Risk Tolerance.

I’ve been walking to work this past week, leaving the marble floored comfort of the Palace for the dust and dirt of downtown Cairo. It takes about 40 minutes, door to door, more or less, with a comparative minimum of life threatening street crossings.

I’m so crisp as I pull shut my hotel room door. Creased trousers. Freshly laundered, starched and pressed shirt. Perhaps a tie and jacket. Quite a change from the end of the trek, when I’m dusty, tired and in a full body sweat. Fortunately, the office tea boy has learned to bring me a cold half liter of water as soon as I get in, so the recovery isn’t so long.

Today, the walk was markedly cooler, but through an incredible haze of humidity and smog, reducing visibility to under a kilometer. The lungs felt the sharp and heavy air almost as soon as I left the building, as there are three flights of stairs just after the first busy street crossing to get me up to the elevated approach section of the bridge over the Nile. There’s not too much traffic on the intersecting ramp, so my second street crossing is almost non-harrowing.

I usually stop briefly mid-span to look up the Nile watch the boats and reflect. Yesterday, I watched an egret for a time, floating his way to the Sea atop a jumble of reeds and trash.

On the right bank, there’s another three flights of steps, past competing shoe shiners, then under the bridge and to the north, between the river and the river road, stepping down and under another ramp to keep the river immediately on my left. The underside of Cairo bridges smells exactly like the underside of most urban bridges – a pungent, piquant mixture of filth and urine.

I like the walk next to the river for a number of reasons starting with my love of moving water. Then there’s the fishermen, some with poles, some with barbs on their hooks, trying to catch something fishlike (and likely inedible) from the ancient Nile. Sadly, the sidewalk becomes blocked after a while by a large sheet steel fence taking up all of the space between top of bank and back of curb so I get a choice – walk out in the street into opposing traffic for the last half kilometer or cross the road.

So far, I’ve always chosen the latter and have (so far) lived to tell the tale (enshallah).

Crossing the street in Cairo is probably the most dangerous thing you can do and this particular road, the Corniche El Nil, while not the busiest in town, is still pretty dang busy at 0830. First, it’s a high curb, so you need to step off, as opposed to walk off of it. Next, there could be three lanes of traffic you need to cross, or is it four? With no pavement marking or lane discipline, the offending vehicles are in a constant state of weave, so it’s hard to judge where they might be at any time. Worst is that there are no pavement signals upstream that would work to force gaps in the traffic. The result is a mass of continual traffic morphing heavy to really heavy to somewhat less heavy but always heavy with very few instances where a gap extends across the entire roadway and for a sufficient time that would allow an unimpeded pedestrian crossing.

Ever play Frogger?

Ever play with real cars?

It’s kind of like that, but you only get one life. What works to my advantage is local law/custom, which has the driver of a car that kills a pedestrian pay the bereaved the princely sum of about $1,200. Since most Egyptians don’t have $1,200, they try not to kill pedestrians (too much). Still, there are 80 million Egyptians, and it seems that most of them survive walking.

This is little comfort. But a minute’s wait, a small gap, and some internal time/distance calculations, and I make it to the median, where the same considerations play out, then I’m on the other side. So, with three crossings under my belt, I’m starting to think I might get to the office.

But first, there are a couple of busy side streets to traverse, and the blocks in between. The in between blocks, by the way, rarely have sidewalks. Sure, they used to have sidewalks, but you can’t see them today because that is where all of the cars park (backed onto the sidewalk with their noses taking up half a lane), forcing pedestrians out into the remaining portion of the street, this time with traffic approaching from the rear. There’s a few more pedestrians on this side of the street, though, so the odds of me, specifically, getting nailed are reduced. Plus, there’s a lot of bus traffic, so when they stop to take on or disgorge passengers, traffic is diverted away from the roadside to pass them.

Half a block to go, and I pass by one of these poorly parked cars, making eye contact with the driver who’s standing in the crease of the open door. As I pass by the hood, I catch him in the periphery, slipping into the driver’s seat, then feel the advancing bumper skim by my right leg and my right hand brush across the accelerating hood.

Well, it was a glancing blow. No harm done this time.