Sam Watson

Back to Cairo on this coming Wednesday. Strange how the place can bug the hell out of me and yet having been hooked by it since 1979 I can’t stay away 🙂 Been trying to bring my Discovery into the UAE from the UK but RHD cars can’t stay in the Emirates for more than…

It’s driving me nuts, not yet having a vehicle here in the UAE. The sale of Stella the 110 in Cairo has gone through, an act of necessity rather than desire, and the cash has cleared (after a very laborious process and I have to say the buyer seemed pretty objectionable), so I’m now hunting…

I have always been more of a Defender person than a Discovery one. I’ve had three 110s and loved each one (still got one of them) but when non-overlanding life intervenes, a 110 is a bit of a brute for, say, giving a lift to aging parents, being genteel with girlfriend or doing large tarmac…

  Proud of my two girls – and aware of how lucky I am. Next trip with them is a loop round Eastern Europe in August, in Elsa the 110.

Back to the UK for a manic fortnight of vehicle outfitting and kit trials. Tried suspending the #Tentsile Stingray between a Defender and Discovery (and a tree!) – worked really well. Also almost-finished kitting out my Discovery with various bits and bobs including a #MyWay roof tent and various storage options including a rear drawer…

. I recently got hold of a new type of tent – a Stingray, made by Tentsile. Tentsile make ‘tree tents’ – a design inspired by the Ewok villages of Star Wars – tents suspended like equilaterally-triangular hammocks between trees. The advantage of them is, of course, that you can pitch over any ground –…

(above) Testing the BoundaryTec water heater / expedition shower system (see below) The move to the UAE was originally intended to be accompanied by Stella, my rebuilt 110 living in Cairo. However UAE laws on import of older, modified vehicles plus time and finance constraints meant that I needed to sell Stella in Cairo. This is…

…which sounds like the title of a B-movie. Fujairah is a small Emirate with a large port. Possibly the biggest container port? One of the biggest anyway. I often sit with a G&T and shisha in the Hilton bar on the beach in Fujairah (like you do) and can see a vast line of freighters…

I wrote a piece for the Expedition Portal website the other day on the building of the last-ever Land Rover Defender. I’m quite pleased with it. Here it is; http://expeditionportal.com/the-last-land-rover-defender/  

Fujairah is a small Emirate with a flat coastal plain surrounded by mountains. I had a quick run out last weekend into northern Oman which is geographically much the same, and then the other day had a drive up into the hills to the west of the city (town?) to Hatta oasis. It’s a plateau…

The contrast between enormous, sprawling Cairo and tiny, blooming Fujairah is huge – and not just in the physical size (Greater Cairo’s population is well over 20 million, the Emirate of Fujairah is around 100,000). As an expat one feels much less under scrutiny in Fujairah, much less an item on the morning’s cabaret, and…

For me, the draw of Egypt is the desert; its space, its history and its ecology. In contrast to my previous, optimistic, post, it became clear towards the lag-end of 2015 that the Egyptian desert, or at least the ‘real’ Sahara, (rather than the bits immediately west of Cairo) was not going to be opening up…

Amidst all the hiatus of Russian airliners blowing up (or not) there has been a speck of good news for the Egyptian tourist industry – the Egyptian Sahara, heretofore off-limits thanks to insurgency and the military’s reaction to it, *may* be slowly re-opening. A friend went out with a group of locals recently into the…

I’ve been quiet for a few days because I’ve been hosting a family of four German overlanders – the Stahl family (http://4-wheel-nomads.de/) and their neat 2011 Tdci 110, fitted with a LandyKamper pop top. Their Land Rover cleared Alexandria customs in record time – three working days – thanks to the efficient work of the…

Visionary explorer, scientist and soldier Ralph Bagnold, founder of the LRDG, wrote in the 1930s in his book ‘Libyan Sands’ how a Briton could drive from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the mountains of Nepal unhindered by bureaucracy. How the world has turned. Now in 2015 living in the Cairo suburb of Maadi, only…

What with writing for LRO, keeping up a Twitter feed and Facebook stream and living a life, I let this blog go. Then today I realised that people have actually been looking at it – “typical bloody Watson, idle git, hasn’t written anything in ages”. Sorry everyone – thank you for persevering. I will maintain…