Egypt - Part 1 Getting there

The sparsely populated and air conditioned bus trundled over the sand covered, pitted road through the desolate desert. The motley crew of e generation holiday makers inside were getting nervous - "What have we done?", "Where have we come?", "What the fuck is this place?", "There is nothing here - it is just fucking endless desert!".

The Evian had nearly run out, soon there would be only unbranded sparkling mineral water. A blond women looked desperately for her Evian face spay but she covered her face with her hands in despair as she realised she must have left it in her flat in Fulham.

The air con was struggling to compete with the blazing heat. Our fashionable London garb seemed ridiculously inappropriate for the Sahara. Some poor fool was still wearing a suede jacket. Occasionally one of us broke into a mild sweat. A women from Clapham held her baby to her chest as it squirmed and struggled looking like it was about cry. She fanatically searched in her Karimore back pack beneath the iPod and lonely planet guide for a dummy but it was too late. The people around her were slightly annoyed. She mouthed the word sorry but no one looked - we were all lost in our own personal hell.

As for me, well .. my ipod was nearly out of juice - it was never going to make it - i knew it, it knew it. I tried to forget its impending death and enjoy the last of the ambient tunes beating though my brain in time to the passing rolling waste land, turned from a glaring yellow to a relaxed amber by the tint of my oakleys.

I imagined a spot where a hundred years ago a young man, driven to the foreign legion by the shame of an inappropriate affair, took his last rasping breath through black cracked lips, his final thoughts realising he would never make to the coast where a boat waited to take him back to his one true love. But we speed on and past in our cool luxury - the wheels of the bus kicking up a cloud of dust and sand behind us.

The reps were getting worried too - the eta was 5 but it was already nearly 515.- surely it was around here somewhere. Then there it was - a shimmering gold mirage oasis in the desert heat. Before we got there the sun went down- darkness falling like a door slamming shut. So it was only two huge flood lit sand stone pillars that marked the entrance. There was no fence on either side and it seemed their sole purpose was to mark the point where the road went from the desert to desert owned by the hotel. A sign post would have been a more efficient and lighter solution but regardless we had arrived.