Category: Big Adventures
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Southern Arabia And The Troubles Of Yemen
Until a few months ago, the Republic of Yemen fell into that embarrassingly large category of nations that I would struggle to point out on an unlabelled map. (Try it now. Yemen. Where is it?) Occupying the south-west corner of the Arabian Peninsular, this former British colony nowadays makes the headlines only for its continuing run of kidnappings of and attacks against foreigners by members of Al-Qaeda, the well-known clandestine anti-Zionist/crusader organization fronted by the A‑list celebrity Arab, Osama Bin Laden, which is known to have major operations in the country. Continue reading →
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How I Hitched A Boat From Djibouti To Yemen And Survived The World’s Most Pirated Waters
At seven o’clock one May morning, as the sun was just beginning to make felt its long ascent into the heavens, a wooden Arabian cargo vessel set sail from the Port of Djibouti for the distant shores of Yemen. On board were an eclectic and rowdy Arab crew, a handful of Somali passengers, six hundred miserable-looking Ethiopian cows, and one exhausted Englishman and his bicycle. I had been awake for thirty-eight hours, and as the diesel engine growled into life from the depths of the rickety ship, it didn’t sound like I was going to have much chance of sleeping… Continue reading →
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That Time I Rode A Bicycle Across The Hottest Place On Earth
I gazed out across the plains from my vantage point by a military watch-tower at the eastern edge of the Ethiopian highlands. I was about to leave the familiar craziness of Amhara and to cross the Afar desert, the site of the hottest air temperature ever recorded, and the home of the nomadic Afar tribes. Even by Ethiopian standards, the road was terrible. I had already pedalled over five hundred bone-shaking kilometres along steep mountain tracks. I couldn’t believe my bike was still in one piece, and I was paranoid that something was going to break in the middle of… Continue reading →
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Ethiopa: No Pain, No Gain
I waved goodbye to the Tele Café in the piazza of Gondar, where I’d enjoyed many a delightfully-spicy breakfast or pint of mango juice. I was about to experience a magnificent ride through the soaring highlands of north-central Ethiopia. As I rolled out of town towards the green valleys below, however, I was nervous. Aside from the threat of ill-health making an unwanted comeback, my nerves came from reading too many journals. Those writing about cycling in Ethiopia were far from complimentary – “the single most difficult place I’ve ever cycled because of the human factor”, “the worst roads I’ve… Continue reading →
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Rest And Recuperation In Gondar, Ethiopia
I spent four days in Metema. The mild symptoms of malaria were the lesser of my concerns. More worrying was the stiffness and soreness that quickly appeared in my legs, as if somehow sparked off by the unexpected parasites. By the evening of my arrival, my lower calves were sore and stiff, causing some discomfort when walking. The following morning, after wishing my temporary Austrian companion a safe journey to Sudan, I could barely hobble from my tiny mud-walled room to the latrine across the stony yard. The hotel proprietor, an older woman assisted by her daughters, interrogated me in… Continue reading →
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When Things Go Wrong, How Do You React?
My six days in Khartoum had been somewhat surreal, to say the least. Barging through the dark, dusty, unpaved back streets in a big white United Nations four-by-four, passing observers would have assumed me and my host to be rushing to assist in some nearby international crisis, unaware that we were actually trying to find the district’s only Chinese restaurant to get some fried noodles and a bowl of tofu soup… In a quiet health club studio, incense candles burning, I giggled in embarrassed discomfort as a Thai woman inserted her elbows deep into my aching leg muscles. (My mirth was partly… Continue reading →
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Hard Days in the Sahara
“Four days”, I said to George when he asked me how long it would take to ride to Khartoum. “Depending on how hard I ride, but I think four days is about right.” I had met a rag-tag band of other travellers in the small hotel in Dongola — from Austria, New Zealand, Singapore and England. They’d met on the boat from Egypt a week after I’d made the same voyage. That had been yesterday, and they’d taken the overnight bus to Dongola, covering in a few hours much of the ground through which I’d spent 8 days crawling. Continue reading →
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Biking The Nubian Desert
I rode out of the tiny outpost of Wadi Halfa into the fading light and into the Sahara desert of northern Sudan. I had no map, no guidebook, no sun cream, no insect repellent. A lone man stopped me on the outskirts of the village, his head and body robed and wrapped in loose white cotton which flapped in the brisk evening air. “There are wolves in the desert”, he warned me. “Wolves!!! Do not stop! Do not camp!” Continue reading →
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Along the Egyptian Nile to Luxor
The direction to ride after Cairo was uncertain. I’d been juggling the options for weeks. Previous attempts at the Nile had resulted in police convoys to ‘safer’ places. The Red Sea Coast route didn’t appeal to me after the ugliness and monotony of its opposite shore, and the Western Desert route, beautiful, quiet and remote, would constitute a long, if tempting, detour. But in the end, it wasn’t ’til I was weaving through Cairo’s downtown traffic, Sudanese visa stuck firmly in my passport, that I made my choice. Despite the previous failed attempts, I would try and ride the Nile. Continue reading →
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Cycling To Cairo, Egypt, And Into Africa
I woke at dawn in a drainage channel beneath a main road. It was 90 kilometres to the port in the south of Jordan, from where I would take an overnight ferry the short distance across the Gulf of Aqaba to Nuweiba, on the Sinai peninsular of Egypt. The outside of my tent was crusted with ice. I packed my things and struggled up the bank to the road. It was 6:30am and I pedalled hard to warm up as the day broke. Then the wind began. Continue reading →