We arrived in Cairo a little before midnight and we had to get up early for our tour, so we stumbled (from exhaustion) into the hotel bar and had a couple of expensive drinks, then stumbled up to our room. The next day was an insane tour through Cairo. I’ve just got a couple of pictures up so far, but you can find them on smugmug.
Our tour guide met us at our hotel and we drove out to Giza City (pretty much a Cairo suburb, but with pyramids) through the teeming streets of Cairo. As you might expect, Egypt is messy and disorganized, but everyone was incredibly friendly. Unfortunately, part of the messiness involved garbage collection problems, which means burning garbage, so it was incredibly hazy.
The pyramids are truly amazing, there’s simply no describing how huge they are. No pictures I’ve ever seen have done them justice, nor do mine. I guess not too surprisingly, there weren’t that many people there, one advantage of going so soon after the revolutions. There are a total of nine pyramids at the site and the Sphinx. The Great Pyramid towers over the other two large pyramids, but they’re all just staggeringly huge. We went down into the second pyramid (it was significantly cheaper) by climbing down through a tiny shaft about 3 feet square, angled at maybe 30 degrees. I was grateful not to have been allowed to carry my camera backpack, which would have made this nearly impossible. Then we went up a similar shaft into the burial chamber. There really wasn’t anything there, it was just a large room in the center of the pyramid, but it was quite something to think of all of the engineering and labor that went into it, and of what it once held.
After wandering around the pyramids, we rode camels around the desert a bit, not for any particular reason, but it was fun. Our guides insisted on taking a series of embarrassing pictures of us in front of the pyramids, holding them, pointing at them, pinching the tops of them, etc. These will not be seen without significant bribes. We then took a short drive to the Sphinx, which was actually smaller than I’d expected. Perhaps my scale was just out of whack from the other sights of the day.
After this we drove out to Islamic Cairo and visited the Mosque of Muhammad Ali. It’s really incredibly beautiful. Inside, lanterns are hung in a breathtaking pattern beneath the high domes. I’ll get some pictures up soon I hope.
Afterwards we visited another mosque with a minaret that you can climb up for a great view of the city. It’s getting late here, so I’ll skip the details, and the photos since I haven’t actually gone through them yet. We finished off the day with a trip to through the markets, wandering through the streets. Stay tuned to smugmug for pictures of that, and of course Londolozi, where we are now.