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We did a little desert trip labeled “Following the footsteps of King Farouk, the last king of Egypt”

Roughly  70km outside of Cairo, after the Helwan toll-road, the driver literally took a 90degree left turn off the highway into the desert.  No markers or signs, just a GPS and a broken down concrete barrier showed the evidence of this unofficial route.  Apparently Bedouins use this to cross through the mountains toward the Red Sea. Why?  To smuggle hashish!

Approximately 10km into the desert on rocky dirt roads, the original tarmac road has be completely wiped out in the last 50 years by flash-floods and sandstorms, we reach the hunting outpost by King Farouk.  Apparently this was also used to house the exiled King of Albania. These days Bedouins use this for a shelter or rendezvous point and all that’s left are empty structures and dried out gardens.

Lots of dusty wind, extreme heat and harsh sun meant many of the images below had to be photoshopped a bit.
click here to read more about this trip.

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Tonight Egypt continue to dominate their appearances in the Africa Cup of Nations.  A 1-0 win over Ghana secured their championship and put the streets of Cairo into a frenzy.   We joint revellers in the streets of Mustafa Nahas Street, Madinet Nasr soaking up the celebrations.

Fun was had by all, from 1 year old babies wrapped in Egyptian flags to senior women in their niqaabs now sporting Egyptian flag colors.  The absence of alcohol tends to prevent rowdiness and hooliganism normally associated with street parties.

Some photographs below.

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This post will breakdown the various tech that I’m using to continue work while travelling and studying in Cairo.

Firstup is hardware. I’m using a medium level Asus Notebook – K50ij series with 2gigs of ram, 320g storage, Intel Dual Core T4300.   This has surprised me with its speed and ability to multi-task with Photoshop, Corel draw, Gmail and a few other browsers. Lastly a 500g external usb powered drive for daily backups of all files, settings, software, etc. Watching movies and playing games is not a priority hence a 15” LED backlit screen suits me just fine.

For file management between JHB offices, webclients and myself. We are all using Dropbox.  The 2gig free version is more then enough to keep things going smoothly.  Website updates, advert submissions and text documents are all handled through this. A few successful referrals has bumped me to about 4gigs of online storage.

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