Matt settled in for his for his forth sleep in a row on a transport vessel, and I opened up the laptop to type up this last post.

I've quite enjoyed writing this blog. I'm pleased to know a couple of people have also enjoyed reading it (hi mum). Now that it's over I think I'll go write something else.

The end.