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Published: March 16th 2009
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Day 1 Not much time to rest up from the jetlag as we had a 9am pickup for our Pyramid tour today. We had a breakfast of breads, yogurt and cheeses provide at the hotel. I decided to give the local drink Karkady (a cold tea made from the leaves of the Hibiscus flower) a try, and quickly decided I'm not a fan. Melissa opted out as she wasn't quite as adventurous with some of the food and drink as I was.
First stop of the day was the Giza plateau and the Great Pyramids. Now a lot of people have visions of the pyramids out in the desert, but in fact the great pyramids are now swallowed up on three sides by the suburb of Giza (according to Wikipedia, the second largest suburb in the world at 2.8 million people), about 20km southwest of Cairo. You never really feel like you've left the city as Cairo spills right into Giza. So we were just driving along watching the traffic, the donkeys and goats in the streets, and all of a sudden see the pyramids through a major intersection.
Picked up our guide
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First glimpse of the pyramids from Giza for the day, Sammy, at the gates and went into the site.
I won't go into all the history, but the Cole's notes version is for us to read when we no longer remember. The Giza plateau is mostly identified by the 3 Pyramids built by a grandfather, father and son. The Great Pyramid actually refers to the biggest and oldest one on the plateau (2560 BC), build by the pharaoh Khufu. Stands about 455 feet in height today, build out of roughly 2.3 million limestone blocks. The next one is the pyramid of Khafre, which is technically smaller, but actually sits higher in the landscape because of where it was built. It also has a good chunk of the original limestone casing at the top of it, which originally covered all of the pyramids making them smooth and shiny. The last one is quite a bit smaller built by the son Menkaure. There's also a number of smaller pyramids and tombs within the complex for queens, noblemen and others.
The pyramids are pretty incredible to see in person and as our first site in Egypt an excellent start to the trip. The atmosphere around the pyramids is
a bit like a circus. I had read a lot of forums before the trip and was expecting the worst from touts. In the end we didn't find it too bad and got better at discouraging them as the trip went along. The key was to not even look at what they put in front of your face and completely ignore them. We didn't have very many persistant sellers, but noticed with the other tourists as soon as you showed a tiny bit of interest, you weren't getting away easy.
Going into the day, we weren't planning on doing a camel ride at the pyramids as I had read that is where a lot of scams happen. Basically they would quote you a price, take you out to the viewpoint in the desert, then tell you a different price to get back. But in the spirit of things, we decided to just do the obligatory camel ride and picture in front of the pyramids. Arranged by our guide, we likely paid too much for a 10 minute quite uncomfortable ride. It didn't help that Melissa was too scared to go on her own, so we shared a camel. The
view was amazing, and Melissa was quite happy with the fact that our camel's name was Charlie Brown, and the guy kept saying "Hi Ho Silver". But we've now both ridden a camel, and have no desire to do it again.
After our camel ride, we went back to the van where they took us over to the Sphinx, which is actually a separate entry point. Its much smaller in person than you think, but pretty cool to see. Sammy had Melissa doing the perfect tourist poses for our pictures. One advantage of having your own private guides was the fact we didn't have to ask around to have people take our pictures. Most of the guides would actually want to take our pictures at the key spots, and Sammy enjoyed having us do the goofy poses.
I had told the driver at the start of the day we did not want to shop. That meant no papyrus factory, no perfume factory, no cotton shop, ect. But we did want to get a papyrus picture, and liked our guide, so we agreed to let him take us to a store. After the haggling was done, we
Ramses II
Statue remaining at Memphis site. They built the building around it. walked away with two pieces for about 300 le, about 40% of the first price. I'm sure we still got taken, but it was the best I could do.
After an excellent provided lunch of hummus, bread, rice, potatoes and some meat, we were off to Memphis. Memphis is about 20kms south of Cairo and was the first capital of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and was used as an administration centre in later Kingdoms. Not much remains other than a huge statue of Ramses II and some other statues and relics.
From Memphis we went to the step pyramid (Djoser's pyramid) at Saqqara, which is actually built earlier than the great pyramids. It was part of the evolution of tombs called mastaba's to the true smooth sided pyramids later built. It was our last stop for the day and we headed back to the hotel.
Well, this is where we had a little excitement today. We got our key to our room from the front desk, opened the door and saw none of our stuff there. This early in the trip, Melissa is still pretty well paranoid about everything and figures we've been
Step Pyramid
Officially the pyramid of djoser. robbed blind. Turns out they had made a mistake when I changed some of the booking dates. I emailed a week before to confirm, and they found the mistake. They showed me a copy of the email she sent to me to tell me this, but I never received it. Regardless, all our stuff had been moved to the hotel one floor down, the Horus hotel. So we went down a floor and checked in, Melissa was not very impressed. No longer in a very adventurous mood, we ended up at the Hardees down the street for supper. That ended a very good first day in Egypt.
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