Thu 30 Dec

Feeling a need for open space, and having been told of an area along the Nile where one can see boat building and potteries, I set off with camera in hand and a day to spare. Along the road there are stalls offering gaily coloured, garden (sized) pots mostly ornamental including a giant tea-pot, a model tubkal (African grass roofed hut) and imaginatively a shopping bag. These are all fired at a low temperature and painted rather than glazed; I suspect they won't travel very well, nor will they last very long in a moist climate. I seriously doubt you'll ever see one in a London department store.

Under the shade of a few trees are some boats in construction but at 9am it is too early to see anyone working on them so I join some locals for coffee and some zalabaya ("donuts").

At this stretch the road is well back from the river; the land between is a seasonal flood plain used for small holdings. I make my way down to the water, watching a tractor ploughing while egrets eagerly drop into the fresh furrows. Along the shore some men are tending to their boat. I wave and they invite me to join them.

I am paddled across to an island which officially doesn't exist. It isn't on the maps and has no name yet at 5m above present water level it has fields, bushes even trees. I go for a wander and find two young men who are rather proud of their tomato plants. At the north-most end I come across a scene which could have been from the nursery rhyme "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" with every animal present except for a pig. In the shade of an enormous tree, in front of a grass hut, I meet the boat men again. Their host hands me a glass of hot sweet milk. Not ever my first choice, but then I realise we are surrounded by cows and for once this is a treat.

Back on the mainland I continue along the shore. After a dry watercourse the area becomes El Gamiya. There are more people around now; a hive of industry. There are fields of bricks drying. Guys carrying them on stretchers, others mixing water and clay and manure, some are shovelling into barrows, dried bricks being piled skilfully for firing. Older kilns "prepared earlier" are being dismantled and loaded carefully into waiting lorries.

A little further on I find skins of baby crocodiles hanging on washing lines or laid out across the ground. I imagine the skin is used for shoes, but I'm quite dumbfounded as to where they have come from - I imagine they are farmed rather than from the wild.

Set back from the shore, behind the brick making, are many potters, each using a pedal driven wheel, turning out pots of all sizes and for various purposes: water "zayers" (large pots used at home and in public places to hold drinking water), proper plant pots, incense/charcoal holders, and vases. A few skilled men have many others around them, collecting and mixing the clay, chopping firewood, attending to kilns and shifting the finished product.