Just spent two days in the desert on …. of all things… a 4wd rally. Cold (but sunny), I went along to the rally as a volunteer photographer, snapping blokes hauling their rally cars over sand dunes.

Frightfully un-pc in terms of saving dunes etc, too much fun camping in the desert – these Arabs know how to do it in style. We finished the last leg in the late afternoon of the first day at the Red Bull-sponsored winner’s arch, to find a massive, massive communal tent erected for dinner for 100 of us, rugs laid out on the floor, the tent walls a traditional brightly coloured fabric all supported by massive timber beams – it all just sprung up that day by the volunteers and local Bedouins who like a bit of down and dirty dune bashing. Who knew??? This is a shot of a Chinese-made Sperenza that two guys were trialling – the aim was to prove that it could actually hold up in a rally. There were no sand dunes injured in the production of this photograph though the driver fell out of his car on the next leg, looking for pain relief for his back. The medical team obliged – you could pick their 4WD, it was the one with the puffs of shisha smoke coming out the tailgate as the doctors’ drivers took time out to have a pipe, even flying down dunes sharing a smoke together…aaaaahhhh, Egypt. These long dunes are a wall between the sandy desert and a long, flat stretch of stony ground that once was a sea bed, and I snapped petrified wood while others picked sea shells from the earth. But SO glad to get home and remove sand blown into ears, nose, hair and to not have to find a convenient dune for privacy:)

As with all Muslim countries, the official weekend starts late Thursday and all day Friday, which means the city absolutely pumps on Thursday nights as everyone mainlines sugary pastries and soft drink – surely a lethal combination but the only way you can hang out till 4am, hey?

For a city that’s always bubbling, it can be surprisingly difficult to know when things are open…or not.

Take for instance, the hairdressers and barbers. They are all closed on Mondays. (Why? Who knows?) Many Christian-run businesses will close on Sundays, regardless of whether they’re locksmiths or watchmakers, the traders at the traditional uber-souq of Khan al-Khalili shut up shop early on Sunday evenings, regardless of the many wandering tourists loitering aimlessly with money to burn on sheesha pipes and Arabian slippers.

In summer, siesta is well and truly enforced as the heat drives Egyptians to their beds in cool dark rooms. I rang a shop the other day to see what time it opened in the mornings – the shutters don’t go up too 11am, so it was a shock to meet a friend who works…wait for it…9am-5pm.

And me? Well…Australia comes online at midnight, Cairo time, so it seems the only way is to go with the flow – I guess one way to not have to readjust to a different time zone is to just stay with the one you left, even on the other side of the world.

The first glimpse of Cairo wasn’t encouraging…what you could see of it. Flying in at 10am, all that was visible was the desert road from the east Egyptian city of Ismalia leading straight and true into the heart of a very large, very grey cloud. It was purely educated conjecture that led me to assume 20 million Cairenes were in there, in amongst the smog somewhere. For all the pollution, the weather is still sunny, warm and bright, a light jacket at night is the only concession to the concept that it still is winter. It seems such a short time ago I was coasting Cairo’s motorways in the cool evening air, yet it is two months since I was last in town. This time, it’s is going to be much different to my last visit. Instead of living Downtown, I’ve opted for the comparatively middle-class Egyptian region of Heliopolis, in the city’s north. The change is dramatic. In an exploratory amble today, I saw only a handful of foreigners, compared with the many that collect around Downtown’s hostels and hotels. It is quieter – no industrial tailors above my bedroom this time, the traffic is more a distant grumble than a shrieking roar, and when I leave my bedroom doors open to the balcony, I hear the twitter of budgerigars from the nearby pet shop.I’m making it sound like I’m in the ‘burbs. But I’m just a handful of stops from the city centre by train, and a quick, 10-minute walk or even quicker tram ride takes me to El Korba, one of Cairo’s most spectacular streetscapes, a string of turreted, whitewashed Moorish-style buildings that I dream to live in. There are also palaces aplenty, a basilica and formal (albeit dusty) gardens open to the public for a few pounds (about 70c).Some things never change, though. As ever, the industrial rubbish hoppers are a haven for Cairo’s animals. The cats, the cats! Spilling out of the bins, mothers first, followed by a slick of scrawny, big-eyed kittens. And beggar women sell packets of tissues for a pound (30c) from their staked-out posses on the streets. Urban myth has it that a tissue crone died and when she was buried, her body was found buoyed with money, and her miserly home a hotbed of riches.

I wanted to call this blog ‘Return of the Killer Tomatoes’ or ‘Return of the Jedi’ or … ‘Return of the King’, but actually, it’s me, not tomatoes or jedi or kings, who is returning. To Egypt. Yeah!

There’s an Egyptian saying, ‘He (or she) who drinks the waters of the Nile will return’.

While I hate to be a statistic, or predictable, perhaps that’s what’s happening. So I will be charging up this blog again. So hold onto yer pants for the next instalment, some time after February 12!

Well people, it hardly seems possible that the feast was so many days ago. I’m back in Melbourne and debating whether or not to upload unpublished blogs. Is it weird? There’s so much more to write about, and I will be writing it all for upcoming magazines and newspapers. Can I beg your indulgence?

Cairo didn’t sleep last night – shops were open till around 4am, people wandered the streets eating ice cream, chilling out and waiting for prayers to commemorate Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice.

A walk through Islamic Cairo saw flocks of sheep and tethered cattle in the main squares, being sold off to those who then had them butchered on the streets, which are, actually running with blood. I photographed a slick of blood, only to have a woman shrieking from a window above that I shouldn’t be shooting such things.

But everyone was happy for me to snap them carving the head from cows, disembowelling sheep and painting the walls with their bloody handprints.

There was a tense moment when I nearly fell on a great mound of cow’s intestines on the footpath, but for the most part, everyone’s in a good mood, taxis are giving way to pedestrians, shopowners not charging outrageous prices … it’s only me who’s tired and cranky and needs to sleep… and I’m probably the only one who did in Cairo last night…

You could be forgiven for saying Egyptians just can’t wait to begin the Sacrifice – the annual celebration of Abrahim offering to sacrifice his son for God’s wishes. “The streets will run with blood,” said friends ghoulishly.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I came home tonight for a few hours’ power napping to find that a few people just couldn’t wait, and my doorman, Hosni, was busy slaughtering a sheep in the foyer, with a butcher and a third strapping fellow to hold down the wriggling brown sheep.

“Hello, would you like to take a photograph?” asked the butcher in excellent English (weirdness number two).

Then he invited me to do as the locals do and dip the palm of my hand in the animal’s blood at print my hand on the wall. Which I did. If this is a taste of things to come (in about four hours’ time) I can’t imagine what tomorrow brings…

Well people, I can safely say that yesterday was a day of extremes for Cairo. The morning started with a visit to the animal section of Souk al-Gomma, the Friday market that rambles down dirt streets, beneath freeway flyovers, into the City of the Dead…

Some of the products for sale are indistinguishable from the mounds of rubbish that line the walkways – piles of broken cassettes, single shoes, wonky sunglasses – but there are also clothes, food, antiques… and then there’s the pet section, where a six-month old puppy that threatens to grow the size of a small horse could be yours for LE5000 (more than $1000).

The pet section is grotesquely amazing. Prospective buyers lounge on crates watching a man parade a massive, scarred blue Great Dane for sale, its savage barking at the prompting of teasing small boys attracting a great deal of interest. German Shepards are extremely popular, and young long-eared puppies wait mournfully for someone to befriend them, accepting a soft pat so gratefully, you just want to take them home immediately.

Slim-bodied snakes crawl over the hands of their traders – young boys learning from their fathers – wild-eyed chameleons shudder at the intensity of the noise and the only place the thickness of the pollution and fragrance of the rubbish is forgotten is around the bakhour (incense) sellers.

But the show highlight, for me, was the pigeons. Take a look at London, Rome or even Melbourne and you’d never understand how a population could adore pigeons. Locals rave about their specialist pigeon restaurants, describing the plump birds with almost lascivious glee. Apart from the regular grey flying rats we’re used to seeing, there are some absolute beauties here.

There’s large, white birds so soft they could be mistaken for a handful of tissues. Enormous brown pigeons, like fat chooks, and one black-and-white one with feathered feet and a mop top. I asked if I could take a picture, and was instantly besieged with men and boys eager to be photographed with their beloved birds. They really do love them, though you wouldn’t know it the way one bloke pulled a few large ones out through a small door and tossed them into a big brown paper shopping bag.

The souk has a bad name for pickpockets and the crush of humanity hides a multitude of sins and unspoken dealings, but apart from a light manhandling (saved countless times by my ever alert bodyguard and bag holder:) it was an amazing place to visit.

It was a serious contrast to the rest of the day, which culminated in a drive through Bulaq, one of the poorest and roughest of Cairo’s suburbs, out to a wedding in the new, elite town of 6 October. Lost in Bulaq and dressed in our wedding finery, it was obvious to the people staring into the car that we weren’t from round these parts.

Named after the victory day in the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 which saw Egypt take back the Sinai, (or Yom Kippur War in Israel) 6 October so is far out of town, sort of on the Cairo-Alexander road, I’d dispute that it was actually Cairo. Neat, identical villas make up the suburbs that, from a distance look like ghost towns, so quiet in comparison to the rest of the city.
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The wedding was small and intimate by Egyptian standards, but had all the necessary requirements – the couple perched on a love seat on a stage overlooking the reception, the wedding singer with his mic turned up onto full reverb, and the belly dancer a strawberry blonde Russian who I think was actually the best dancer I’ve seen in Egypt. I still find it weird to have a robust woman clad in a pink body stocking, knockers held in surely only by sheer willpower, sliding over the bridal couple, but that’s obviously just a cultural difference. If it was me, I’d have to have a dance-off with her!