I’m going to start with the view from the roof. This is off towards the main road of Janzour and well beyond that, the ocean, which you can’t see, but you can see the sun about to be swallowed up by smog, possibly generated from the oil-burning power plants (there’s another thing you could be using your ‘waste’ gas for, guys - though to be fair I have heard some other oil company is paying to convert the oil-burning power plants to gas, so it is happening). That’s our neighbour’s house in the foreground.
This is to the left of that first photo. You can see the closest mosque we have in the area – we hear the call to prayer in the evening, but aren’t woken up by the first dawn call…unless Dog hears it and barks.
This is a close-up of that mosque area. You can see the row of shopfronts lining the main road, and the suburban nature of the area. I think I once may have mentioned that Janzour used to be a separate town from Tripoli (and this was only in 2002 when the Lonely Planet was written), but now urban sprawl and a big development boom has made it another suburb of the city.
This is facing the other way. You can see the dirt track going further back into our little sub-suburb, and the gum trees which line the track and give us a nice outlook and reminder of home. I worry these will be chopped down and more houses built on the farmland opposite us. But I heard a rumour that chopping trees down is illegal here, though I also heard that only applies to the date palms as they are a source of food. You can see a patch of rubbish under the trees, not rare, and the building blocks they’re using to build the house next door.
This is to the left of that photo, the farm all these new houses have been built on. It doesn’t look much like a farm, but there’s sheep and chickens, so it counts.
In general news, the last couple of weeks have gotten very hot (and the city is filled with the evocative aroma of hot rotting garbage) and proved the sense of shutting down during the afternoon and opening again in the evening. It does not get much hotter than a Perth summer maximum, but it does stay consistently very hot and there is no sea-breeze or cooling down overnight. I was horrified when I heard people leave their air-cons on 24 hours a day, but I can see why – the houses have no insulation and without that night-time breeze, they just do not cool down.
We are also having more maintenance issues, what with leaking air-conditioners which leak worse after the maintenance guy has been...
3 comments:
These photos make the place look fairly green, which it is, but inbetween the plants the ground is like the red dust from the North of WA. And with the lack of sea breeze the heat just builds and builds. The coast line is orientated east-west, so when the afternoon breeze comes from the East you get virtually nothing more than 2km away from the coast line.
As the Cap'n says, we thought running an aircon 24 hours a day was a bit much, but we ourselves now have 3 aircons runnings 24 hours. Once the concrete and marble of these houses heats up it acts like a big oven and it takes days to get it back down. The only reason we probably don't have at least one more going is because the other 3 of the 6 in our house leaks so much water inside. I can't see where they've run the drainage pipe for them, which probably explains it. I think they fill up inside the walls, then overflow through the units themselves.
But it's not so bad, so people I know don't have enough power in their area to run more than one airon...
We had internet at home briefly on Friday night. Broadband and all. It hasn't worked since though :(
Expect to run the ac for the next three months - non-stop!
:)
I love looking at pics from Tripoli area, thanks for posting.
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