Cairo to Capetown... the journey begins

Nearly 40 years ago, aided by a well-thumbed yellow covered backpackers' bible (ie Tony Wheeler's Southeast Asia on a shoestring, before it became the Lonely Planet empire it is now), I travelled from Singapore where I had just concluded my first year of university to my hometown in Malacca and all the way up Peninsular Malaysia to Hatyai, Phuket, Bangkok, Kanchanaburi, Chiangmai and beyond. 

Believing the "bible", I had faith in my shoestring budget - all of a thousand ringgit (earned from giving tuition) - would be enough for an entire month of travel. It was, barely. 

I met other travelers, shared resources with them on common routes, ate and drank simply or not at all, figured out how to keep my unlaundered clothes fresh, survived dehydration and somehow stayed safe throughout. 

Though I don't travel like this anymore, am glad I did it all those decades ago. The main barrier to such trips is the lack of time. I did do another month long journey, across Indonesia, the year after. And I started work and had only 20 working days of leave for the year. So trips got shorter, no more than a couple of weeks each time, like the one across Europe with D and her friends who were on their post university getaway. 

It wasn't until I was in BCG where as a partner, one earns a 2-month sabbatical every 5 years, that I could contemplate such travel. I missed my first window, then back in 2009. In 2014, I did the wanderlust nirvana notion of going Round The World and in our case, we chose the Latin world... so from Singapore we flew via Barcelona to Sao Paolo, then Rio de Janeiro, and over to Lima and Cuzco and then into Miami, Los Angeles and back via Tokyo (yes this doesn't count as Latin but was a much needed sanitiser after the sights and sounds on Ipanema beach and the mountains and sacred valleys at Macchu Picchu. 5 years after that, with the young ones in tow, we took the fabled Silk Road and travelled east to west from Beijing to Xian and through old stations like Dun Huang, Turpan, Kashgar and continued overland into Krygzstan, Tajikistan and finally Uzebkistan. It was mosques, mausoleum, museums all the way. That was just before COVID19 shut down borders across the world and we were lucky we got the big trip out of our system.

This year our plan is to go from Cairo to Capetown. In this journey from the top to the bottom of the continent, we are expecting less sights and more mess. It's the continent that humans first started and fanned out to populate the rest of the world. Yet, till today, it's infrastructure remains poor. There was no direct flight to Cairo from Singapore for example. And from a distance, Africans seemed poorer, less educated, more pessimistic and in some countries you can't tell its political leaders from village shamans. It's done to them by people with bad as well as good intents, sadly: manipulated by their governments, befooled by foreign experts, kept needy by foreign charities. 

This is our first morning on the continent and we're awaken at 7am sharp by the church bell ringing. It was next to our apartment. I was expecting a muezzin call to prayer for the mosque given this is a Muslim majority country but churches have a long history here. Perhaps you heard even the Holy Family lived here. 

Then the renovation started in the building. The dull thumping on the walls somewhere in the vicinity. Welcome to Africa. We are up and ready!