Heavy Duty Hose

We water our garden from the well and in order to do the vegetables and the horse corn, we went looking for a BIG hose. We found a used fire hose that delivers a stream of water about 4 inches in diameter. Everyone gets a bit wet, but a lot of water is what the plants need on these hot summer days.

Looking For Water

It isn't as though there isn't water here..there's tons of it, but if you want drinking water you have to drill deep enough to avoid surface water that might have agricultural runoff in it. Naturally, they do it by hand, like almost everything else.

Not Just For Alice's Caterpillar

Water pipes are known by all sorts of interesting names: hookah, hubbly-bubbly, or in Egypt sheesha. There is a small dish at the top where a flavoured tobacco is burned and then the smoke is drawn down through the water and out the hose attachment. The tobacco may or may not be enhanced with other things, but most of the time it isn't. There is also an assumption that the smoke is somehow cleaner for having passed through the water, but that is also false. The smoke from a sheesha burning an apple tobacco is really very nice, however passing a tip from smoker to smoker also helps to pass tuberculosis. That's not so cool. But if you stand watching the departure lounge at Cairo International, you will see lots of them boarding.