Cairo Times…
On January 8th I left Calgary to begin the easy part of the next five months of travel – the flights to Cairo, Egypt. 
Along the way - from the Calgary Airport through Heathrow and into Cairo I met up with four fellow TDA riders. Ian from England, Ester from Australia, Michael from Edmonton and Beverly from Toronto. After over 24 hours of travel, weary but excited, we finally arrived into Cairo and my new best friends, our bikes and bags of goodies were fetched from the airport and taken to our hotel. The fact that we arrived around 2am local time acted as no deterrent to start unpacking, reassembling our bikes and preparing our bags for the truck. Here’s to hoping everything pictured on my hotel bed is less that our strict weight limit of 100 pounds!
With Egypt making the news almost daily recently, I was keen to check out the situation in Tahrir Square for myself – don’t tell my mom. This is my fourth visit to Cairo over the years and as much as I love the charm of the city – I wouldn’t describe it as clean or well manicured. In fact, Egypt has a law that you don’t have to pay property tax on a building until it is finished. Every building in the country is left in an unfinished state of one form or another – making the entire country look like a construction site. But in this visit the mass amounts of garbage, statues covered in graffiti and surrounding buildings burnt to the ground were something I had never seen here before. I asked a local why some buildings were torched and others left untouched – he told me the buildings that were owned by Mubarak were the targets of the riots. Pictured here is one of those buildings – the National Counsel for Women.
Over the past few days the riders have been arriving from around the world with the last rider arriving this afternoon. Just as the TDA organization clearly states there is no one kind of bike that is perfect for the trek, it is also becoming obvious that there is no one kind of rider that takes on this challenge. We have Carlos the handbag designer from Spain, Andrew Younghusband - the host of Canada’s Worst Driver, Bob, retired US Army from Florida, Gennesse a 61 year old woman from Australia – (after biking the length of Africa, she will fly to Canada and bike across the country – then into the US and bike across the States before returning to Australia one year later – seriously!!!!) and EVERYONE imaginable in between. As the riders arrive and introduce themselves I am happy to learn there are a variety of cycling skill levels and bike knowledge, everyone is here for a different reason and best of all – I might actually not be the slowest – or the craziest!
We had our first of two bike meetings today followed by a one hour ‘fun’ ride though the streets of Cairo at 5pm. The usual warning shouts of ‘bike back’ among cyclists when a bike is approaching from behind were instead replaced with screams of ‘bus coming from left full speed’, desperate hollers of ‘pack of goats straight ahead’ and the occasional shriek of ‘look out for the ox cartttttttttttt’! We are definitely in for a crazy four months for certain.
On Saturday morning we will depart from the pyramids with our police escort out of town. And the pedaling for the next 12,000 km will begin!
