I am here in Egypt with Tour d’Afrique. Tonight we are in Safaga on the Red Sea. The first four days of riding are behind us and they have been challenging ones indeed.
The tour staff and myself spent several frantic days in Cairo preparing for the big start of the 2010 Tour d’Afrique. I am here to oversee the start of this year’s tour and to help out with any and all of the day-to-day tasks.
We had long lists of things to buy and meeting agendas to prepare. Shopping for small yet important things in a giant chaotic city like Cairo can be a challenge. I took four hours one day to find 70m of string and an adjustable wrench.
I went from Walmart-style Carrefour shopping complex to the down and dirty streets markets of one of Cairo’s many neighbourhoods.
Since Cairo, the tour has gone relatively smoothly. We headed into the desert and towards the Red Sea. We had a torrential downpour on day two (first such rains in 14 years I heard our local staff saying) that left my tent drenched. Day three was better weather but my body was sore from the last few days of riding.
The police in Egypt are both a help and a hindrance. They are essentially with us every moment from the time we leave our hotel in Cairo to the moment we board the ferry to exit Egypt five days from now.
I discussed this issue at length with Mahmood, one of these police officers who was with us at our camp on day 3. He said that the officers are told to protect us. Their bosses cannot risk any tourists in Egypt being harmed and the reputation of Egypt being a safe tourist destination might be severely damaged if this were to happen.
Without the police, we would simply not be able to pass through Egypt as we do, and so they are to some degree a necessecity and an integral part of the journey.
But when it comes to the low level officers tasked to protect us, some of them really seem to hate it and they also don’t know exactly how or what they are supposed to be doing to help protect us – this almost always leads to confusion, disruption of our route, and constant hassles to make them understnad what our schedule is and how important it is that we keep to it.
Example – after the hard rain the night before, day 3 began with our officers telling us that we were not allowed to continue along the road as the water had flooded the roads they had been given instuctions to stay where we were indefinitely. This is, of course, not possible. We worked on a tight schedule, having made arrangements with police and local couterparts months in advance.
Unfortuantely this meant giving the police an ultimatum – they had 10 minutes to speak with there superiors and then we would proceed as we had planned. So 10 minutes passed and we were on our way and there flooding concerns were unfounded.
I later explained this scenario to Mahmood, and I asked him “what other options did I have?” he replied that the officers in the camp had no choice but to follow orders and I had no choice but to simply carrying on as per our schedule – its a bit of an awkward situation really.
On a positive note, I intend to send a letter to the Cairo police responsible for our convoy out of the city. They did an excellent job and keep all our cyclists safe and happy. Every intersection the entire 40 km of our convoy had an officer stopping traffic for us, and 3 – 5 police cars at any given time were encircling our group, protecting us from the busy morning traffic on the ring road.
Signing off from Egypt, my next update with be from somewhere in Sudan.
