Luxor is home to the Valley of Kings, the temple of Karnuk and the temple of Luxor. For overlanders there is one place to stay in Luxor and it is Rezeiky camp. It is run and owned by a very friendly and helpful Coptic Christian, Mr Rezeiky. We made it our base for a few days while we visited most of the temples. One utter stupid thing about the major attractions is that they do not allow any photos to be taken of the temples or inside the tombs. So we can say we were there but we have not a single photo to show for it. And beware, to visit all the temples will shrink a budget traveler’s budget in no time at all.
Back in Ethiopia my front fork seals took a beating and both pissed out most of the oil. I was in no mood to fix it in the heat of Sudan and as such carried on all the time while oil pissed out onto the front brake, over my bike and to Elsebie’ horror my pants. We took this opportunity to get them fixed. Fork oil is not something that is readily available in Luxor. The owner none the less sends his help to fetch me some fork oil. What he brought back was something more with the consistency of rusty murky water, but it was definitely not fork oil.
If that is it then, that is what will have to work in this bike till Europe. In any case the nice off-road riding was a thing of the past for now.
It was in Hurgada the sea side holiday resort town that our trip got halted with a sudden urgency. We booked into a cheap dodgy establishment which was only good for poorer bottom of the barrel scraping travelers like ourselves. It was clean and…………well, it was clean let’s leave it at that.
After our accident in Sudan, Elsebie nursed her knee for 4 weeks and it looked like it was healing albeit slowly. The injury from our view point did not look to be too serious. A few days before, an Egyptian pseudo-ointment quack tried to swindle us into buying his toxic potion made of white pig lard, cow shit and other unholy ingredients which yet had to be named by science and which does not exist on the Periodic table.
In any case this quack saw Elsebie’s knee and before she knew what hit her were made to sit on a small 3 legged chair and he rubbed this shit into the wound, she stopped him and try to get out as much as possible. We could only surmise that, that must have been the root of the infection as her knee showed healing in the 3 and half weeks prior to this.
Her knee did not look well, it was swollen with the typical signs of infected red flesh. Only option was to see a Dr and since it’s a big town they would have a hospital. She left us at a coffee shop while she went to the hospital. Two hours later she called and informed us the Dr wanted 8000usd as deposit and that he wants to operate the same.
It left us between a rock and a hard place. There were no way we would give a Dr 8000usd and that as deposit. We have learned from our mistakes in Egypt and that would only result in more horror extortion afterwards. Also even if she did get an operation in Egypt we cannot stay for months for her to recover. We decided to leave the bikes in Cairo and fly back home the next day.
Antoine offered to ride her bike for me to Cairo and she and Carlene will use a rental car to get to Cairo. I called the South African embassy in Cairo and Johnny one of the higher up managers immediate told me that we could leave the bikes in the basement in the embassy until we return. This was the first time I have ever experience this kind of help from any government department and people.
Needless to say, the next day with the bikes parked we flew back to South Africa.