As you can well imagine, 100 foreign cyclists, heading out on an epic bicyling journey where hardly anyone even rides a bike for fun, attracts quite the crowd. At home, this would likely be a crowd of like minded individuals, fellow riders, keen travellers, friends, family, etc. Here however, our fan club here, is slightly different.
I guess you could say that in which ever country you look at us from, the one uniting factor is that we might be seen as kind of a big deal? So if you were to have a job, say like a police man, an army official, or work for the Egyptian special forces, and you weren't really all that busy with your job, but you wanted to be a big deal, well, where else would you go? You would go to where people might assume that you are also a big deal, right?
Now the Tour D'Afrique is required to hire a police car in Egypt as part of standard tourist regulations. The army and some semblance of the CIA however, were never brought into questions, and yet, the snowballing of the Very Important People that we collected during our desert stretch was a new exciting surprise each and every day. For a few nights we were even blessed by the presence of a fire truck to accompany us all through the night. Thank heaven! What would we have doen without a fire truck?!
I suppose this would be fine considering the police are fairly useless and didn't do too much to help or hinder via there intentional actions, but what they did add to the tour, was at least an additional 10 extra mouths to feed each night. It's not like you can say no in the middle of the desert, but it's not like you can just nip out to the store either. We just started to expect new friends and prepare accordingly.
The real help that they offered us though, was they fact that they really had no idea what we were up to. At night, they would be loud as hell when everyone who just biked 200k that day was trying to sleep. When we would be trying to pack up and drive out at 6:30 in the morking so that the lunch truck could get to lunch before the fastest racers, they will have double parked all of our vehicles in, be hidden off somewhere smokng shisha, and would then have go herd them away and into their vehicles to get going. It's not easy to explain why you're in a massive rush at 6:30 in the morning, in a country where nothing happens fast, especially to someone who is 'in charge' of all. A little bit of yelling and gesturing goes a long way.
Some days the 'CIA' looking men, the guys in suits with biggie guns on their belts, would decide to ride with us instead of in their own vehicles. Ok, so everyone has left, all the vehicles but one have pulled away, and now we have three men in suits that we have to pack into the one remaining back seat of the truck with everything else we're carrying for the day. Cool, thanks for coming out guys, can't thank you enough.
For the most part harmless, but just has to make you laugh when your only interactions with 'authority' are to feed them, tell them it's time to go to bed now, and then to rush them to put on their shoes and socks, put down the smoke and get the day started.
In two days we move onto Sudan. I think I might expect more of the same.
I guess you could say that in which ever country you look at us from, the one uniting factor is that we might be seen as kind of a big deal? So if you were to have a job, say like a police man, an army official, or work for the Egyptian special forces, and you weren't really all that busy with your job, but you wanted to be a big deal, well, where else would you go? You would go to where people might assume that you are also a big deal, right?
Now the Tour D'Afrique is required to hire a police car in Egypt as part of standard tourist regulations. The army and some semblance of the CIA however, were never brought into questions, and yet, the snowballing of the Very Important People that we collected during our desert stretch was a new exciting surprise each and every day. For a few nights we were even blessed by the presence of a fire truck to accompany us all through the night. Thank heaven! What would we have doen without a fire truck?!
I suppose this would be fine considering the police are fairly useless and didn't do too much to help or hinder via there intentional actions, but what they did add to the tour, was at least an additional 10 extra mouths to feed each night. It's not like you can say no in the middle of the desert, but it's not like you can just nip out to the store either. We just started to expect new friends and prepare accordingly.
The real help that they offered us though, was they fact that they really had no idea what we were up to. At night, they would be loud as hell when everyone who just biked 200k that day was trying to sleep. When we would be trying to pack up and drive out at 6:30 in the morking so that the lunch truck could get to lunch before the fastest racers, they will have double parked all of our vehicles in, be hidden off somewhere smokng shisha, and would then have go herd them away and into their vehicles to get going. It's not easy to explain why you're in a massive rush at 6:30 in the morning, in a country where nothing happens fast, especially to someone who is 'in charge' of all. A little bit of yelling and gesturing goes a long way.
Some days the 'CIA' looking men, the guys in suits with biggie guns on their belts, would decide to ride with us instead of in their own vehicles. Ok, so everyone has left, all the vehicles but one have pulled away, and now we have three men in suits that we have to pack into the one remaining back seat of the truck with everything else we're carrying for the day. Cool, thanks for coming out guys, can't thank you enough.
For the most part harmless, but just has to make you laugh when your only interactions with 'authority' are to feed them, tell them it's time to go to bed now, and then to rush them to put on their shoes and socks, put down the smoke and get the day started.
In two days we move onto Sudan. I think I might expect more of the same.
awesome and awesome!
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