Egypt Dead End for Overland Travel

Egypt Dead End for Overland Travel

I am pouring over maps trying to come up with my next move from the Middle East, and it is seeming as if Egypt is one big dead end for onward overland travel.

Chaya is flying back to Maine out of Cairo on the 27th of this month, and I want to travel with her over the border crossings to Egypt. I will probably continue traveling for a while after she returns to the USA, but I am finding that I will be will left in Cairo without an open gate for an onward move.
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Wade in Aleppo, Syria
April 14, 2009
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I want to leave Egypt, I know this. But where to? I am caught in a Catch-22 of travel:I do not want to stay in Egypt, I do not have enough money to buy a plane ticket out of Egypt, it seems extremely difficult to cross by land into either Libya or Sudan, I do not want to go to Israel, and I also do not think that I will want to turn around and return to Jordan.

I looked into the possibility of traveling across Libya, but the sporadic visa granting policies and the inherant hassles of gaining permission to enter this country far outweigh my resiliance to travel in this direction. I have also thought about crossing Sudan, but it seems as if I would have to fly to Khartoum and then hope on my lucky stars that I will be granted the permits to travel south to Ethiopia. Both of these routes seem like beurrecratic disaster areas, and I do not have the cash to grease the wheels of progress.

If I had the travel funds I would fly from Cairo to Addis Abbaba and travel in Ethiopia. I want to go this way so badly that I can almost taste it. I think of East Africa and I dream of East Africa: I want to get to Ethiopia. But I also need to have an exit strategy planned so that I can get back to an air travel hub and fly back to the USA for the birth of my first child in August. Cairo is a good hub to transfer through to get to New York. But it looks from here as if it will cost me around $500 to get a round trip ticket from Cairo to Addis Abbaba.

This is way too much money. My pockets are not weighted with $500 to spend on an extra flight right now.

But I also know that I am not good at taking no for an answer. I am even worse at confincing myself that I can’t do what I want to do. I am looking at the last time in my life that I will be able to travel on my own before I will be a father and have father duties and responsibilities. For many years I knocked about the world solo or with just a partner, and I am absolutely freigntened to let these days go. I want one last go on my own before I jump into the life of traveling with a family.

I want to go to Ethiopia.

But how?

Where are the overland travel possibilities?

Egypt Dead End for Overland Travel