THE PYRAMIDS AT GIZA

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Our trip is full, all couples and all Australian. I’ve been keeping a list of Aussie words and phrases that capture the “strangeness” of their relative isolation from the rest of the English-speaking world. The group makeup also shows Australia’s uniqueness: two Chinese couples, one half-German couple, and one half-Malaysian couple.

We visited the really famous pyramids that are located just outside (across a street!) the city of Cairo mingling with a crush of tourists, Egyptian and foreign. The pyramids are more impressive than the ones we saw earlier, but are crowded with tourists, touts, camels, horses - and with children running in the deep, loose sand as they train for soccer. Tom had his first camel ride. Did you know that there are actually nine pyramids in this area, not just the big three? You can climb down inside some of them, and it’s amazing that the ancient Egyptians were able to build them - the blocks are huge and the construction is absolutely precise. Nothing has been found in these pyramids; they were all robbed thousands of years ago for the gold treasures buried with the pharaohs.

At the end of the long day, we took a night train, this time in first class sleeper cars. They are the nicest train accommodations we’ve found yet on our travels. We came to Aswan in upper (southern) Egypt, where the huge dam was built in the 1960s to protect lower (northern) Egypt from flooding. The Aswan area is home to the Nubians, black Egyptians whose culture was taken over by Egypt thousands of years ago. They speak a separate unwritten language and still seem to feel separate from the rest of Egypt - still a question of their relationship with the “white” (Arab) northern Egyptians. 80% of the country, Egyptian and Nubian, is Muslim and 20% is Christian. Virtually no Jews or other religions.

We spent some time on river boats going to a Nubian village for dinner, again encountering the obvious Egyptian desire to make as much money as possible from the tourists. We ate a good dinner, but then had to put up with a sales pitch for local handicrafts by our trip leader (forbidden by Intrepid!) and the entry of a bunch of kids who were supposed to dance for us but only asked for money and candy. Not good … Oh, and several people (not us, thank goodness!!) got sick afterwards.

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Photos

Giza
They're huge and people are still discussing how they were built. How did they get those huge blocks of sandstone to the site and up to the top of the pyramids?

The Famous Sphinx
No one still knows who shot off his nose.

On the Nile
No matter whether you're in uppor lower Egypt, the Nile dominates.