You pass some beautifully illuminated LED trucks on the night roads, but it's as impossible to get a good phone photo of them as it was of the pillar of light. They're often beautifully painted for the day, too

No i'm not thinking about animating truck lighting, it would be a traffic hazard

I remember seeing more LED mosques in the past, perhaps it's out of fashion now. Still, a lot of spiritual art potential if you could get the imams on side

The drive out was overnight, you don't get to take in much. I remember a lot of façades of coastal gated communities, massed speculative building like you'd find on the Mediterranean coast in Spain

It helps recontextualise all the new building in Siwa! Some of the roadside has the organic-growth feel, the layers of brick and tob and rebar poking out the top. More of it is large planned developments. A lot of effort going into building them, quarries the size of multistorey blocks. You wonder how much demand to live in these places there is

Show flats at the front, single-word English names - "Salt" or "Soul". It's like a landscape generated by AI

Sadly the rubble turns into half-trash for at least 500m back from this point, the main checkpoint for getting on and off the Siwa road, who knows how far it goes back

The scenery's starting to change a little, pockets of vegetation, but it's still mostly rubble. Tbh it's meditative, you can tune into the slight differences in its emptiness

Passed some roadside camels and beeped at them to keep their distance. One lucky photo, others of camel backside

Upward climb out of the oasis bowl, past some tiered geology, occasionally pockmarked with tombs / caves / dens, and onwards through approx three hours of rubble, a barren unchanging landscape punctuated every 50km or so by a mosque + petrol station + cell tower arrangement

The cats. I was peer pressured into feeding them (by humans) and for the past few days they have feasted on chicken. Other cats come and go, these are the committed ones.

The two kittens were petrified of me at first, and now perch on the stair hoping for more chicken. Their mum blessed my toes with a scratch this morning. Got a small wooden cat statue to remember her by

No pump/generator in the pre-dawn hour, so i got to see the pillar of light in its ideal state, dark except for the cries of individual dogs, lighting right up for the closest donkey.

Threw taste to the wind for its last night on the roof, added a yellow/pink/blue colour range in the middle, like a sunrise, and white at both ends, the simple maths dropping out from its two previous incarnations.

Carefully dismantled it with no little sadness. The landlord was up there at sunrise, packing the roof dates back into crates (after having done the same last week, then returned and spread them back out a couple of days later).

So maybe the Siwans worked something out at the town reconciliation meeting, the folks who missed the unannounced window get to sell their dates after all. Hope so, and hope the price is fair.

Was a lucky chance to fill a biscuit box with roof dates to take home to the kid, though (offered retail price, and the landlord insisted on giving me half back)

The Sufi hadra / reconciliation meeting in Dakrour is tonight, we learned by showing my mum the new cafe in the library. Part of me would love to be there, but there wasn't an offer

And while the night is technically young enough for me still to summon a motorbike-sidecar tuktuk all "take me to the mountain" to listen, which is permitted if you're tactful, decided against it

Because it's still an all-male thing, there's no joining that circle, so it's a version of "if i can't dance, i don't want to be part of your revolution". As much as i want to sit on the edge of things, i also want that to be a choice, not the only option

Made it back to the souk and spoke with the new-energy stallholder doing the pyro calligraphy, lots of easy to carry, customisable trinkets but nothing distinctively Siwan

Collected his details to pass on to folks helping local women get a fair price for their work, sweetened the pitch with a couple of prototype handmade signs in Chinese and Korean reading "Made by Siwa sisters"

Look, i'm on holiday, a recreational marketing initiative is my choice of use of time. And they're nice sized practise canvases, it's the 10,000 hours thing

An afternoon spent in the sewing matriarch's front room, had arranged to actually buy one of her heirloom-level shawls, telling myself it's to learn from. Just a dimensionality and intricacy i've never seen anywhere else, not on public sale in Siwa, not in the museum. Looking at it is like reading a book

Yesterday i'd made it back to Ashraf's, the hidden haberdashers for women, we split 50/50 the colours i couldn't find last time.

Did some little sketches in the rough yarn i'm still mostly working with, which she looked at and pronounced "good", gave me a little thrill of accomplished satisfaction :)

My host dropped by for a while with a couple of winsome young American women in tow, both speaking surprisingly good Arabic, to look at the embroidered souvenirs. Guess they got an extra show out of it all

Found the nicest roadside hut, with car seats and plastic pallets for furniture, and a possibly-functional drinks machine, if this weren't such a busy dusty road now it would be a real effort to leave #HutLife

Looked like someone had abandoned their breakfast in Abdo's cafe, and i had a whole schtick lining up about "I pity the ful", but after 5 minutes they turned up, shooed the flies off and ate it, spoiling the moment

Even selectively skimmed through the eyes of Google Translate, the picture Schiffer paints of Siwa-as-expression is astounding

All of it interconnected - building ornamentation, jewellery, dance forms, music, and of course the embroidery - each part of it a harmony in the same endless song

You realise *how much of it had already been lost by the time the road came*

The trip is drawing to a close, starting to regather myself, revisit bright spots and pick up small things to bring home

Found the library / museum has a new terrace cafe, sat up there and drank Turkish coffee and flipped through the PhD thesis of the composer Brigitte Schiffer, a work of ethnomusicology published in 1935
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Schiffer

A street scene that will look familiar to anyone who visited the Oracle Temple of H.A.C.K. :)

That's the Siwa that tourists have historically come for, the "eco-lodge" vibe (but this one with electricity), the charmed simplicity that the King of England heaped praises upon 20 years ago as a model of environmentally sustainable tourism, local and renewable building materials, etc

A lot's happened in the last few years. Material, construction, the road out to Dakrour now lined with new hotels that look like the palace-compounds along the Mediterranean coast.

More vehicles bringing in more materials bringing in more vehicles. Profitable to build, but there's a limit to what the power and water infrastructure can sustain, and Siwa's always feeling its way just past the edge of that limit

We went on to a hotel built around a hot spring, with a swimming pool, and beautifully tended gardens. The hotel part is low-key, half a dozen wee cabin-pods, mostly people go to bathe and swim and eat in the restaurant.

The spring was the hottest i've been in, the temperature of a hot bath. Tiled and prepared, bit of algae but not too much. Soaked in there for as long as i could, and the swim was the most movement i've done here. Good to exercise, though it's been a luxury to mostly rest

We had dinner there post-sunset, ate camel stew along with the every-meal accoutrements (rice with noodle fragments, tomato/cucumber salad, root veg in a tomato-y sauce, bread and tahini, and a jute soup, particularly nice one). I didn't hear how much it all cost. Sliding scale, depends who you know and who you are, like everything here

Then we had a "how the other half live" afternoon courtesy of one of mum's Dutch friends, who drove us out to the other side of Dakrour, the healing mountain.

Mum got a reiki massage from an Italian practitioner with a very more-enlightened-than-thou attitude, in a room made of four kinds of salt, while we waited in a nearby open hut, a space used for shared meals during the annual reconciliation meeting and Sufi hadra, which still happens but in a very scaled-back way.

Saw the hadra once, soon after visiting here for the first time. There's still a writeup of my first impressions, and a short phone audio recording of the Sufi circle chanting, here: https://siwa-ultrazool-71e8e70f244fe8593b1faab9c153ccd1d3f0c2e5335a4812.gitlab.io/

The weekend starts on Friday here, so yesterday was different kinds of rest day. Morning of peaceful sewing, sitting in the stairwell with the cats, turning out prototype gifts for the traditional Siwan bag charm marketing plan

There was a special Friday lunchtime sermon, Khutbah / خطبة - perched in the shade of the water barrel and listened. A younger-sounding imam, not the usual caller. Impassioned, singsong, words melting until they could have been in any language, just reaching tones, the final section incredibly stirring

My first high school boyfriend went on to become an imam, he looked me up on Twitter once. Don't know what that says about me ;)

Anyway. Best is probably to buy a stack of sealed drinking water bottles, they'll keep indefinitely and you don't have to use them all at once. We use 20l jerry cans at work to take onto the island, but they need sterilising regularly, are heavy, and the stupid taps always leak