Visa's, Taxi's, Accidents and Justice

We put our passports into the Ethiopian Embassy in Cairo. A 24 hour process and it doesn't seem to matter when you put them in they are ready at 2pm the next day. They wanted the sudan Visa in our passport first but we got round that hurdle with relative ease.Its $30US each and a pretty simple form. All they wanted was a single passport photo paperclipped to the application. We need to buy a box of paperclips......Can someone send us the stapler and paperclips we got especially for the trip?,,,, and forgot.

The sudan Visa will be tomorrow having picked up the completed Ethiopian today. We went to the Sudan office and the UK office to check out th process. The Sudanese want :-
2 passport Photos each
Copy of completed applications form
Origional application form completed
Copy of Passports
Copy of Egypt Visa
Origional Passports of course
A letter off the UK Embassy (costing £45 EACH !!!!!)
$100US EACH !!!!

So tomorrow we go the UK Embassy for the letter. Get ripped off to the tune of £90 and then go to the Sudan embassy and get ripped off to the encore of $200US.

We also went to the Museum in Cario today. Its nowhere near Tahir square honest.......So we survived that. We wern't impressed by the museum, its poorly layed out, poorly signed, poorly run, poorly lit and is very dirty. The artifacts altough wonderful should be dusted once a century. The security is laughable and its expensive. If you want a guide (and really you actaully need one) its £100E for one hour. Worth it, but it shouldn't be required. Its shame that such a marvellous collection is so poorly presented. I was actually more interested in some of the old photos of where the stuff came from before they moved it to a Museum. The statues from Abydos should have stayed there and would make that wonderful temple even more so. Anyhow enough museum bashing.

We yet again got a Taxi driver who decided to rip us off.blatently going in completely the wrong way to which i started  telling him off. Once he realised i know which direction was north and which direction we needed to go he started to go in almost the right direction only to attempt the same at the other side of the river comning off at the wrong junction. At this point i started ranting and rattled him to the point that he had an accident ( Justice ! ). I said "we're gettign out and you can have £5E" leaving him to sort out the accident. The meter was already at £8E and we should have been at our destination at £7E. I wasn't happy and we wern't where we wanted to be. So we walked. The Taxi in the morning reset the meter half way through the journey. He also got £5E which i threw on the dash when he asked for £15E ...I was going to give him £15E for the journey (actually about £7E as the same journey) until he tried to rip up off. Again, not happy. Why do they do this. I tip very well having already paid £30E for journeys costing £20E ! Its only 3 quid for £30E so not really worth bothering about but trying to rip me off no mater how small is unacceptable. One of the non-meter taxi's wanted £40E ! We walked away.
 
Photo's of the pyramids and stuff later as this battery doesn't last long enough to do it without power and somewhere to sit down.

The Doctor (Dr. mustafa farhmy. A doctor of Engineering for my mothers benefit and not a medical Doctor) has been looking after us and has even got me a new Axe. Would you believe it. I can now threated the border guards with something larger than a swiss army knife. We even got an excursion to the market and coffee houses last night and altough the market wasn't full of the normal tourists you could have certainly spent way too much money and filled the land rover. Julie and I both agreed that we'd like one or two things but just cannot get them in here for the next two years and sending them home is impossible.