After a years delay due to a separated shoulder I have finally arrived in Cairo for the start of the Tour d’ Afrique, a biking adventure from the pyramids of Egypt to the wind swept shores of South Africa’s Cape Town.
In preparation the last year I have ridden well over 5,000 miles and peddled up enough hills to equal more than 7 ascents of Mt. Everest. However, on arriving in Cairo I traded my bicycle for a camel.
I rode out into the desert and found Cairo and my little home town of Manilla, Iowa to be quite similar – in some respects. Like Manilla, Cairo has pyramids on the outskirts of town.
Cairo’s are built out of massive stones chiseled out of limestone quarries with handmade copper tools. Then floated down the Nile Rive on barges after the seasonal floods and assembled on the bluffs overlooking the ancient bed of the Nile. At 4,500 years old they are a bit older than Manilla’s. To put it in perspective, the pyramids were already ancient when Christ was born and for a thousand years they were the tallest man made objects on earth.
When Cairo’s pyramids were being built the land that would be called Iowa was just transitioning from glacial tundra to the landscape and climate we know today. As a result the paleo Indians that inhabited the land were growing in numbers and they were just beginning to experiment with mound building. It would be another 2,500-3,000 years however, before the art achieved its greatest accomplishment in the Effigy Mounds on the banks of the Mississippi. Iowa’s people were still in the Stone Age to be sure but large spear points were being replaced by smaller arrow heads and copper was just beginning to arrive down the trading paths from the Great Lakes.
Manilla’s pyramids are also a bit more transitory, built of the seeds of the seasonal harvest they are often transported down the Missouri River in barges to distant ports.
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