Know your enemy.

After three weeks now of driving in Egypt I am starting to get an appreciation of the my fellow road users, or as I like to think of them, "the opposition". As Sun Tzu said in the Art of War, know your enemy....here are some snippets Im now begining to understanding.....

Water - Egyptian drivers are like cats, they avoid water at all costs. At first sight of any H2O on the road, as we have not seen a drop of rain since we have arrived these occurances are normally from impromtu glorious roadside fountains displays - burst water pipes. In unison hazard lights go on, brakes rapidly applied and traffic will crawl past left and right of the puddle, very very slooooowly. This caution can be explained with the equation

D + H2O + BT + GiTs = Lots of rotation and choas

Where

D=dirty oil stained road

H2O = thin film of water

BT = Bald tyres

GiTs = Grining idiotic Taxi driverS

Even small puddles are approached in the same way as the crocodile hunter approaches a spitting viper....the reason being the small puddle may actually be deeper than the pit of Hades and probably already contains several ex-auto suspensions.

Microbuses - Living life on the edge of society, children of oblivion, not caring about tommorrow as tommorrow may never come, the grim reaper runs scared from them, these people know no fear, F E A R are not in their alphabet. The microbus driver. In some ways you have to admire them and their poor horror-struck passengers, they drive with abandon through gaps smaller than the width of their vans testing the laws of physics more than the Hadron Collider, and judging by the side panels of their buses they have generated a few Higgs bosons in their time. Avoid at all costs.

Pedestrians - For someone stepping out in front of a 1974 vintage Fiat 126 travelling at its top speed of 45mph the average Egyptian pedestrian demonstrates a lot of faith in his fellow human being behind the wheel. Particularly as the last time anyone looked at the brakes was in 1974. The most impressive thing about egyptians is not the pyramids but the way they cross the road with such a causal nochalent saunter. The non-Cairennes, not used to this traffic, usually take the "Usain Bolt" in a hurry approach - stopping mid cross has a 100% fatality rate.

Lanes - white lines are too conformist for the egyptian drivers more freeform thinking. The concept of slow lane and fast lane is not valid in this respect. All the lanes are fast lanes, with random slow vehicles moving between them with Brownian motion, whilst pedestrians run across the flow like herds of migrating wilderbeest taking their chance against the Crocs at a particularly wide river crossing. The "inside" slow lane is used for changing tires, or more commonly staring at whole wheel that has just detached from the axle.

Packing - as impressive as anything is the egyptian skill of packing the contents of one of those Chinese Super container ships onto the back of a Suzuki Jimmy, reaching vertical heights that would not be out of place in Manhatten. How do you transport a mattress across town with a moped nothing a single bungee cord can't fix- no problem- and your very own crash mat to boot. Only visual evidence can convey the things we see, I shall be getting a camera for these wonderful sights and putting it in the car. Its hard to explain in words how two guys in a small pick up carry a lorry bonnet on the roof by hanging out either side and driving along whilst fighting against the updraft. Of course packing does not always go to plan in Egyptland and its not uncommon to go round a corner and find a slick of runner beans, tomatoes, bricks, cement, loahfers, baskets.

Sure Ill have other snippets - and now I have the camera in the car Ill have the evidence to prove it!!