DAY 32 Wed 14 July

I feel more like I am earning my keep over here this time, giving the dogs their medication every morning (and having to hold on to Demon while he had his medicine dropped in his eye). It was a rather slow start to the morning, and I relaxed a bit until Waleed came round to ask what horse I wanted to ride – I decided to not ride a horse this time, but to get them to saddle up Amira the mule.
We went for a nice ride around the countryside, with the requisite boom boxes on wheels going past, people sitting outside their homes doing normal household things, or just relaxing in the shade of the many trees lining the canal. We rode past Hassan, who was sitting inside one of the houses. I also got to go for a reasonable length trot on Amira – mules have a tendency to be gaited, so it was very smooth – it isn't exactly a trot that you could do a normal rising trot to. The problem that I seem to be having is that I'm so used to the gait of a normal horse, that a gaited horse makes my muscles move in funny ways, and I can end up with a sore back afterwards (it is supposed to be better for the back, but it doesn't seem to work that way for me. Came across another Egyptian traffic jam today – a flock of sheep blocking one side of the canal. A ute was trying to get past, and the young girl who was herding the sheep was having a hard time getting them out of the way. She eventually got them far enough out of the way that the ute could manoeuver around, which left plenty of room for us to get by. There was a guy in the village with one of the three wheeled push bikes – these are set up rather weirdly in that they have the single wheel at the back, and the two wheels at the front, with a cart on the front, and the back of the cart has the handlebars of the bike. This guy was selling clothes and ship ships (aka jandals, aka thongs etc).
At one stage there was a horse heading down the other side of the canal – colour wise, it was totally unsuitable for Egypt – it was a pinto bay, with large white markings on its face (in fact about ¾ of its head was white – terrible for sunburn!
After riding through the village, and along the side of the canal, there was another herd of sheep and goats, this time looked after by an even younger boy, who was sitting in the shade of a tree playing with a lovely little puppy.
On the last stretch towards home, we ran into the ship ship salesman again, trying to ride his bike over a very rough section of the trail.
Riding through Saber's garden, we were accosted by Achmed, who took the reins and led Amira out of the garden for me (we were doing fine without him, but he was enjoying himself, so who is to argue). And walking through the village just before Maryanne's there was another salesman – this gentleman I believe was a locksmith, at least he seemed to be by the keys and stuff in his travelling bag.
Back at the house, Pal and his wife were just finishing visiting Maryanne, and after they had left, and I had had a couple of mangoes for lunch, Achmed took me into the garden to get some more mangoes. Him and his friends had great fun playing with my cameras, and they actually took some really good photos of each other.
Eventually the day got too warm, and I had to head back (and I had had enough of young boys roughhousing). As we were walking back, the boys caught a young heron of some sort – it was looking pretty stressed out, but I rescued it from the boys and took it back to Maryanne's to see if after a bit of peace and quiet in her bird house it might recover enough to be released. We settled it into a quiet corner with some food and some water, but I was a bit concerned that it might not pull through – it didn't seem to be recovering too well.
Maryanne also had some baby pigeons in there – just starting to get their adult feathers come through – they were rather awkward looking lol. And large.
Sabine turned up that afternoon and we spent some time talking to her before she went out to treat Stella and Nayzak. I used the quiet afternoon to work on getting my blog up to date (I got up to yesterday, so I'm almost there).
Later in the evening I got a call from Morad to say that he was home, but he couldn't come around because Cespio was on his last legs. I offered to head round to his place instead, so I tossed a few beers into my beer cooler bag (came free with the Stella I bought :D) and headed the long way around via the road – don't know if I would like to do that too often though – there are not many street lights around, and Egyptian drivers are more likely to use their headlights to let other people know that they are there than to actually use their headlights to light the way. But I made it safely (and I made sure I was walking close to the trees so that if necessary I could get out of the way in a hurry). Poor Cespio was down on the ground, and couldn't get up. Most people were talking about medication for the horse, I took medication for the owner in the form of some beers. Morad wanted to sit with him until it was resolved one way or another. He had old grooms that he had trained up coming over to help as well. We turned Cespio onto his other side once and just kept him company. At one stage they tried to get him up and standing and I was roped into helping, but he just didn't have the strength to do it. After the last attempt to get him standing, Morad rang one of the vets over here, and was told that it would probably take about another 2 hours for poor Cespio to pass away. He didn't appear to be in any pain fortunately, and I hope he passed quietly. Unfortunately there is not easy access to the blue juice over here – only one vet has it and he is currently not in town. Morad sent me off home just after midnight, and asked if I would mind checking up on his horses the next morning, as he would no doubt be out for the count after staying up with Cespio till the end. Poor Morad, poor Cespio. Cespio had had a hard life, but had had a good life with Morad.
I was just about to walk up to the gate, when the grooms came riding up on Hassan's motorbike – Hassan, Mohamed and Waleed all on there – Waleed was obviously the groom who had to stay the night, and as I went into the guest house, he was heading out to check on all the horses.

Countryside ride 18:
Distance - 5.21km
Time - 1:04:26
Average speed - 4.8kmph
Max speed - 13.1kmph