The last few days have passed relatively quickly it seems, in some ways, and slow in others. A couple of new staff have joined us: a photographer from University of Cardiff, and a conservator from Cairo University. Weather has been moderate, food has continued to vary in quality and quantity, but mostly toward good and enough.

Work at the site progresses slowly because of the need for teaching the inspectors how to do everything correctly, and the need to cycle them through working with each of the specialists. See Willeke's official web site for the week 2 report and the week 3 report that have more information and photos.

On Friday -- our day off -- several of us went over to Wadi el-Rayan, where we swam in the artificial lakes there. Back in the '70s the Egyptian government built a major drainage system to carry excess water from the lake here to a pair of dry basins some 25 km to the southwest. This prevents the big lake's water level from increasing and ruining farmers' land (becaue of salinisation) and provides irrigation water and recreational activities in the area where the two new lakes have formed. This formed Egypt's only waterfalls, however it's decreasing in size as the lower lake fills up to the level of the higher one.

Those of us who went swimming (me, John, Lauren, Louise, and our two cooks, Fatma and Abeer) soon got involved in a major mud fight that lasted hours. The guards stayed way up on the hill side where the road is, so we had a tremendous amount of fun running around and throwing mud and diving into the water and caking on mud and even getting down to wrestling in it. Willeke came along a few hours later and picked us up. Overall it was a great day of relaxation along the lake. Dirty, but relaxing.

Here's a still shot of the swimming hole:



And here's a panorama of the wadi with the swimming hole down below (282 KB). This panorama isn't very clear because there was a good deal of wind kicking up the sand into the air. But you can see that it's a lovely situation out in the middle of nowhere.


Here's some of the results of the wind along the road to the wadi:



Soon we will be visiting a potters' village called el-Nazla in order to see how they go about their business.