Cairo to London overland

The overland route from Cairo to London. Photo: Billy Macrae

After their epic overland journey from London to Cairo by train (above), slam-poet Dizraeli and his mate Billy Macrae travelled back overland from Cairo to London by bus, performing in Palestine, Kosovo and the Czech Republic along the way. Here's a diary blog post about their return journey.

Having spent 5 days in Cairo (performing our show to a small crowd of passionate people; arguing with camel hustlers), we embarked on our trip home. It was to be a very different journey to the voyage out, when we had ten days and one solitary goal. This time, I had a whole string of gigs booked; times and places we had to get to. We were also running very low on money: with a slightly heavy heart I realized that if we were to get as far as home, we’d have to abandon the European trains and travel the cheaper way, by bus. 4000 miles on buses is a daunting prospect.

We boarded the bus from Cairo to the border, an overnight rumble through the desert which farted us out into a dusty dawn. We crossed to the Israeli side. It was bizarre: a garish teen sitcom, painted with airbrushed dolphins and staffed by young, female Israeli soldiers who slouched in low-slung combats without a gun in sight. A breeze, we thought. We thought wrong- it was 4 hours before we were finally let through. They took exception both to the colourful Islamic Republic stamps in my passport (Iran and Pakistan from my last overland voyage) and to the fact we were scheduled to stay in the West Bank: the word Ramallah sparked a tightness in the girl interviewing me.

Once in Israel proper, though (past the Action-Man guard at the exit with a very real machine-gun; hadn’t spotted him) I realized just how political, how potentially incendiary every word, every place is in this part of the world: Ramallah is the previous HQ of the PLO, a stronghold of the Intifada. The whole Sinai peninsular we’d just crossed was battled for, claimed by Israel, then reclaimed by Egypt. The girl at the crossing probably had relatives who fought in the Six Day War.

We travelled north to Tel-Aviv on a bus full of soldiers, through a desert-scape where dust devils spun among great drifts of black shingle, a dry haze which was gradually shaded greener until we were rolling through great waving fields of corn, a farmland and a climate like the South of France.

Tel Aviv welcomed us with the dirty, indifferent noise of a fully Western metropolis, and we spent 2 nights there with an Israeli friend, eating food left over from Passover, drinking in Hebrew hiphop clubs and taking a trip to smear ourselves with the salty mud of the Dead Sea.

The next day we took a hot bus across the divide to Bethlehem in the West Bank, where the next gig was booked. There, we heard that the Dead Sea is a vast sewage repository; because the Palestinians in the West Bank have not been able to build a proper sewage-treatment infrastructure, much of their waste is channelled downhill to that broad saucer of brine. Our skins smarted. This was the least disturbing story we heard during our time with the Palestinians in the West Bank: every day was a flood of tales of injustice, pain and imprisonment. It threw our self-imposed travel restrictions (land, not air) into sharp relief, glimpsing the lives of people who live between imposed walls and fences.

Crossing the Wall for the last time –2 hours shuffling at prisoner pace through turnstiles and down chickenwire corridors- I blazed with frustration and impotence, and we left Palestine behind on a bus bound back down South to Eilat.

Visa complications on the border between the West Bank and Jordan meant we couldn’t just make the 3-hour hop East from Ramallah to Amman; instead we had to do a ridiculous loop all the way back south to Egypt then north to Amman. It was frustrating, and the next 48 hours were a lesson in the Zen of Overland. Our plans were scuppered at every point possible, and we just had to let go. At the border crossing back into Egypt, we were stuck behind a 200-person Holy Land tour group, all shuffling through at geriatric speed. It meant that we missed the fast ferry we were rushing to catch (we arrived at the port with its ripples still lapping the quay) and then the slow boat was cancelled. A deep breath, and a night spent in Nowhere Town, eating fish and watching American wrestling videos with the men of Nuweiba. The boat was to leave at 9am the following day; we rose early and waited, waited and waited more. Mohammed tried to convert me and Christian persuaded me to dance. The boat finally left at 7pm.

We’d planned to break our journey homewards into sanity-sized pieces, stopping for nights in Damascus and Istanbul, but Nuweiba had eaten our time- we were left with 5 days to get to Kosovo for a gig I’d arranged there.

Those five days were a headlong rush: across the water to Jordan with pilgrims on their way to Mecca; North to Amman stretched on the corrugated floor of a bouncing overnight minibus; on to Damascus in an exhausted 7-hour taxi; on up to Istanbul in a 36-hour haul; West from Istanbul, overnight through Bulgaria and Macedonia and on to Kosovo.

There were times, of course, when we weren’t in motion. In Amman we found a moment of calm at sunrise, stumbling across a Roman ruin on a hilltop. In Damascus we spent 8 hours making firm friends with the man who sold us our Istanbul tickets, and finished the day drinking tea and playing Oud melodies on my guitar outside the bus station. In Istanbul we wandered briefly among the tour groups in the Blue Mosque and had coffee to the tune of Hotel California. On the border with Bulgaria we taught two Serbs how to moonwalk, and they showed us a bellydance. But for the most part, we were moving, always moving.

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