The Egyptian Highway Code

Thinking of driving in Egypt? Don’t! Unless you are considering shortening your life span considerably or have an uncontrollable urge to invest in car body repairs. Don’t take this to mean Egyptian drivers are unskilled: it actually takes great skill to avoid getting killed in the malestrom of automotive chaos that is Egyptian traffic. In fact, they have the lowest road death rate in Africa, not far behind the European average. What you need to understand is that they operate…

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Soul of the city: Alexandria, Egypt

Digging under the surface of Egypt’s famous city    Probably the most important thing about Egypt’s second city according to its residents, is that it certainly isn’t Cairo. In particular they’ll tell you that it’s not as busy, dirty or noisy as the capital, which might come as a bit of a surprise to a westerner arriving in Alexandria who had yet to see Cairo, for by European standards it is all these things, even if it pales in comparison…

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Soul of the city: the sound of Dhaka

I woke to the sound of roar, a roar without end. What was it? A protest? A soccer match? Having arrived in  the early hours, when all was quiet in central Dhaka at the edge of the old city, I had only one option: to get out and explore. Besides, not being a botanist the lure of staying in and studying the abundant insect life crawling around my room didn’t seem quite so appealing. I soon located the source of…

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Rubbish roads

Public transport is a subject I have already given you a flavour of so the dereliction of its vehicles will come as no surprise but I feel obliged to cover some organisational issues with bus services. To most of us it would seem logical, when providing a regular coach service, to relate ticket sales to the quantity of seats on a coach and the departure times, but Cote d’Ivoire in particular has other ideas. Lets say the basic plan is…

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