Day 92

Sleeping location: Blessed Virgin Mary church school, Samalut, Egypt
Distance (km today/total): 111 / 7136
Estimated climb (m today/total): 100 / 57700
Captain of the week: Ahmed
Day in three words: Mistakes and egrets

Rebecca woke me up at about 4am to tell me that the floor was covered in two inches of water and the power had gone off. I thought about how this affected me, concluded that it didn’t, told her as much and went back to sleep. The situation was the same when we woke up and packed up, so we just waded around in the water and pretended it wasn't there. Our police escort then didn’t arrive until well after 8, when we had said we wanted to go at 7. The monastery guard wouldn’t let us leave, and I was feeling grumpy after a bad night’s sleep, so I kicked off massively and had quite the rant at him.  Bless him, he was very conciliatory and calmly explained that he understood our annoyance, but this is the system here, and would we like some coffee while we waited. After this I felt really bad and made sure to apologise before we left, which he took in good grace. During the first hour’s riding I had a long think and realised that I had got far more from the reconciliation than from the rant, that this really is the system here and it’s not going to change, and that there’s absolutely no point wasting energy on getting angry about it. I resolved to be nicer to our police in future, although it remains to be seen how easy this will be if we get some more annoying ones.

The scenery today was more of the same: flat roads along fields, Nile channels, with lots of donkeys carrying people/stuff and egrets everywhere. Egrets are little white herons, which are kind of pretty until they start nosing around in piles of rubbish to find food, which they do a lot. The day’s second police captain was a guy called Ahmed who spoke excellent English, which he told us he’d picked up from watching Friends. Sadly he didn’t pepper his conversation with “how you doin’” or “pivot”, but he was nice and even bought us some coffees. Rebecca and I decided to invent a scoring system for our police to make it more fun, with a bonus category of Captain of the Week which Ahmed is a strong candidate for. The next bunch were a bit hands on, and the bunch after that were nice but totally inept. It was like four Mr Beans had been provided with machine guns. During the second bunch I listened to the rugby world cup final on the radio, but after the excitement of the previous Saturday it was a bit of a damp squib. South Africa killed the game expertly; they absolutely deserved the win, but it was a bit boring listening to collapsed scrums and Handre Pollard penalties over and over. At least the Saffers won’t hate me when I arrive there in about five months.

We arrived in Samalut about 4.15pm and asked if we could sleep here. It was the dustiest town I’ve ever experienced, but also bustling and interesting and friendly. The police wanted us to get to Minya, which has hotels, but it was too far and we didn’t want to cycle in the dark (or pay for a hotel). We had to explain this multiple times before they understood. We must come across as incredibly entitled, asking for free accommodation all the time, but they won’t allow us to camp in our usual way so this is how it has to be. We were found some free Christian accommodation for the second night running, this time a school with even nicer rooms than last night. Result. If this trend continues we will be sleeping for free in mansions in a week.



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