Time to do some reading...

Cairo, Egypt

 

For the past 2 months, the Lonely Planet guidebook titled simply "Middle East" has been my reference. It served me perfectly in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. But now, it's run it's course. Egypt is has far south as it goes, yet I'm going further south. So yesterday, after learning that I had got my visa for Sudan, I paid a visit to the bookstore at the American University in Cairo to track down some new guidebooks for Africa.

 

Well, it turns out that there's no good compilation that covers the countries I'm interested in. I've already got the "Southern Africa" guidebook, courtesy of Wendy who will probably never see the book again. However, "Southern Africa" just starts covering countries south of Tanzania, so it's not enough.

 

There is a guidebook titled "Eastern Africa", but that only includes Kenya and Tanzania (as well as a few others west of Tanzania) but doesn't include Ethiopia or Sudan. There is a guidebook titled "Ethiopia and Eritrea", which obviously just covers those two countries.  And sadly, there really isn't a Lonely Planet book for Sudan... Maybe that's a sign...

 

So if you were traveling from say Cairo to Cape Town, you'd need to purchase the Ethiopian, Eastern Africa and Southern Africa guides, and expensive and heavy option which still wouldn't give you Sudan. The only other Lonely Planet alternative is to get the guidebook "Africa on a shoestring", which covers every country in Africa! (Of which there are over 50.) Needless to say, the detail is rather sparse for each country in that book, and it duplicates many of the countries that I already have covered in Southern Africa.

 

Annoyed and undecided as to which book to purchase, I picked up the "Africa on a shoestring" since it's the only way to get even a bit of info on Sudan, and still cover the other countries. However, back at the hostel I ran into a friend from Dahab who out of the blue offered me her copy of "Ethiopia and Eritrea"... Score!

 

I then decided to just copy out the sections on Sudan from the "Africa on a shoestring" book and return it for the "Eastern Africa" guidebook. So while I no longer have a book that covers Sudan, I do have a few hand written notes as to where to go and what not.

 

Oh, and I figured that maybe I should pick up a road/topo map of the region since I suspect there will be many times when I say something like "Uh, where the hell am I right now?" 

 

So, now I've got a map of Africa and three guidebooks to get me from Cairo to Cape Town, hopefully that's enough literrature. Next step is to find a western shoe store here in Cairo that sells hiking boots because after three months of walking in my current ones it's time to retire them. 

 

In an unrelated note, I learned just how small the network of travelers is the other night. My first night in Cairo, there was a traveler in the common area that most people seemed to know. Turns out he had been staying there for awhile and it was his last night, so several people joined him across the street for a sheesha pipe. I was beat from my overnight bus from Dahab and passed on the offer, only to learn the following day that the traveler was Adam Katz.

 

Who is Adam Katz? Well, I don't know him personally but I've probably spent hours on his website reading all about his travel adventures. He's from the Bay Area and back in 2001 when the dot-com bust happened, he (apparently) received a rather nice severance check and started traveling on it. He's been traveling ever since. He's now in Dahab, were I just came from and I never got a chance to actually talk to him, but if you read through his website you'll see where he's been and some of the amazing travel stories he has to share. The address for his site is: http://www.geekeasy.com/travel/writing.html

 

Small world,

Kenny