I am in a room which has a semblance of order, two sleeping men, and three fully laden bicycles. Today three years of dreams will find their reality and we start cycling to Cape Town. 12 500 km. That is longer than I can imagine and holds endless possibility for the spectacularly good and spectacularly awful.
I fell off a camel yesterday. All was well and despite the ridiculously bad camel breath, and a saddle less comfortable than that of my bicycle, I was relatively happy with my young Egyptian groom and his camel. With the words “lean back” and a sudden movement likened only to that of a mechanical bull, I was on top of the two meter plus beast, and loping down the streets of Giza.
We paid 50 Egyptian pounds to our guide and found ourselves within a cordoned off area designating the beginning of the desert – complete with sand dunes and pyramids. Phenomenal! It was only when we were given the reigns to our camels and told to race them, that my Alice the camel who has two humps… decided to “go Alice go!” I neatly started into a gentle trot, even practising my early equestrian upbringing. But I was flawed when Alice suddenly changed gait into what felt like a canter but was probably nothing more than a sidestep from Niall’s camel that was charging up behind. I simply couldn’t take it any longer and did a neat sideways roll to the floor. Camels are pretty high. And there’s a certain wooden peg on the saddle that makes life fairly inconvenient when one is in the process of falling.
My pride bruised more than my leg – which was to shortly turn all shades of purple – I righted myself and realigned my clothes just in time to watch Niall suffer a worse fate as he took a forward roll into the sand. He got up a little dazed and confused and seriously lucky to have escaped a certain neck injury. My pride recovered.
We are closer in years to the birth of Christ than the pyramids are. I stood in front of these monumental structures and was unable to comprehend their age. Some of the team went inside the tombs and one of the smaller pyramids, I was content to simply sit at the foot of this giant tomb and try to understand the magnitude of what I was looking at. In addition, it allowed me to recover from the fall which was starting to make itself a more tangible memory!
I fell off a camel yesterday. All was well and despite the ridiculously bad camel breath, and a saddle less comfortable than that of my bicycle, I was relatively happy with my young Egyptian groom and his camel. With the words “lean back” and a sudden movement likened only to that of a mechanical bull, I was on top of the two meter plus beast, and loping down the streets of Giza.
We paid 50 Egyptian pounds to our guide and found ourselves within a cordoned off area designating the beginning of the desert – complete with sand dunes and pyramids. Phenomenal! It was only when we were given the reigns to our camels and told to race them, that my Alice the camel who has two humps… decided to “go Alice go!” I neatly started into a gentle trot, even practising my early equestrian upbringing. But I was flawed when Alice suddenly changed gait into what felt like a canter but was probably nothing more than a sidestep from Niall’s camel that was charging up behind. I simply couldn’t take it any longer and did a neat sideways roll to the floor. Camels are pretty high. And there’s a certain wooden peg on the saddle that makes life fairly inconvenient when one is in the process of falling.
My pride bruised more than my leg – which was to shortly turn all shades of purple – I righted myself and realigned my clothes just in time to watch Niall suffer a worse fate as he took a forward roll into the sand. He got up a little dazed and confused and seriously lucky to have escaped a certain neck injury. My pride recovered.
We are closer in years to the birth of Christ than the pyramids are. I stood in front of these monumental structures and was unable to comprehend their age. Some of the team went inside the tombs and one of the smaller pyramids, I was content to simply sit at the foot of this giant tomb and try to understand the magnitude of what I was looking at. In addition, it allowed me to recover from the fall which was starting to make itself a more tangible memory!
1 comment:
Love your writing diddles!!!! And am so so excited for you!
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