Circling Closer To The City

From the extraordinary bareness of the Sahara, which is the image that many people carry subconsciously of Egypt, the lushness of the Nile Valley is a shock. Even without the yearly inundation the Nile Valley has to be one of the most fertile areas in the world. Most of the farming is done by hand, with fields usually being plowed by one of the local villagers who rents his tractor out to do the job by the hour. I was out riding one day and ran across a few of my neighbours who were plowing their field with an old wooden plow drawn by a couple of cows. This is not a common sight and I snapped the shot with my Nokia 6630 since I'd left my camera back at the house. One of the extraordinary things about Egypt is that most of the fruits and vegetables needed to feed our roughly 75 million people are produced by the hand labour of the Nile Valley farmers. There are some larger holdings in the reclaimed areas that can sustain more mechanised farming, but near Cairo the work is all done by hand.