The system
So we tried to beat the system – it didn’t work. This is in short what happened.
After we arrived in Aswan the fixer called Khemal (as my Arabic is all but non-existent this is probably not how you spell his name, but this is what it sounds like) enters the scene. This was expected as the fixer on the Sudanese-side, Mazar, had told us that Khemal was the person who could speed up the paperwork in Egypt.
Well, it turned out that Mr. K did not speak much English, he had an arrogant attitude and we got bad vibes. So we thought it was better to try and do all the customs paper, the traffic police, the insurance and the new number plates without a fixer.
Now the car finally arrived yesterday and after much discussion with port authorities we managed to get it off the bargethanks to the kind Mr. Nasser and a Mr. Ned and a Mr. Hassan that helped us with the language.
Today we were supposed to do the paperworknow it turned out that everyone in the port wanted Mr. Khemal to do it for us.
We managed to complete the customs form, but then it was just a jokewhen the traffic police finally arrived we couldn’t get our form, because the only person who had forms were Mr. Khemal, and we couldn’t get our car checked, we couldn’t get number plates, we couldn’t get insurancewell, we couldbut then we had to go back into town to get the right form and find the right person and then maybe it could be donetomorrow (and this was now our own fault as we had not hired Khemal to do it from the start, we were bluntly told).
It could be all arranged today – if only we asked Khemal who, against a small fee (it was actually quite small) would help us.
So we gave up. The system had beaten us and we had to ask Khemal to please arrange with the paperwork
Two hours later we could leave the port much thanks to the three Jordanians who helped us through the language barrier, without them I think we would still have been in the harbour trying to understand what was going on….
