Oct 26, 2026, 8:55 AMThe 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
Oct 26, 2026, 10:54 AMUpward 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
Oct 26, 2026, 12:51 PMThe 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
Oct 26, 2026, 1:11 PMSadly 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
Oct 26, 2026, 2:35 PMThe 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
Oct 26, 2026, 4:57 PMYou 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
@zool Calling the stuff in the first picture 'soul' is a bit on the nose. Looks like a playground for parkour people, or a good map for an FPS video game.
Oct 26, 2026, 4:50 PM@semanticist need to have a good squint at some remote sensing timelapses of that part of the world sometime, the footprint as seen from the land was startling
@zool It looks like it was extruded from the ground, the walls of the buildings are almost exactly the same shade as the soil/sand around them. Going for a wander through those would be an experience. Probably a nightmarish one!
Oct 27, 2026, 3:55 AM@semanticist they're unfinished :) no pics of the polished ones nearer to Alamein, but they acquire balcony-effect ornamentation, a layer of sand-coloured concrete spackle, end up a lot more aesthetic
I remember first passing through Alamein and thinking how Chinese it looked, though at a smaller scale, identi-buildings stamped out for km outside a city core
Bits that look like Benidorm and its sister town Finestrat, further along. That's the Mediterranean coast for you, pile 'em high. Almost makes me want to go back and look at how Benidorm is growing
Oct 27, 2026, 4:10 AM@semanticist Spain got caught up in a building development bubble that deepened the 2008 crisis, despite having taken steps to protect their banking system after past shocks. It took the everyday economy much longer to recover there than other places. The development along the North Coast looks like that, but with generative marketing
Sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf funding the building, according to the FT https://www.ft.com/content/5cbc4708-c11b-4be7-88f4-9c23a2066dd7?syn-25a6b1a6=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932014_Spanish_real_estate_crisis
Ghost developments