Just Trim The Mustache, Please.

Camels at Giza have intricate designs cut into their coats. I don't know if it is just artistic and or if it's also a means of identification. But these designs are created with an enormous handmade pair of shears. Frightening.

The Old and The New

Oddly enough, you can see the pyramids of Giza from a lot of different angles.  People expect to see them in company of sand dunes and camels, but as you drive into Cairo from Alexandria, they come into view in a landscape of traffic lights and mobile phone towers.

Wake Up Call!!

I really hate posting ugly pictures of Egypt when there is so much beauty here, but every now and then I have to in hopes of helping people care for our country. The government (old government) built an extension of the Ring Road to connect the end of the Moneeb coming from Kattameya to the part of the ring road that circled around to the north of the city. Originally the road was intended to go around behind the Giza Plateau but UNESCO blocked that route arguing that the construction was not good in an antiquities area. Just last fall someone put up some tent material along the canal just where the extension took off from ground level and began dumping garbage there. Now every day trucks come and dump load after load of smelly gross garbage under the overpass while bulldozers dig it up again and put it in big trucks to move somewhere else instead.

All of this is incredibly stupid. Instead of investing money in the Zebaleen who recycle roughly 80% of the waste they collect, we are paying people to move it around in trucks, using gasoline and polluting the air further. And it goes to landfills, which as might be expected, FILL UP!

Selling The Desert

When I first moved to Cairo about fifteen years ago, I moved my two mares to a stable next to the desert near the pyramids of Abu Sir, about a kilometre from where I live now. I was delighted to be able to ride in the desert straight from the stable, and on late spring/summer days it was especially nice to ride up the hill from the club to the plateau that rose behind it. It might be hot closer to the valley, but if there was any breeze at all, it would be on the plateau. I rode up there today with a friend and most of the plateau is gone, missing, defunct. Fifteen years ago, the ridge that can be seen behind the rider's head was not a ridge..it was the top of the plateau. Where there now is a vast canyon a few hundred feet deep, there was a flat sandy riding area that eventually led to the Giza dump. With the removal of such huge portion of the plateau and the immense increase in the size of the dump, there isn't much left for riding or anything else.

The sand was sold to people with bulldozers and dump trucks who carted it away to be used in building. Who sold it? It would appear that people who mined it paid people in the military, the Giza governorate, and the antiquities department for the right to take it away. Who owned it? Who knows. Who misses it? Everyone in the area who loves the desert.

Trash Collection Take Two

If the government of a city believes that having a group of people whose lives are devoted to the collection and recycling of trash is old fashioned, even if the Ford Foundation believes otherwise, they will likely bring in "modern" techniques. In our case, the city of Giza took a large section of desert between Giza and Sakkara and moved in a dump and recycling plant. Now thanks to willy nilly modernisation we have to put up with enormous trucks hauling in massive loads of refuse along our country roads, a road into the desert cutting the old trails from Giza to Sakkara and making life for riders that much more hazardous, a black pile of refuse that is creeping up to the wadi leading to the Sakkara complex, (a valley still unexplored and containing a number of antiquities sites), and the various aerial byproducts of a dump for a few million people. These include armies of plastic bags that roll inflated in ranks across the desert on windy days and the occasional smoke cloud when something goes wrong and catches fire.

I think I like the old ways better.