Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cairo. It was not going to be easy. It wasn't that I'd never covered thirty-seven kilometres
a day before - Boston and I had done it regularly, pushing up through Rwanda, Tanzania
and Uganda. But that was before my body was broken. Somehow, I hadn't accounted for
the idea that my body might start to rebel along the way. It was, I supposed, the same trick
an athlete's mind plays on his body at the three quarter point of a race - as I approached
the finishing line, I was hitting 'the wall'. Each morning, I woke in agony, unable to even
walk to breakfast. This morning, it had taken an hour of unbearable pain, hobbling slowly
along, before I could convince my brain to stop sending pain receptors to my legs and just
get on with the job at hand - and, all the while, I could hear the policemen barracking me
from their car, tempting me to climb in.
Late in the afternoon, on the outskirts of a small riverside town, I caught up with Turbo.
As he had every day of this interminable march, he handed me a can of soda, filled with
sugars to restore my electrolytes, and a handful of painkillers. I hated it, but I was on a
steady diet of them now - a chunky dose of paracetamol and ibuprofen with every meal of
refried beans and boiled egg. We had reached the stretches of Middle Egypt, where people
seemed to live as their forefathers had done for generations - men in shades of white tilling
the land along the Nile, still working their fields with buffalo-drawn ploughs, while wo-
men in black flitted between the shadows of half-obscured gardens.
'Are you okay, Lev?'
He asked it every time and, like every time, I didn't answer. With the end of the journey
in sight, somehow it seemed further away than ever; perhaps that was why I was at my
wits' end. I'd lost a lot of weight on this journey, my stomach had shrunk so that only one
or two small meals a day seemed enough - and, though I tried to find small moments of
beauty every day, it had become a constant battle. With the eyes of the policemen on my
back, and the insanity of jumping into a car each night to be forcibly ferried to the nearest
guesthouse, I was tired of living in this government-controlled farce.
'I miss it, Turbo.'
'Miss what?'
'What it was like much further upriver. The serendipity of the walk - of meeting people,
different
people, of expecting the unexpected, of . . . Look, I came here to discover Egypt,
but I can't even speak to a local without that lot . . .' I gestured at the policemen still idling
somewhere behind '. . . interrupting. I want to get under the skin of Egypt, the
real
Egypt,
not just the version the government wants me to see.'
'Wait until Cairo, Lev. Ibrahim will show you the real Cairo.'
'Cairo's still two weeks away.'
'Well, what do you want to know?'
