Cleopatra's Needle

Anne Mustoe's cycle ride began at Cleopatra's Needle on the Thames Embankment in London, destined for the needle's original site at Heliopolis in Egypt. Weaving historical and cultural information with anecdotes of the trip, she tells the story of the eventful and challenging fates that befell her.

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It was a blustery April morning on the Thames Embankment in London when Anne Mustoe set out on the most recent of her phenomenal lone cycle rides - this time to the original site of Cleopatra's Needle at Heliopolis in Egypt. Leaving aside home comforts she set herself the challenge of journeying wherever possible close to water - via the Seine and the Rhone, then alongside the Burgundy canal, the Po and the Venetian Lagoon - inspiring her to think of her mode of transport as a set of "waterwheels". Sometimes, though, she got more water than any cyclist would want - when freak floods in Europe demolished the roads and bridges on which she was travelling. Before she would reach the site of the final waterway - the evocative Nile - Ms Mustoe encountered the dusty yet beguiling ancient near East: Turkey, Syria, the Lebanon and, not least, Egypt itself. Interwoven with information regarding the history and culture of every point en route are also accounts of the eventful and challenging fates that befell her.
Undaunted by extreme weather, robbery, an old knee injury flaring up and, worst of all, running out of whisky in a country that forbids alcohol, this pioneering ex-headmistress-on-a-bike soldiered on in true British spirit to reach her destination.