We drove into the port and MC went off to try to complete the customs paperwork for the vehicle and us two. It was absolute chaos, busy and all signage in Arabic only! We were booked on the 11:30am “fast” ferry and for over 30 minutes MC wandered around without a clue what to do! You would queue at one window with other people clutching their carnets only to be sent to another window.
Finally a Tourist policeman said that if I had E£30, another policeman would assist me. This finally meant that at least now someone knew where to go and who to slip the E£5 bungs to. We went from office to office all over the port with MC shelling out pound notes to one and all. We eventually cleared customs at about midday. We could see the ferry still at the dock side, so charged down to it, hoping still to make the 11:30am sailing.
At the dock we were told to wait by another policeman and parked next to a colourful, old Renault 4. This was driven by two Frenchmen who were doing a similar route to us around the Med albeit in less time (2 months). At 12:30pm we all saw the ferry leave with no-one on it! The officials told us that it was not taking passengers and that there would be another ferry at 2pm.
At 3pm a ferry arrived and unloaded its passengers. We got onto the boat at 4pm and it set sail at around 5:30pm. We docked in Aqaba at 7:30pm.
Clearing Jordanian customs was a breeze compared to Egypt and we were out of the port by 8:30pm. We were both tired and hungry, so drove to a hotel in the town we had used before. The Moon Village hotel is a bit tatty and cost 30JD for the night, but it had parking outside for the Land Rover and we could walk into town for a meal at the Chinese restaurant and get a well earned beer!
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