Roof Rack / Diesel Tank

I've been to the fabricator today and he installed the roof rack and the 2nd fuel tank for our desert trip later this week. The top two pictures are at his shop (the smoke in the top right is just your average every day air pollution rolling by). The bottom two are of our driver Ali and I trying out the secondary fuel tank. It's a 200 liter monster but I wanted to try it with just 60 liters in case it leaked or something. But it did work and how it works is pretty simple, there's a filler cap on the top of the tank with an air valve in it, you fill the tank up and when you need to pump diesel into the main tank there's a pipe on the side and I just use my air pump to pump air into the tank and that pushes the diesel out and down the hose to the main tank. Pretty slick.

And a couple of shots of the street outside the fabricators shop. Never mind the goats, a lady came out of the building to the left and shooed them into the house after I took the picture.

Egypt's roads are among the world's most dangerous

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CAIRO (AFP) — Eleven members of a single family were killed and another 16 seriously injured on Saturday in a road accident in Egypt, the official MENA news agency reported.

It said the vehicle carrying the victims was driving at "a crazy speed" on the highway linking Cairo and the northern port city of Alexandria when it collided with two oncoming trucks.

The injured, all of whom where gravely hurt, were taken to hospital, MENA added.

On March 16, 23 people -- among them 21 police officers -- died in a head-on collision between a police truck and another lorry on the same highway.

In February, 29 people were killed in a pile-up on a road south of Cairo that was blamed on fog.

Egypt's roads are among the world's most dangerous. Each year about 6,000 people die and 30,000 are injured in road accidents.

Traffic regulations are often badly enforced and vehicles poorly maintained. Many roads allow for high speeds, and accidents caused by reckless overtaking are common.

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Air Filter

The Embassy has provided us with a number of Bionaire air filter/ionisers about a month ago. I picked one up to shift it the other day and the air outlet was filthy, which I found surprising as it's suppose to suck in the dirty air and spit it out clean so I took it apart and it was caked with dust. I had to get a shot of it and above you can see the left half that I cleaned (sort of) and the right side that I didn't. I hate to think of what our lungs will look like after 4 years.

Our House

We've had a few request for pictures of our house but between the internet not working and computer problems it hasn't happened yet. But to start off with we have this picture of the entrance hall that we can post, we'll try and do more soon.

The bench, picture and lamps are things we've (i.e. Doortje) bought here, and if the walls look a bit orangey in the picture there's a reason for that, it is. We didn't ask for this colour nor anything remotely close to it but this is the best they could do. 'That's Egypt' as our landlady is fond of saying.

And the internet is down again, I'll try and post this whenever.

The Forecastfox Bar on Firefox

It was 39 degrees 24 hours ago and then it was 29 2 hours ago and now it's 19. I've put my fleece back on. But I had to post this screen shot, it's been a long time since I've had "Blowing Dust" in my weather forecast.

BBC Drama: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Jill Scott, Anika Noni Rose, Lucian Msamati, David Oyelowo, Colin Salmon and Desmond Dube lead an all-star cast in the late Anthony Minghella's and Richard Curtis' charming adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

We watched The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency yesterday and and thought it was very well done. Made us a bit 'homesick' for Southern Africa to be honest. Well worth watching if you have the chance.

BBC

The November Desert Trip

This is a short clip from the desert trip I made last November of Peter Gaballa getting us unstuck in the Sahara while someone is having a go at him on the radio. The 'hissing' sound you hear that cancels out most of the other audio is Peter letting air out of his tires, he has a system set up to inflate and deflate his tires on the move from the cab of his truck. Pretty nifty.

You can see a few more pictures from this trip at our Picasa page.

AFP: Make bread not war, Egypt president tells army

CAIRO (AFP) — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has mobilised the army's ovens to deal with the country's massive bread shortages amid rising social unrest, official media reported on Monday.

Mubarak has told the army and the interior ministry, which control bakeries usually used to make bread for the troops, to increase their production in order to "put an end to the bread crisis," Al-Ahram daily said.

Egypt is in the grip of a serious bread crisis brought on by a combination of the rising cost of wheat on world markets and sky-rocketing inflation.

Four people have been killed in fights that broke out in bread queues in recent weeks, a security official told AFP.

Mubarak said that the phenomenon of bread queues "must disappear."

While most bread in Egypt is subsidised, the price of non-subsidised bread has risen by more than 26 percent over the last year.

"Where's the problem?" the official MENA news agency quoted Mubarak as asking. "If it's the production, then it should be increased. If it's the distribution, then new distribution points should be opened."

Twenty percent of Egypt's population of 78 million lives under the poverty line of two dollars a day, with another 20 percent hovering just above. Around four percent of Egyptians live in extreme poverty, the World Bank said.

At least 70 people were killed when bread riots erupted in 1977 after the government tried to reduce subsidies on the staple, of which Egyptians are the world's biggest consumers.

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Doortje is back from Bangkok

Rita, Maher and I, two colleagues I travelled with to Bangkok.