How docile camels are. Stick four of them in the back of a ute, they just sit down and chew their cud and wait to go to slaughter. And how versatile utes are for animal transport: camels, cows, sheep, horses, all of them just get shoved in the back of the ute.
By sheer fluke, the car makes visible in the photos are real - there's a lot of Tayos and Suzys around here.
That these desert-descended people do not understand how precious and rare water is (e.g. the phenomenally wasteful practice of using water to wash every grain of sand off the marble terraces; it just blows straight back in, people). They’re rapidly exhausting their fossil water reservoir (laid down by the last ice age, it’s not replenishing next time it rains…) and yet flaring off ‘waste’ natural gas that could be used to run desalination plants. I fear for their future if they don’t learn water management. Including managing drainage for heavy rains – that’s a flooded pedestrian underpass.
That rubbish collection is voluntary; you pay 5-10LD a month if you want your rubbish taken away. Of course, everyone produces rubbish, so if you’re not paying, you’re dumping it on the side of the road or into the dry riverbeds. Hey, who cares what it looks and smells like and that rotting trash is a health hazard for the city, particularly when it rains, at least you’re saving a massive 2LD a week, right? But to some people, that is an onerous cost – the government supplies free housing and subsidised bread, it wouldn’t hurt to add rubbish collection to the list and not only provide employment for the poor African immigrants who sit on the main roads all day with the tools of their trade waiting for any kind of work, but also clean the place up for tourists and for the general wellbeing of its inhabitants.
That Robert De Niro has been here; our driver, who used to work for the hotel, had his photo taken with him. Tourism is becoming more and more common – these cruise ships in the harbour are near-daily sight. Note the traffic in the foreground; anywhere, even main roads, can become a parking lot if you just park there.
That it’s safer to step out into traffic here to cross the road then it would be Perth; here the cars will almost-invariably stop (or at least slow down) for you. Not that we make a habit of stepping out into traffic, but sometimes the only way to get across a road is to just start to cross. Which means that when driving you really have to watch out for pedestrians stepping out into traffic.
2 comments:
Great posting! I wonder if they'll ever sort out those problems? I'm guessing no - at least not until it's forced upon them.
While it is true that crossing a road here with traffic bearing down on you is safer than doing the same thing in Perth (where drivers would probably speed up), I have also seen a couple of bodies on the motorway on my way to work. So it's not totally safe. We met a guy from another company who said that none of their workers are allowed to drive - ever since one of them hit and killed a guy because he stepped out from in front of a bus where the driver had no chance of seeing him. Needless to say, that guys next few weeks were spent in jail until the blood money was paid.
The water use that the Cap'n mentions in probably the hardest thing to take. The main water source here is ground water from the desert. This was put in place by the last ice age and is termed fossil water. It does not get recharged like the ground water aquifers beneath Perth. Now this water reserve is HUGE. But it is going down fast, so fast that there are reports from Egypt and Sudan of lakes drying up and the Nile water levels dropping. This last bit is third hand info, not facts that I have found, but I do know that despite the size of the aquifer it will be gone in 30-50 years. That's not long...
On the flip side they are laying fibre optics cables everywhere here, so at least soon we'll have fast internet.
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