Well you’ve heard how to walk like an Egyptian…
Let me give you a heads up on how to drive like an Egyptian
- Line markings: Rare and utterly pointless… if you want to drive half in a lane do it … not just for a few seconds until you realise oh no, just stay there taking up two so called lanes
- Stopping: If you come across one of the rare (in the smaller cities) sets of traffic lights, stopping at red lights is optional. Stopping elsewhere in any lane or part of a lane on any road at any time = “Nike” … just do it
- Car Horns: 24 hours day, non stop, if you’re going to overtake beep, if they’re to slow beep, if they’re morons beep, if it’s your buddy beep, if you’re lucky to be alive … BEEP
- Sirens + After Market Horns: Same as a police or emergency vehicle or like “The General Lee” from Dukes of Hazard … just buy them and slap them on your vehicle, they’re not legal, but that doesn’t stop anyone, I’d guess a third of vehicles have one – use exactly the same as a car horn as listed above i.e. CONSTANTLY
- Vehicles: Everything you can imagine and some you can’t ranging from semi trailers to trucks, cars, motorcycles, three wheeled utes, motorised vendors carts pulled by horses and donkeys or horse and carriage and last but not least the illegal tuk tuks that are everywhere (the tuk tuks also delight in driving the wrong way up a one way street
- Merging: This is not to be confused with Australian lane merging (which is bad enough), Egyptian lane merging can best be described as pretending you’re a serial killer with a very large carving knife … now stab aggressively and repeatedly at any tiny (or non existant) gap in the traffic
- Pedestrians: Anywhere, anytime, they step out in front of any vehicle no matter what size it is or speed it is doing on any type of road or freeway
- Street Vendors: Anywhere, anytime, any road or freeway, just stop in any lane and setup your cart
- Pot Holes: These are not rare
- Sleeping Police (Speed Humps): except On freeways expect one of these every few hundred metres
- Driving Attitude: Not all drivers, but a consistent small percentages driving attitude can be described as “being, drunk + stoned + on crack + all while having a bad case of diarrhoea desperately looking for the closest toilet”
It is EXTREMELY difficult to describe the driving experience without swearing profusely…. let me sum it up as “butt clenching”.
Note: The drivers of our tour vans were all great, they did a great job in a very harsh environment.
We don’t have many photos of this as Steve had his eyes closed most of the time (praying for his life).