You can probably tell by the title of this day that things did not go according to plan. I got to the Algerian embassy for 8am, waited for it to open, waited to be let inside and then waited to find out if I could get a visa. By 10am, I had my answer. No. You can’t get a visa for Algeria unless you apply for it in your home nation.

Rats.

This was not good news. Kicking myself AGAIN that I didn’t take the boat with Laura on Saturday night, I rang Grimaldi ferries (they put the GRIM in Grimaldi) and they said they couldn’t alter the ticket – I had lost it. Seventy Euro down the drain.

CHINNNNG!! [the sound of Sonic the Hedgehog landing on a spike and losing all of his rings].

After a cheap and cheerful sojourn around Europe, Africa was going to start taking it out of my backside, and wasn’t going to stop.

So I booked on the next boat out of there (not until tomorrow afternoon, mores the pity) and had to ring my parents and Matt the Producer in Barcelona and explain that I would be three days late getting there.

My mum and dad had to re-arrange their flight home.

Africa – you are beginning to SUCK. And I’ve only been here a weekend.

The rest of the day was wasted in fine Odyssey form – I mooched (er, got lost) around the Labyrinth/Medina, DON’T GO INTO THE LABYRINTH, SARAH…!, had lunch with young Chris from the hostel and in the evening met two new hostel recruits, Arthur and Juliet – gap year, Oxford, classics, terribly posh but sweet as hell; and what are they calling their trip around the classical sites of the Mediterranean Carthage-Alexandria-Petra-Palmyra-Troy-Athens-Rome?

You guessed it – The Odyssey. How cool is that?

We tried to go and grab a drink, but it was a little more difficult than we thought it would be: Chris led us somewhere nuts and then promptly vanished in a poof of ‘gotta-girl, gotta-go’; and when we finally did find a fridge full of bottles of Becks, it was past serving o’clock so we had to make do with Coca-Cola.

Oh well.