From Cairo

From Minya there are only 250km to reach Cairo. Today I head for Beni Suef; another set of high-rise blocks on the banks of the Nile. The road continues along the fringes of an irrigation canal, whose waters become lower and blacker and more cluttered with rubbish as I head north. Steep embankments drop towards the water on either side of the canal; they are covered in rotting fruit, polystyrene packaging, chicken carcases, soiled tissues, scraps of plastic bags, torn apart by hungry cats. I watch women and children walk down to the bank and wash metal plates and pots in the water. There are tall white tower blocks just behind the water-logged fields; water-buffalo graze and tall white birds with thin yellow legs stand still as statues in the thin wet grasses. The road is flat and I reach Beni Suef early in the day and drink glasses of tea and write until evening.

Soon I will be in Cairo; I ride fast and the traffic thickens. There are more bridges, more concrete blocks, more long posters of the president, looking out over the highway, jaw clenched beneath dark glasses, the red and black bands of the Egyptian flag behind. In every direction I can see the lone turrets of power stations, rising high above the date palms, sending dark smoke, from blackened tips, into the hot sky.

The cars are rushing in a constant stream now, jerking and honking, six lanes wide, flowing madly towards the towers collecting on the approaching skyline. I drift alongside, through Giza's decaying tower blocks, across the Nile, up the Corniche, and on, to Midan Tahir.

Since leaving Addis Ababa, expiring visas, departing ferries, police escorts, have kept me chasing the road north. That road is now at an end and I have time in Cairo. I go the city’s eastern quarters first; to all the mosques. The streets are narrow here and many floored with dust. Slanted scaffolds of dark wood cross the air between the old stone buildings that enclose the cluttered alley. In the gaps between the latticed beams I can see fluted minarets; pairs of tall stone shoots rising to a chalky sky, encircled by crown shaped balconies that open like petals around the spherical towers. On the street, old women swat flies from trays of silver fish and men in beige jalibiyas sit hunched on low stools behind mounds of pale yellow pears. There are pigeons and chickens and rabbits crammed into a layered wire-fenced coup, and on the corner behind, a short man, with an enormous metal gourd strapped to his chest, stands, like a French cartoon, pouring black coffee into little glasses. The bread boys fly past on bicycles, shouting to clear a path, one hand, dusted white with flour, resting on the handlebars, the other supporting a five-foot long tray piled high with flat buns.

I knock on a thick bronze-studded door, beneath a huge, smooth-brick mosque. A few minutes later a dosey imam lets me in. Small circular grooves, decorated with brown stars, are carved into the chamber of the portico roof, leaving triangular splinters of stone hanging like stunted stalactites above the high door. Within, long lines of Arabic script run along the wooden panelling just below the ceiling, and the walls are covered in white and turquoise alabaster murals. From the roof, I can see abandoned planks and tyres and bundles of tangled wire, left on the tops of buildings just below. There are tall glass and steel towers far to the south, and all around, crescent-tipped spires sprout above the tattered city skyline.

When I come out, a man in a white skull cap, with a thick black beard, walks towards me: ' My brother, take this. For clothes, for food.' He hands me a two hundred pound note. I am astonished. 'You are a Muslim, my brother?' I tell him no, that I just have a beard, that my clothes are worn from a long journey, that I have plenty to eat. He smiles and tells me he is a shoe-maker, and takes me to his shop and gives me a glass of tea.

I walk up past the citadel, along a busy ring-road, to a cemetery in the far east of the city. Long lanes of fine dust split rows of stone walls that guard domed-minarets. Behind the metal gates of many of the tombs I hear mothers shouting at noisy children, men spitting, the clatter of dishes being washed. Throughout the cemetery people are living in the tomb enclosures.

I spend four days in the city: In the white-washed churches of Coptic Cairo, the coach-ridden pyramids, the tranquil suburbs of Maadi, in smart nightclubs, full of high-heels, frosted glasses of Russian vodka, brightly painted eyelids. Tomorrow I ride east to Sinai.