Meet The Man Who Walked From Alexandria to Cairo

On July 18th, 24-year-old Mohamed Khalil began a trip from Alexandria to Cairo. Unlike most road trips, he took this one entirely on foot - with thousands of people on Instagram tuning in to watch him. He walked for three days, without a tent, stopping to rest in mosques on the road or to receive snacks from travellers who saw his videos, until he reached Cairo on July 21st.

“I had this funny idea to hike to Alexandria when my dad and I took a trip there back in 2019, and he actually convinced me it would be possible with enough training,” Mohamed Khalil tells CairoScene. Khalil then began testing his limits, exploring how far his legs would take him. He walked the entire 21 KM of the Alexandria Corniche, then did it twice more. He started taking more hikes around Cairo, from Nasr City to the Nile, then to Mokattam and back. Then he reached the Giza Pyramids, Madinaty and even Ain Sokhna. His last test trip was a long walk from Dahab to Nuweibaa.

It’s pretty natural to wonder whether or not all this walking, body exposed to the elements on the road, is safe. Khalil assures us it is not; after he got into hiking, he started taking solo bike trips to scale bigger distances. He went camping in Sokhna, Fayoum and Ismailia. On a Suez trip, he tells us that he got attacked and nearly kidnapped by local bandits on the road, and has since stayed off highways - that is, until he tackled the Alexandria-Cairo trip.

“Why did I do it? Because I wanted to feel what it’s like to move with no safety net,” Khalil tells us. “To reconnect with the stillness we can’t have nowadays thanks to a constant stream of information. It enabled me to enter a personal spiritual withdrawal.”

Khalil has participated in rigorous physical endurance and self-defence training since he was young, which has primed him for his cross-country journeys. He's also empowered by a light-hearted, perhaps nihilistic nature. In his videos, Khalil films himself eating melons he found on the road, being kicked out of mosques he intended to sleep in and interacting with singing stray dogs on the road. Sharing an encounter from his final day on the road, Khalil shares, "A guy at the toll booth asked me if I was the guy walking from Alexandria to Cairo. I told him yes, I am the guy walking from Alexandria to Cairo." Something about Khalil's general nonchalance makes his videos and his story more fun.

In spite of all the work he put in, and his seeming coolness, Khalil was still aware of his vulnerabilities. “On the final day, I woke up overwhelmed with anxiety because my reel went viral and I didn’t know if I was going to do it. Surprisingly, that day I walked what I had planned to cover in two days and ended my longest hike ever on a stronger note than before." Looking back on his achievement, he adds, "It reminded me of who I am when nothing's left but the will to go forward.”