So we made it into Syria and drove the 2 hours or so (probably even longer, I think I fell asleep) to our camping ground.

This time we were lucky, it was an actual proper camping facility with showers, a fridge and other good things like that!

First things first I got to work talking to the camp ground people about their ability to supply us all with beer. He said he can sell us some, but only a slab (24 cans) at a time. I went around everyone in the group writing down their orders then rounded up to 24, going back to man and ordering 6 slabs. He look told me he wasn't quite prepared for that many! He went to his "secret stash" area, which meant pulling 4 slabs of beer out from under his bed and promised me he'd have the other two slabs for me...

Hello from Aleppo in Syria. It's been quite a few days since the last update, the Internet is quite hard to come by when you are bush camping and we couldn't find a place in Damascus. When we stopped in Palmyra there was only one computer in the whole place that had Internet and it was on dialup! It's been a very interesting fun few days since the last update!

So to pickup from where the last story left off, I'll write this entry just for Jordan and then do a new one for the days we've been in Syria.

We had our breakfast, filled up all the truck's water containers and headed off towards the Dead Sea. We drove for ages, stopping only to have some lunch from a "Chicken From The Machine" place that really good. We had a bit of a language barrier, I was ordering...

I was wrong yesterday, we're not staying in Petra, rather a small town near to it called Wadi Moussa. Easy mistake to make though, seeing as everyone else was calling it Petra.

Speaking of Petra, that's where we went today. We got up at 5am and headed down for a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee, then piled into the hotel's minivan and got dropped off at the entrance to Petra. Claire had warned us not to all go to the ticket booth at once, otherwise we'd be flagged as a single group and we'd have a guide forced on us, something that none of us wanted. Claire had photocopied the Lonely Planet Petra map for us, that was all we needed.

We all made it in no problems, no guides forced on us. It was only about 6:30am and it seemed like we were the only people there, I think...

Hello from Petra, a town we haven't really seen much of yet but that's because we only arrived a couple of hours ago. This is my second attempt at the Internet here, we headed into town just before and the Internet there was so bad that I gave up after 5 minutes. It shouldn't take upwards of 2 minutes to load my diary!

As always since I last wrote an update, it's been a very busy few days. We left Dahab a little sad because it's such a nice place to relax and chill, but we didn't come all this way to do nothing! We had a fairly lazy breakfast and then piled everything in the Truck ready to head down to the Port of Nueiba, to catch the Ferry to Jordon. It was only a couple of hours in the truck, though actually we were expecting the day to...

Just when we thought that Dahab really couldn't get much better, we went Snorkelling yesterday. I thought what we'd seen in Thailand was the most amazing snorkelling I'd ever see, but it seems almost second rate after what we saw yesterday.

We got up late and joined everyone at the Funny Mummy for breakfast. Funny Mummy is the name of the Restaurant at the hotel, it's great food and the staff are pretty good value too, especially when Dingo turns up and starts off with his "Brother from another Mother!" routine. Once we'd all done breakfast we walked down to the Dive Shop and got the gears we'd be needing, then we all piled into three Jeeps that would take us the 20 minute ride to the Dive spot. The Jeeps weren't really that old, but they were so well used that they looked about a hundred years old. The...

Dahab life is pretty good, the sun is always shining, the people are nice and there's not really a lot to do expect relax and take it easy.

Which is pretty much what we did yesterday. We dragged ourselves out of bed just before 10am, it was pretty hard seeing as we'd had little sleep the night before. I thought breakfast finished at 10am but it didn't, it's good I made that mistake though otherwise we might have slept the day away.

There's a hotel with a pool a 2 minute walk from where we're staying so Sarah and I went and paid our 10 Egyptian Pounds each and relaxed by and in the pool for a couple of hours. Sarah went and had a massage while I practiced my sleeping skills on the sun loungers.

Then the rest of the daylight hours were spent walking along the little strip...

The big yellow truck rolled out of Hurghada yesterday morning at 9am, packed with us travellers ready for a good 13 hours at least on the road until we got to our destination of Mt Sinai.

One fairly major thing that I forgot to mention is that our original truck driver, Greg, hurt himself quite badly in Luxor. He was playing around at the hotel and decided to jump into the pool from the 3rd story. Everyone else was doing it, but instead of landing flat like the rest he decided to jump in toes first. He hit the bottom and damaged both his feet quite badly, one was in plaster with multiple fractures and the other was bandaged heavily. He wasn't able to walk at all, so people had to carry him wherever he needed to go. We were actually quite lucky that the trip could go ahead without...

We had our first ride on the big yellow truck today! It's not as bad as I imagined it might be, though it does get very hot. The wind tends to make up for it though, it comes screaming in through the open windows. It's worse down the very back of the truck, you get the wind and also any bumps in the road are magnified about 20 times. We spent 4 hours in total, broken into two 2 hour trips (We were in a Police Convoy)

I'm feeling a lot better, my little magical pills I bought are really helping a lot. I thought last night that my time had come and I was about to snuff it, but after a decent sleep and the magic of prescribe-it-yourself-medicines I'm on the mend.

Hurghada is a bit of a shithole. Actually, it's a lot of a shithole. Sarah and I...

We're currently in Luxor and what a crazy busy few days it's been. It feels like 2 weeks since I was last at an Internet cafe but it's only been 4 days I think, probably not even that many.

Our last night in Aswan was interesting, while browsing the markets Sarah went to buy some water. One of the not-so-nice Egyptian men tried to "help" by taking the correct change out of Sarah's wallet while she has it open and was looking through it. She didn't want him helping though, especially when she saw him grab a 100 pound (Egyptian Pounds) note and slip it under the cigarettes he was holding in his other hand. She grabbed all her money from him that he'd pretty much helped himself too, including the $100 and we left. We came back a minute or two later and told them very loudly and publically...

Hello from the very sunny city of Aswan in Egypt!

We managed to catch our night train the other night with only a little bit of panic. Claire (our tour leader) had organised the bus to come and pick us all up from the hotel at 9pm, allowing an hour to get to the train station in case of really bad traffic. Problem was that because of really bad traffic the driver was held up getting there on time, so he arrived at 9:30pm.
There was a little bit of a panic as we threw everyone's bags onto the bus and piled on, Claire stressing a bit making sure that we hadn't left anyone behind. With everyone and their pack safely on board we teared off towards the train station, our driver doing some fantastic and scary driving to get us there on time. We were worried to start with...