Saturday morning photography

With no football and things settling down a bit Im going to go and take some photos around Cairo. Spent this morning in Maadi and Zaarha and scouting a few places for future visits around Mokttam Hills. Got some nice graffiti ones that I will share later.....

Bee Eaters Return

A sign of the warming weather is the march north of various migrant birds. Our favorites are the colourful bee-eaters that have arrived in numbers to swoop for insects across the golf course. Took the camera over as dusk was falling to get some shots. Full resect to nature photographers - you need a lot of time to get a good photo - heres my best efforts after 10mins!

And also a few of the easily tracked plovers on the golf course...

10 days on the Ring road

Not being able to travel about much I have been looking for subjects to photograph, and as stated previously I wanted to record a few days traveling up and down the Ring of Death (the Ring Road). Bumping along merrily at 60mph, weaving in and out of the traffic does not make for well composed images and in the split second of seeing something interesting it often is already a distant memory in the rear view mirror....but here the results anyway which Im pretty happy with, the instant composition and recording gives a immediacy to the image.

With my trusty side-kick, Ahmed Da Driver, here the results from about 10 days commuting to Heliopolis.

We had serious rain at the weekend. Always leads to complete chaos with flooding skidding and general mayhem. Heres the drainage system going onto the ring road....

Nothing unusal about a truck loosing a load of bricks...for some reason this is a very common occurence...what is unusual in this post-Revolution world is the police are on hand and are

actually doing something to help!

The truck drivers work long hours and all-nighters, which means plenty of falling asleep at the wheel - guessing this is what happened to this double-trucker of gravel that ended up over 3 lanes of the ring road. Ahmed Da Driver in true Egyptian rubber-necker style slowed down in the outside lane so I could take a snap!

These little Fiats are 30+yrs old and are everywhere in Cairo - everywhere including on the curb of the police bridge. This happened in the morning with little on the road - what did he do? lose control due to the Fiats excessive power.

Serious rear shunt - a very common coming together. Very typically of Cairo accidents everyone gets out and offers an opinion as to who is to blame......

This guy somehow missed the Suez Road turn and ended up wedge on the curb.

On Wednesday I was in worst traffic jam since arriving in Cairo - unfortunately we were

shifted off the road by the Police academy and went on the slip roads. The incident occured in the under pass outside the academy and in typical egyptian style you can see the massive crowd watching adding to the jam. Radio said an oil tanker had over turned. Cigarette anyone?

Coming round the bend underneath the ring road is a trouble spot our mate Jack warned us about- so is now called an accident Jackspot. This happened on Sat morn, we screeched to a halt, a car had just flipped over just infront of us. Typical of the stoical way Egyptians have, everyone just jumped out of the car, gave their opinion on how the car should be righted, and

with everyone pulling and pushing in different directions the car got righted, pushed to the side and everyone gets back into vechiles and drives off....Great job.

We could not quite work out what was going on here, whatever the army were doing with their truck it caused n almighty tailback.....

Public transport in Cairo is not quite up to Dutch levels of efficiency. Buses often litter the slow lane as they break down more often than not. Got this photo of the passengers pushing the rusty dirty hulk slowly up the long hill to Kattameya.

In Holland there is a strict hierarchy - pedestrians, bikes, trams, buses, and lastly cars. In Cairo is more of a free for all, cars are king. I always laugh at the "Sweety Sweety" turn on the Suez road when the tram (green roof in photo) comes along and has to wait for a gap in the traffic.....whose going to give way? This is the same tram I saw with flames comng from the roof when we had the rains.

Becoming a cynic

With the old regime it was well accepted that you had to interpret whatever you read in the papers - nothing was ever the whole story and you were always being told what people wanted you to be told....(this is also a healthy attitude with western press also)....

So I was interested to read this story that would clearly damage the fragile or near-non existant tourist industry. I found some more details on a random blog....Giza is where the main pyramids are.

A bomb has exploded at Giza about 150 meters from the pyramids badly injuring three people.

Initial reports stated that the three injured were men who sold tourist trinkets but now it is being reported that they were children, one boy having lost part of his arm. The three children had found the object out in the desert and brought it back to the pyramids to try to open it, thinking it might contain ancient Egyptian artefacts. The device exploded when they used iron bars to hit the object in the attempt to get inside. From APF

In the mainline Masry al Youm it states

It was not clear how a leftover piece of ordnance ended up in the desert near the pyramids, where no major battle has been fought since 1798, when Napoleon’s army routed Egypt’s Mamluk rulers in a pitched battle. [...]

[...] Egypt was the site of titanic tank battles during World War II, but these were confined to the deserts around the northern coast and the later wars with neighboring Israel were focused around the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula, far to the east.

Lets hope the rather dubious and patchy explanation is true, many people here depend on tourism which currently is in a poor state, driving many into poverty. The country needs the tourists to return....