It's been a while; what with the want of good connections and the demands of the road time slips by. I'm in Nairobi with an extra day to rest giving me the time to bring this story up to date through the next series of posts.

We crossed the border from Sudan into Ethiopia at Metema, a border town that intersected two worlds: one Muslim, the other predominantly Christian. However there seemed to be an easy flow of people crossing both ways. We waited four hours for all the paperwork to be finalized for the Tour vehicles, sitting in a café … Continue reading Metema to Gondar →

We have spent almost a month in or at the edge of deserts. From the start water has been a consistent theme. We are lectured by staff on how to conserve and use this limited, precious resource. We discuss it among ourselves: the water we need to survive—always available to us; the water we want … Continue reading Water →

No consistent connections for the last ten days. We are now in Gondar in northern Ethiopia. By happenstance I see that it is February 14, Valentine’s Day. It should be Saint Valentine’s I suppose. Not a figure of importance here, in this predominantly ancient Orthodox community (not a Valentine’s card to be seen anywhere), although, … Continue reading Desert Days →

Did Luxor exist? Did we pass by there in a swirl of wheels and spokes and dust? The road erases the past as wind sweeping over messages scratched in the desert sand. It hardly allows for a future. It is a perennial now, this foot on this pedal on this segment of tarmac. The Pharaohs … Continue reading Now Sudan →

Yesterday we biked into Luxor with a motorcycle police escort after two days of hard cycling. We had crossed over the Red Sea Mountains, some sixty kilometers of climbing and another eighty-five through barren desert to our camp site. We made camp by the road side at a police check point. A dozen or so … Continue reading Luxor →

It’s one thing to spend an hour on a bike trainer or in a spin class. It proves quite something else to sit in a saddle for five, six or seven hours. The last time I did anything like that was 38 years ago when a friend and I, on a lark, decided to ride … Continue reading The Rhythm of the Road →

We’re two days on the road now. Yesterday, day one, we gather by the big truck. There is a febrile tension in the air; this is what we've come for; this is what we've been waiting for; what we've been so apprehensive about. We are at the start of our four-month pilgrimage into the unknown. … Continue reading It Begins →

Our third morning in Cairo. A couple of days to recover, explore, acclimatize. Our time is too short to get a deeper sense of the place but we are beset by a welter of fleeting and striking impressions: the dust storm on our first day, fine sand sifting through everything; a constant stream of pedestrians … Continue reading The Gathering →

At Toronto airport, all checked in and ready to fly off into the unknown. As I was lying in bed very early this morning thinking wouldn’t it be nice to have just another ordinary Saturday home day: a nice cup of coffee, the weekly visit to the organic market to shop and shoot the breeze … Continue reading Possibility →