So it’s the weekend, you’ve been out, had dinner, a maybe few drinks and then… not in the mood for a club? Why not ride a camel around the back of the Pyramids? What a great idea.

People, I am serious. We’d been out, eaten, drinks, and then someone looked up into the sky. Full moon! Midnight! It’s time to go horseriding! So three cars of us flew out to Giza where stables line the fence around the Pyramids. Even though it was past midnight, the streets were full of young guys on horses, galloping – yes galloping – wildly up the tracks that lead out of the city and into the desert – a distance of less than a kilometer.

By daylight, this area is a tourist hub, with touts leading riders from across the globe out around the Pyramids and past the Sphinx on camels, horses and even a donkey or two. By night, the locals come out to play (at half the price), especially during the full moon, which clearly lights the sandy desert.

We saddled up, my flighty grey mare pulling at the bit and skittering sideways when a band of about 15 boys flew past us. She spotted a few horses in a separate group in front of us and took off. Great. I was riding a leader, not a follower.

There were just five of us riding, and we finally got into a cohesive group, turned a corner past a few shops and there it was – the desert sand and the pyramids in the full moon. We cantered easily for about 20 minutes to a hill lit with fires, where guys sold hot tea – no polystyrene cups, we were drinking from glassware, baby.

We sat on logs pulled around a carpet (they SO know how to do this desert style thing), everyone smoked a cigarette, then mounted up again for home. We cantered the desert, my horse ever alert for the rocks and shale that marks part of the desert, the pyramids to my left, lit eerily with an orange glow. (Yes, it’s a gratuitious horse and pyramid shot taken in the day, months ago.)

As we rode through Giza yet more packs of boys (and a few squealing girls) on horses were heading out into the night, accompanied by at least one annoyingly loud quad bike and a dune-bashing car.

We turned our horses into the stables, to see a final group of about seven saddling up, and bringing up the rear were two wild boys high up on a pair of camels, about to set out. I looked at my watch. It was 3am.

Body of Lies seems to have become the textbook movie for the Middle East. Starring Leonardo di Caprio and Russell Crowe, it moves between Jordan, Iraq and other countries in this region – rumour has it Egypt, with its notoriously bloody-minded attitude toward movies, which has seen pyramids constructed in Morocco countless times, wrote itself out of the script. In it, one of the main guys is an elite para-military called Hany. Throughout the movie, he’s referred to as Hany Pasha, ‘pasha’ being the old Ottoman term for ‘general’. (Except with the Egyptian accent, it comes out as ‘basha’.) When I was in Khan al-Khalili the other night (see pic, pre-bombing, have yet to go up there since) talking with my jeweller friend Shaggy, the café boy brought his drink and said, sycophantically, ‘Here you are, pasha”. Shaggy looked at the boy and said, ‘I’m not a pasha, I work in the market like you.’There are so many terms like this, ‘bey’ is one below ‘pasha’, which my book translates as a title to apply to a wealthy person, while ‘doctor’ is one who is educated. So when Aya, my cleaning lady, called me doctora (the feminine version of doctor) today I, for once, knew what the hell she was talking about.

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.