March 19th & 20th Well we are here in Egypt! We started out with a walk around our hotel. You take your life in your hands just to cross the street. No exaggeration here!! We have never seen so much traffic. There are 15 million people in Cairo. The streets are filled with cars, buses, trucks, horse and donkey carts and thousands of taxis. We are staying in an Egyptian Hotel that is clean and comfortable. The people here are very nice and go out of their way to be helpful to us. Saturday morning we did some sight seeing on our own. I bought a pair of sandals for 35 Egyptian pounds (6 pounds to the US $.) and I wore them on the tour to the Pyramids at Giza. What a spectacular sight. We spent the afternoon with Eman our guide and Rakesh Gandhi a young man from India. There are 3 main pyramids here in Cairo. The biggest is the burial chamber of Cheops.
His son Chephren built the second and the third was for his son Menkaure. Around each pyramid are smaller pyramids for the members of the royal families. We took a passageway down into the queens pyramid. The passage way is very tight and you have to hunch over and go down a steep and narrow tunnel to reach the burial chamber.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in, but Rakesh encouraged us to take the challenge. He was right, it was a very interesting experience. After that we climbed up with some other people on one of the small pyramids. Plenty steep and difficult. We were getting some good pictures when we were busted by a policeman. It is against the law to climb on the pyramids and he gave us a scolding. When we asked Eman our guide about it she confirmed that it was forbidden to climb on the pyramids but the Egyptians do it anyway. There is a lookout high above Cairo close by that you could see The pyramids and the Pyramids at Saqqaro quite a distance away. Our next stop was to visit the Sphinx.
That was truly amazing. Eman, our guide, then took us to a papyrus shop and a perfume shop. Anything that is purchased from these locations will benefit her with a commission. Then it was back to the hotel to get ready for the night laser light show of the pyramids and Sphinx.
That was truly amazing. Eman, our guide, then took us to a papyrus shop and a perfume shop. Anything that is purchased from these locations will benefit her with a commission. Then it was back to the hotel to get ready for the night laser light show of the pyramids and Sphinx.
Our hotel was about a 40 min drive from Giza so we just had time to change clothes and head back. The laser light show was absolutely beautiful and certainly a highlight. We wore our polar fleece jackets and were very glad as It was coooooll... We finished of the evening with a dinner of Lebanese food. That was very good !!! It was a full day. Today the 20th of March, we took a Taxi to the "Old City of Cairo". These gates are the same gates that the caravans entered into city some thousands of years ago. You could find just about anything here in the bazaars. They are somewhat similar to Mexico only magnified a thousand times. You could hardly walk, and some didn't...they rode camels, donkeys, or rode on a flat cart that had regular vehicle wheels on it. This area is under major renovation and should be beautiful when finished. We toured a home that was built in the 1600's by a Sultan and his four wives.
They lived in over one hundred rooms. No we didn’t see them all and I'm sure they didn't either. Later as hunger grew, we decided to return to our hotel for some lunch. We hailed a cab and gave him the name of our hotel, but unfortunately he didn’t know our hotel so….we hailed another one, he didn’t know our hotel either. Now it would have been better if we had brought the address with us (big mistake) but we didn't (the un-educated traveler strikes...). In the end a young man called our hotel, received the address and directions and we were underway, a little longer stay of 2 hours, but underway. Tomorrow we go the Egyptian museum in Cairo and then onto Memphis and Saqqaro to see the step pyramid. Following that, we catch the night train to Luxor where we board a cruise ship for Aswan. Not sure when we will post again.