Hi all,

I'm in Egypt for the next month doing field work west of Aswan in the Western Desert of Egypt. A couple of you asked me to post some pics, so I thought I'd put up a few now. I'm part of a group of American and Egyptian geologists and students who are working on a variety of geological mapping and geophysical survey projects. We arrived in Cairo on the 28th, spent a couple days at one of the Egyptian universities in the Delta, and then took the 1200 km train (14 hours) from Cairo to Aswan, which is in the very south of Egypt. We'll be working here for the next two and half weeks.

Here is our crew taking a day of sightseeing at the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx:


Buying food for the train trip:


Egypt is a peculiar mix of high tech (the mobile phone store on this street, plus the wireless USB modem that I bought to access the Internet - total cost $30, which included a month of access) and donkey carts on the four-lane highways.


We're staying in a dorm at South Valley University, and we have a typical Egyptian breakfast every morning - flat bread, fool (kind of like refried beans with garlic, lemon, and oil - very yummy!!!), cheese, and water.


Every morning, our group hops into a pick-up truck with a cap and bench seats in the back (kind of like an old-fashioned troop transport), and we head for the military checkpoint on the road out of Aswan. Some very serious soldiers with well-worn Kalashnikovs check our paperwork every day - no one can just drive out into the desert to work. Then we drive an hour or so, and our driver drops us off, and we head off across the desert to do our work.


That's me in the photo above - this is truly bleak desert. We've seen fennec fox dens, a few beetles, a lizard or two, and the trails of sidewinders in the sand. But no water, no vegetation. Just the wind and the rocks and the sand. And one road running through it all for thousands of square kilometers. Amazing place.

If you have Google Earth, you can see the structure we've spent the last couple of days mapping at:

23.857562°N, 32.490288°E