Egypt photos and video
Sphinx at Giza
Originally uploaded by dynamist.
I finally finished uploading to Flickr all of our photos from the trip to Egypt last week. (Well, there are a couple I took in the airport which are still sitting on the camera.) You may also enjoy this video, which displays a fraction of the terror one feels as a passenger in a car in Cairo (where people drive the wrong way into oncoming traffic as if it’s no big whoop, where people randomly wander into six ‘lanes’ - if you could call them that, since no one adheres to anything as structured as lanes - of traffic, and where stoplights are considered mere suggestions; at night, lights are strictly for flashing, but otherwise remain off), and a fraction of the hysteria I can display when I think I’m going to die.
This one is wacky, too.
Ha ha! Oh, man, do I know this feeling! Your reactions are so fabulous, and identical to what mine would have been! We forget, of course, that this is how they learned to drive; that, for them, threading through a five-foot gap while dodging pedestrians is normal
I mean, that’s only the stuff I managed to record! Antoine and I had a good laugh, though, trying to imagine a) my dad driving in that traffic (his fuse is as short as mine), and b) A’s dad driving in that, with his mother in the passenger’s seat.
They were brilliant - how fast was the car going? Those people crossing the road appear almost as ghosts.
You never really get up much speed in that kind of traffic - I’m crap at anything numeric, but I’d estimate 35mph, tops. (I don’t think our taxi would have been capable of going much faster, actually; when we pulled into Old Cairo, there was a big struggle for it to get up a very, very slight incline of about 15 degrees.) I was terrified for all the kids who were being dragged across the road by their mothers. I wonder what the stats are for road deaths; if I weren’t so lazy, I’d look them up.
Quite an interesting article here (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/778/eg11.htm)
In Egypt, for every 100 million kms driven, 43.2 people die, compared with 0.9 in Australia, for instance.