THE WORLD IS ROUND: Lessons from 18 months cycling west.
Fearghal O’ Nuallain We covered 20km in two hours, grinding into the relentless headwind. Then it happened, we encountered a pack of wild dogs and they attacked. Kicking vainly in the dark at their snarling jaws we tried to out-run them. They appeared unfazed and although we pedalled hard they refused to give up their eyes shining like reflective dots. Time stretched and it seemed like our fate was bound to these feral canines that they’d wear us down and tear us apart in the dark desert. It was lucky that they couldn’t see our faces, if they had, they would have recognised that we were spent, totally devoid of energy, and if they hung on, chased us a little longer, they could have had us. Luckily, they couldn’t, and just when it felt like our legs would burst and our lungs would cease, we left the barking behind and the green eyes melted back into the black night. Once safely down the road, we allowed ourselves to stop, listened to racing heart beats and trembled in the darkness. Then we sat staring at the horizon just sitting on the sand berms on the Red Sea coast looking east and seaward watching the oil rigs in the flare of the distance.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAA
In the footsteps of Eratosthenes
“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I was with my childhood friend Simon Evans and we were cycling from Aswan to Alexandria because we’d planned to cycle around the world the following year. We were ostensibly looking for an adventure but I’d kept my reasons for circumnavigating the globe by bike to myself, I wanted to prove to myself that the world was round and cycling west until I arrived back where I started was the best way that I could think of doing that. We’d come to Egypt, because of a Greek scholar called Eratosthenes who was the first person to figure out that the world was round in the third century BC. He was the first person to see roundness where others saw flatland. Eratosthenes was the first person to suggest that the world was round and proved his theory with some basic trigonometry; using the distance from the Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria to Aswan which currently sits on the Sudanese border and the angles of the sun in each place on the longest day of the year. From these facts he worked out that the Earth’s circumference must be 39,690 km, the actual distance is 40,075 km - Eratosthenes was off by less than 2%. I’m not completely happy unless I’ve seen something for myself, so, when I read about Eratosthenes I had to go and experience each one of those 1,000km of desert and Nile that moved him to think that the world was round. And that is how we found ourselves sitting on the side of the road in the dark, recovering from Image Opposite: Fearghal O'Nuallain on the World Cycle © Fearghal O' Nuallain
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