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The road stretched behind me to the roundabout I had just swung around, with snow capped mountains in the distance, and in the other direction around a bend and off to who knew where. Fortunately it was a dry day, if not somewhat cold.

Stranded at the side of the road, I changed the spark plugs, I checked the battery leads to see if it was the same problem we had had in Gazianteppe, we had a full tank of petrol, so it wasn’t that… I poked and prodded, but to no avail.  She wouldn’t start and that was that!.

We all hear about the French being perpetually on holiday or on strike and this was to be no exception. It was Thursday 11^th November, and the country was honouring its War Dead. No one was open, the local Legion were all dressed in uniform attending parades, and as far as my predicament was concerned the familiar Gallic shrug was all I was likely to get!

I did manage to hitch a lift to the local town where I was informed everything was closed. Returning to the bike there was nothing for it than to rely on the only legal bit of insurance I had for the whole trip. How I had managed to escape needing anything before was a mystery.

Good as the printed word on the document I found at the bottom of the pannier, my insurance company managed to rouse a recovery lorry and the bike and I were scooped up. I was deposited at an hotel in the middle of nowhere. The bike was to have an over-night stay on the lorry and be dropped at the BMW dealer conveniently located in Annecy, from where I had only just come from that very morning.

Next day the BMW dealer confirmed my worst thoughts. The fuel pump had packed in and a new one was five days away. We weren’t going anywhere!

Taking the option of the insurance hire car, I left the bike in the safe hands of the deppanage to be returned to the UK at a later date.

Ignominy came knocking at the door in the shape of a Fiat Punto! It was however much warmer in a  car, and there was a radio to boot. My invitation to shoot wild boar outside Tour still stood and I was keen to experience this Gallic ritual. Dressed in highlighter jackets to avoid being mistaken for a pig, it was a curious but fun day, and although I left without firing a shot, I given a haunch of one of the days kill – it was delicious!

Toll roads being the norm in France I was still shocked at how expensive they were, but I was keen to get back home and so figured I would save a night in an hotel against the peage.

The insurance car deal was pretty good. I dropped Fiat French side, walked on the boat as a foot passenger, got off and was taken to the empty and cavernous Dover customs hall, where the luggage trolleys which are meant to take both pounds & euros wouldn’t take a euro. Dropping all my kit, which was not inconsiderable, in a jumble outside the hall, I saw a figure approaching another building. I strode over, hailed the figure as charmingly as possible, and was somewhat surprised to be told to “step away from the building” by a fully armed and body armed wearing female police officer, who told me the building was sensitive. I think she meant it was a sensitive area.

I finally made my way through the maze of Dover, found my next hire car, and made for London and the arms of my one in a million pillion.

What an adventure. What a journey. What a pillion! What a relief to be back in one piece. Similar to the last adventure, I was tired but content to be home.

And yes, one day, I’ll do it again…..

There is only one word for the palaver of boarding the ferry at Alexandria. Chaotic! Utter chaos. Chaos of such magnitude, should you awake from your daydream, you would surely know you were in some far flung, post colonial country, which had clung to the uniforms of their glory days, but none of the common sense or administration which made things work.

As instructed by the unfortunate agents who have to fight such governmental incompetence, I took a taxi and crossed town to get my slip of paper from traffic control, which allowed me to proceed through the port gates on the given day, and reach the customs checkpoint, barrier to any further progress nearer the ship. The bedecked officer I spoke to informed me I should arrive by 11am to make sure I was in time for all the formalities required by the authorities. That the ferry wasn’t due to leave until 10pm Egyptian time hadn’t seemed to cross anyone’s mind!

As bid, I pitched up at 11am. The first instructions were that I didn’t need to be there until 3pm. Clearly the Egyptians don’t liaise! I sat around for four hours on the pavement, reading, sighing, cursing… I had naturally checked out of the hotel. The bike was typically overloaded with all my shopping, and I was reluctant to leave it. Though confident it would be safer here than in Europe, I still preferred to keep a weather eye on it. To make me feel only marginally better, I was not the only one who had been instructed to turn up so ridiculously early. 4×4’s were beginning to form an orderly queue behind me, and being more Latin than me, expletives were beginning to rain down in Italian and French. Lots of Gallic shrugging and eyebrow raising. Though clearly unimpressed, there was nothing we could do, other than sit out our enforced wait. I was just thankful I had a mildly interesting book with me.

I left the bike under the watchful eye of my fellow Europeans (and the Egyptian police of one kind or another) and set off to find some lunch. Down a small alley, tucked into a niche little bigger than a cupboard, I found a man making and selling falafel sandwiches. Although his frying oil reminded me of used engine oil, the queue for his sandwiches was long enough to offer confidence that some people were at least returning dinners. Once again, the humbling generosity of the average man in the Middle East made me forget my frustrations of being made to wait four hours to proceed to the next point of embarkation. As I tried to pay, his face broke into a large smile, and he touched his chest and said it was his pleasure to give me the sandwiches. From experience you should not just accept this and walk away, but rather press your corner and try again to pay. You can do this three times, and as long as they continue to offer, and you have made fair effort to pay, you can walk away, humbled again by the generosity you would be unlikely to find in Europe. With my spirits restored by this humble kindness, I retraced my steps for more patient waiting.

At 9pm, we were allowed on board. It had been a frustrating last day in the Middle East, but reassuringly commensurate with what I had come to expect. I had booked a 4 berth shared cabin, though who I would be sharing with was the unknown. My roommate turned out to be the large form of Mustafa. Egyptian by birth he has been living in London for 40 years, now retired. Claustrophobic, he cannot fly, and so travels to and from Egypt by land and sea. Introducing himself, he had the courtesy of informing me that he was both diabetic and snored heavily. Heavily! He was heavy, and clearly the din that would emanate from him would be raucous. I sighed inwardly that for the next three nights and two days I was to be cosseted with him. I went in search of a late supper, and found one of the shipping agents. As I told him of my dilemma, he spoke to the purser, who kindly gave me the key to a cabin of my own. What fortune was this? Removing myself from confines of Mustafa, I retired to my own cabin, exhausted after a tiring day doing….. nothing. I ‘mustafa’ good night’s rest!! (hoho)

Ferry journeys are what I am sure prison must be like. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, terrible food – the difference being you have to pay for it – and the TV on every conceivable channel other than the one you want to watch! Still my sentence was light, and Wednesday morning dawned. Mohammed the purser woke us with the tannoy at 6am, and by 8.45am we were docked, cleared of customs and on our way in a light drizzle.

I had forgotten how expensive Europe was, and by then end of the day, as I found an hotel in Annecy, France, I had spent an astonishing 50€ on road tolls, and 25€ to get through the Monte Blanc tunnel. Still, with 400 miles under my belt still using Egyptian petrol, it could have been worse!

Re-fuelled, re-energised by ten hours uninterrupted sleep, I set off again. The day had dawned dry and sunny, and all looked well for another long day on the road. As I was rounding a roundabout, I was congratulating the bike on having performed so well. Over 20,000 miles, 18 countries, some of them more than once, and hardly a hiccup. Granted we had new bearings in Italy, after Morocco, and a service in Ankara, but all in all she had done sterlingly, and was clearly due some congratulations. 16.2 miles outside Annecy, the old girl chugged, coughed and spluttered… Had I spoke too soon…?

I just couldn’t face heading further south towards the Sudanese border to visit Aswan, the first Nile cataracts (going upstream) and Lake Nasser. It seemed a few kilometres too far to head south only to retrace exactly the same route and bear West-North-West into the Western Desert, The White Desert, The Black Desert and then the edges of the Great Sand Sea and the Siwa Oasis. All in all, a whole lotta desert and not a lot in between!

If you leave Luxor heading north north-west, direction Cairo, the second Oasis you reach is Dakhla. It’s not quite what I was expecting. This dusty town, with dustier still trees, has little to hold you rapt, and so after the usual breakfast of over-boiled egg, plastic processed cheese, stale bread, and rocket fuel coffee – included in the room rate – I set off for the Bahariya Oasis. The desert is a mysterious and hostile environment, the wind whipping horizontally across the road at such velocity I had to ride at a permanent lean into it. Neck ache, back ache, knee ache, in fact almost everything was beginning to ache, and the landscape so monotonous in its dreariness I had a couple of sleepy moments. Fortunately you can count the number of vehicles which pass you on one hand, so the occasional wandering goes un-noticed.  The deserts I was crossing were not the fabled deserts of shifting dunes. They were for the most part, other than the occasional rocky outcrop appearing, flat, and flatter still. The most interesting moment of the day was passing through the White Desert, so called not because of the colour of the sand, which was what I had been expecting, but the glacially white limestone / chalky rock which forms this plateau. Because the wind is laced with abrasive sand, and fairly constant, the rock shapes protruding from the desert floor wouldn’t be out of place in either Alice in Wonderland or a Dali-esc sculpture. It is said this whole region was once under water, and I was later told, not too far further afield you can see whale bones, bleached by the sun and scoured by the wind, lying skeletal in the middle of the desert.

The Bahariya Oasis is the staging point for the 280 mile (450km) crossing to the Siwa Oasis, which by the 1920’s was reputed to have only 45 male inhabitants left – being Egypt, it doesn’t say how many women there were, but presumably enough to look after the men! It was so isolated it took 600 years for Islam to reach here, the inhabitants in the 1400’s still praying to the ancient Pharonic gods. However isolated it may have been, there is now an asphalt road linking it to the other Oasis’s, Cairo and Alexandria, albeit the first 134 miles out of Bahariya is a knackered, potholed, sand strewn, and bouncy decaying “road”. Because the Egyptians like to make sure no tourists get lost, or they just want your money, you have to get a permit to traverse this section of nothingness, and you have to have a guide car. Typically, had I been allowed to ride the road on my own, I would have left at 8am to make sure I made it in daylight. We were told the convoy would be leaving at 11am (Egypt time). This translated to 1.30pm real time, and so with a good 7 hours hard riding stretching in front of us, off we set. It was not a propitious start. I was joining the convoy of an Italian couple, who had been cycling here and there for 15 days, but were not allowed to cross this section by bicycle. They had a driver and one car, their bikes another, and I had a car to myself!  Their driver was a buffoon of the first order. I had tried to set out the previous day, but been turned back at the first check point, and so I was aware of the road. For some reason the driver lead us past the turn to the first check point, which did strike me at the time, and then turned right to join a proposed new highway a long way short of ever seeing hardcore, let along asphalt. Off he sped in a cloud of dust and sand, and me? Well I got bogged, utterly. So bogged, the old girl was able to stay upright all by herself. Eventually, even the buffoon got stuck, and had to turn back. When he reached me, both the Italian man and I had to be restrained from clobbering him! Eventually, I was hauled out by three men, and we retraced our steps to try the hardcore side-road to the check point. Once we were all stopped to show our passes, the Italians tried to change driver and vehicle, I was restrained again, and someone promised the buffoon would be controlled!

Deciding to make full use of my escort, I unloaded the bike of all its contents, and told them to keep up if they could! Actually, it was more me having to search the far distance to see where all of my luggage had vanished to, as the cars were able to speed along on the semi hard desert crust, whilst I had to bounce along on the deteriorating road – I didn’t want to chance hitting a soft section of sand, and be sent tumbling. I would occasionally get a glimpse of the convoy as they waited for me at any of the 7 checkpoints along the way. These remote concrete bunkers housed a few miserable soldiers, for who knows how long at a time, to check the steady to-ing & fro-ing of the not quite hordes, but steady flow of tourists, wanting to hop from one dusty desert outpost to the next.

At 5pm, we all stopped for tea, and I took the opportunity to reload the bike. I wasn’t sure otherwise if I would ever find my kit again, and the bumps were all behind me. Just as well I did. Once ‘shai’ was finished, we all set off, and I took the lead. I had a note to get me though the checkpoints, and as my teeth chattered and I shivered in the growing desert evening chill for the final two hours in the dark, I eventually found an hotel at gone 7.30pm. I met the Italians the following day. They had made it in to the oasis and their hotel at 8.45pm, having had to change a wheel, due to some tomfoolery by the buffoon. Still, thankful for small mercies, we all arrived safely, if somewhat late.

The oasis is the largest of the many on the desert route, with a population now of 22,000 odd. It sits on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, which stretches across into Lybia, down to the Sudan, and covers an expanse of immense proportions. It has a profusion of hot and cold springs, and a large lake supporting a variety of aquatic and bird life. Dates here are reputed to be the best in Egypt, though in my opinion, those from Saudi are the best – I was just coming to the end of my kilo I had bought as energy snacks in Jordan, and how long ago did that seem. Flora had left me in Damascus on 10^th October, a full three weeks ago, and I had somehow ridden over 3000 miles in those three weeks, most of it through desert of one kind or another. Having seen so much of it of one kind or another, I took the LP’s advice and enjoyed the laid back approach to life Siwa is renowned for, spurning the temptation to take a 4×4 into the Great Sand Sea. Deserts… phffff! Done them!!

My final desert ride was a short 400 mile nip north to the Mediterranean coast, and eastwards to Alexandria. I set off early to avoid the traffic (!), arriving ready to kick back for three days, and enjoy the seafood Alexandria is famed for. No more chicken and rice for me please! I’ll have giant shrimps, fish of all kinds, seafood until I burst, and all for, E£70 (£8)…!