Well this started, 7 months ago, March '09 to be precise.
My friend Mo and I were talking about Martina Jisbrant, who was walking the El Camino de Santiago in Spain. Which is an 800km long famous Christian pilgrimage.
I was amazed by the fact that she's doing it. We discussed how cool it will be to do something like that. Mo said "well you don't have to go to Spain to do it... probably there's something to be done around here, in Egypt or the region"
The thing is that since we are Egyptians, we suffer from the fact that to travel to any country, wherever it is. We have to get a visa, from the country's embassy, which is a long tiring process, lots of paper work, you have to prove that you are coming back, you have to prove you have this X amount of money in your bank account... bla bla bla and all that racial discrimination we have to deal with because we are a third world country, and Europe or wherever, is our unseen Eden.
We started thinking if we can walk to Jordan perhaps through Israel or Palestine... Yeah why not! started searching a bit... We then came up with the idea of cycling... starting from Taba (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.226493,34.741516&spn=1.061818,2.469177&z=9)
through Israel to Jerusalem, down to Eilat, Eilat to Petra.
This was the initial plan, we started searching the internet and found this website (www.downtheroad.com) They are an amazing couple Tim and Cindie Travis, who have been cycling the globe for 7.5 years, very admiring and inspiring. We learned a lot from their website, and in specific regarding the equipment, since we know nothing what the equipment was all about.
We live in Cairo, and Cairo is an anti-cycling city. In fact Cairoanians despise cyclists and always try to run them over. It's like fighting pagans in the old days.
The idea of cycling through Israel after some surveying seemed to be more of a dream, as we have troubles getting across the border to Palestine or Israel, specially from our side. So we decided to abandon the idea, and take the other route. Which is from to cycle to Neiubaa a few kms from Taba, take a ferry across to Aqaba in Jordan cycle to Petra, and then go the way back.
It sounded perfect and we were set.
Since we are living in an anti-cyclist culture then obviously we don't have proper bicycle shops or bicycle mechanics or anything related to decent cycling. Mostly are cheap children bicycles... So you can imagine how challenging was the challenge of searching for a bicycle was.
Thankfully, we have only one single shop which sells decent bicycles at very high prices. This shop is called "Besceltta" and if you are a cycling tourist and you happen to have passed by Cairo. This is probably your only stop for decent bicycle parts, just don't have high expectations.
So we went to "Besceltta" to our luck the owner was there. A very nice well spoken gentleman, and we started discussing with him the possibilities of supporting us with a bicycle that is capable of cutting a bit over 2000km, to Jordan and back. He was so excited about the idea and he gave us his full support. We ordered the bicycles "Gitane 300GTN" this is an entry level road bike, so i will never recommend it to anyone planning a cycling trip, but it's all we could afford, plus we'd still be equipping it with all the touring gear, but it has an amazingly good Aluminium frame, all the rest are just details that can be upgraded later on.
We paid almost double the bike's original price had to order it from France, waited for like a month and a half. Finally it has arrived and i'm the happiest person alive...
