TransAfrica Motorcycle Expedition Go South!

Cairo, Egypt: The participants of the motorcycle expedition fly into the megalopolis of Cairo, the tour guide is ready at the exit and picks up the motorcycle group from Mādār al-Qāhira ad-duwalī International Airport in Cairo. The motorcycle group rides/crawls in the shuttle to customs in the middle of Cairo, where the motorcycles are registered in the passports of the expedition participants at the customs office and the driving permits are issued. After the 'official stage', we take the shuttle to the starting point Alexandria, 222 kilometers away, where Ali is already waiting for us to pick up the motorcycles from customs. It is cold, the waves of the Mediterranean serve as the 'background' for our first briefing at the beach restaurant. The sun rises, we start the engines and embark on the 15,555 kilometer expedition across the African continent! The Mediterranean disappears in the rearview mirror, heading south towards the Atlantic Ocean. We gobble up the kilometers of the connection stage like fast food into the odometer, hand on the gas, head ducked behind the windscreen, until the stench of Cairo wafts around our noses. The last required stamp is hammered into the passport, the customs procedure for the enduros is celebrated in 'Egyptian tea ceremony' style in slow motion! Dusk sets in and we squeeze through the dark, completely filthy and overloaded streets of Cairo like mustard from a tube. The madness of the urban jungle of Cairo comes to an end and we start the adventure. A last look in the rearview mirror at the Sphinx of Giza, threatened by the megalopolis Cairo. Behind us lies the Great Pyramid of Giza, before us the 'lifeline' Nile, which we follow towards the desert tongue of Quena in the south, hour by hour, day by day it gets warmer.

In the morning, the expedition convoy with Land Rover Defenders and travel enduros is loaded onto the ship. We sail upstream to the Sudanese border, where our longtime colleague Kemal Abdul Aziss is waiting for us and, together with his brother-in-law, who fortunately 'clears' the border, processes our papers. Between eight and forty-eight hours can be comfortably planned for the border formalities in Cairo, Alexandria, and here at the Aswan Dam. On our first trip about ten years ago, I needed two days, on the second expedition only one day, and tomorrow... inshallah only three hours. The border situation between Egypt and Sudan is simply tedious, the Egyptian IBM computers and users stand for I-nshallah B-uckra -M-alesh. This means something like 'God willing today or not', but eventually the barrier for us to Sudan will also be lifted... Inshallah.

Ethiopia is legendary, but cultural cities like Lalibela with their rock churches and Gondar, the former royal city of Ethiopia, we skip for security reasons because of the war turmoil in the Tigray Highlands on this motorcycle adventure trip. Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world; due to deforestation and the fall of coffee prices as well as the devastating war in the Tigray region, the country has been economically undermined beyond the hunger threshold. Is it ethically justifiable to travel through a starving country where not even every second Ethiopian has access to clean drinking water? A clear YES, because individual tourism brings 100% cash directly into a country and to a population that has less than $1.25 per day to live on! On wild, typically African tracks, we 'semi-legally' crisscross the national borders right up to the Oromos area, who are widely known for their lip plates. We cross the region of the southwestern Ethiopian peoples and the highland area of the Oromo's origin until we encounter the East Cushitic-speaking groups living in the lowlands, such as the Afra people, Saho people, and Somali people. An exact location is and remains controversial here in the more 'nomadic south' just like the indefinable border course, where we meet somewhere 200 kilometers east of Omorate Malcome from Addis Ababa.