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| Day 98, 2011/08/07 |
I have decided to not go to Suez but rather go directly to Cairo. The distance is less than I expected and being 450 km, it is most certainly manageable in one day. I get up early to make sure I miss the intense midday heat, and am on the road by 6 am. As I progress along the road, fighting some extremely strong headwinds, does the magnitude of today's ride start to cement itself in my mind. Yeah, I am only 450 km from crossing Africa! Well Johannesburg, I'd not Cape Town, and I guess to be accurate, I should infect get to Alexandria and the Mediterranean to be precise but, for all intense and purposes, I would have accomplished all those 98 days ago. As Cairo gets closer, I can feel the excitement slowly build up in me and I start to appreciate what an accomplishment it is. Many are keen to do something like this but never have balls, funds, time to. Yeah I guess how many modern day working people, with family commitments, can afford to do something like this. Not many, let alone the fact that many of us in the modern world are too busy chasing money to stop and smell the roses and actually there is more to life than big pay cheques, fancy cars and snobbish suburbs!
Anyway, the road North follows the coast almost the entire way, passing many oil fields and refineries. I even happen to go past the biggest wind farm I have ever seen. It is so long that, it stretches for over 10km. Impressive!
The road eventually turns away from the coast approximately 50 km from Suez and heads North Westerly 120 km towards Cairo. The road is pleasantly quiet until about 20 km from Cairo, when I hit the infamous Ring Road. Oh boy,what a nightmare! It is a 4 lane highway. Not that anyone actually uses the lanes to travel in. And almost all the cars have dents and scratches on them! Not the kind of stuff you want to start riding thru after about 5 hours of bike riding! Also, the GPS has a limited road set, so I battle at a number of junctions on the highway to be in the correct lane for the split offs. Not fun! It feels like a real live version of those Play Station arcade games, like Need for speed, or gone in 60 seconds! Just everyone else is in a car, and i am the only idiot on a bike!
After negotiating about 15 km of Ring Road, i finally get routed off the freeway onto a main road and into the backup traffic. It is about 12 noon, and the temp must be close to 35 degrees. So I start to melt in my biking gear. One nightmare into another! I force myself through the traffic and manage to scratch numerous cars with my soft panniers. In South Africa, i would have been shot dead by tue motorists for that, no one blinks an eye here. The GPS eventually routes me through Tahrir Square, where the Egyptian Revolution of 25 th January this year h taken place. The place is wall to wall army and riot police however, i am not overcome by fear and feel actually very safe. It is not far from there that I find my hotel for my stay,The Berlin Hotel. It has aircon and safe parking, what else can a biker ask for!
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