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Published: January 17th 2006
The first day we all headed off to see... SURPRISE the Pyramids! Turns out they are practically in the middle of Cairo. Well sort of...
After heading to bed early and not being able to sleep (Turkish coffee?) well after my overwhelming previous day several wake up calls ensued. It started with the cat in the hall way, followed by the roosters, the call to Allah at 5am, needless to say I was up when they actually phoned me to get up and go and see the Pyramids.
We went on a bus trip with the most boring Egyptian in Egypt. During his droning commentary that went on all day, and required a microphone for a bus load of 7 people, he took all the interest out of some of the most interesting history in the world! We went to the Pyramids which you can drive right up to. They are interesting because as you drive through the high rise streets of Cairo they just appear out of no where. We took some suitably touristy photos, got harassed by hawkers, and went inside one of the smaller ones. I can now tell you that the Pyramids were made with
sleds. Mystery over.
We then moved onto the Sphinx. This was interesting because they have restored the paws. Nothing else... just the paws. So the poor old Sphinx has a nice set of paws on him, but no nose! The bus trip then moved on to a Papyrus institute and then to the Egyptian Museum.
No photos are allowed in the Museum, but it is completely crammed with the hugest number of ancient artifacts I have ever seen in my life. There were some rather obvious gaps that are owed to other European thief's that refuse to give certain artifacts back. However when you are there you do realise that they may be reluctant to return them out of jealousy. This rather modest museum could fill 10 decent museums with it's contents. It actually borders on ridiculous and I was not all that able to decipher a totally logical order. I saw ancient pots, mummies, mummified fish/crocs/birds, many statues and lots of jewellery.
Most famous of course was the tomb of King Tutankhamen. I saw it all... the famous mask and tomb. It involved a huge amount of gold which I had always assumed to be leaf,
but it is much more solid than that.
For some reason that evening the group was a bit down. I don't know quite why, but I think we were all pretty tired, and possibly it also had to do with the fact that none of us were anticipating having to pay for quite as many extras as we realised that the trip was going to involve. All of the many temples and trips have associated costs, which I was expecting (though they were more than what I was expecting) but they others weren't. Could also possibly have to do with the fact that Cairo was just plain revolting. And I didn't mind Bangkok.
The three Brazilian girls and I went with our tour guide to smoke some apple Shisha (tobacco from a bong) and we all perked up a bit after that and headed off to the sleeper train to Aswan.
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