The bus ride to Cairo was long, hot and boring. There was a lot of Red Sea coast to look at, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen that before. There was also some thrilling checking of our passports at a number of checkpoints, I think Leora counted at least seven of them. We understand from others who’d taken the bus before that this was more than usual, and due to the Taba bombings. Anyway, it was near dark when we reached Cairo, and we didn’t get to our hostel until around seven. All we had the energy to do was find a restaurant along the street and eat before crashing at around nine. Our hostel was fine in terms of comfort, we paid only 15 pounds a night and got breakfast with it, and they had internet access available and TV, but the main reason people stay there is the fantastic location, right on Tahrir Square, one of the main centers in downtown Cairo and a stone’s throw from the Nile. It’s like a five-minute walk across the square to the Egyptian Museum. Usually you have to stay in an upscale hotel if you want that kind of location.
My impressions of Cairo were varied. It’s very urban, but mixed with the agricultural fields centered around the Nile. It’s hazy and dirty sometimes, but mostly you don’t seem to notice it. Leora thought it was like London but with date palms and warm weather instead of cold and fog. It’s also not quite as modern as London, the cars are older, for example. As uncovered and obviously foreign women, walking on the downtown streets got us some stares, but nothing we don’t get in Arab parts of Jerusalem.
On Tuesday we got up and arranged for a cab to take us to the pyramids. Taxis in Cairo, pretty much like Cairo itself in a lot of ways, exist for the purpose of ripping tourists off, so we had to be a little careful. They’ll take you anywhere you want to go, but often suggest going to a slightly different place than you’d originally arranged, and then demand an extra fee, or suggest certain shops or services, like camel riding, to take you to. Even if they say no extra fee, these places are always paying a commission to the driver for taking you, and will jack up your price to cover it. So we got a few of the other people staying in the hostel to suggest a good price, and decided to go with a taxi the hostel arranged for us. The driver, Abdullah, was definitely cheerful, didn’t do any of the crap with suggesting different places, and at first we liked him a lot. He was at least very good at taking pictures for us, and got some of the guards who man the gates where you have to pay entrance fees to lower the fees for us. He did pull the “commission” thing twice, which made us like him less, but he also warned us against the common bakhsheesh scam, which we appreciated. This involves random Egyptians appointing themselves as your “guides” when you get out and see a pyramid or tomb, telling you random things or helping you take pictures, then asking for a tip, or bakhsheesh. We already knew about it to an extent, but you can’t really be prepared for how often it happens sometimes, even with the tourism/antiquities police. Although, there really wasn’t any reason for Abdullah not to warn us against it; he wasn’t going to benefit from these guys getting tips off us. Oh yeah, and Abdullah also stopped and got us some koshari for lunch, an Egyptian favorite that’s kind of like noodles, rice, lentil, chick peas and some garlic-type sauce all mixed together. It was very good (take that, Dad) and we were really grateful for some food at that point, late in our day. So he got brownie points for that.
I sat shotgun most of the time, basically because Leora and Marianna are the worst shotgun players ever, and never remembered to call it. This meant I spent a lot of time sticking my camera out the window when we set out, because I was way excited. Abdullah called me Japanese a lot, and he wasn’t the only one. When any of us whipped our camera out for something, if an Egyptian merchant or someone was nearby, they’d either make a comment in Arabic containing the word Japanese, or tell us the same Japanese-tourists-take-a-lot-of-pictures joke everyone else tells. “Why are the Japanese’s eyes so small?” Yeah, you probably know the answer already. And you probably didn’t laugh, because it’s not really funny. But it’s the only one they knew, and they all wanted to tell it, so it almost became cute after the third or fourth time. We drove by the American Embassy, or rather drove by the police blockades that blocked off about half a block in either direction. Not surprisingly, the Embassy was a suspected target at the time.
Anyway, that was what was going on in the background of most of our “pyramid day,” but the main attractions were of course Saqqarra, Dashur, and Giza, which we visited in that order. Saqqarra is an area just south of Giza, which contains some tombs, a few ruined pyramids, and the famous Step Pyramid of Zoser, which (and I’m getting this off a website) is called so because it’s believed to have been built by a 3rd-dynasty pharaoh of that name. It’s cool to look at from the outside, unlike the other two places we visited, the Pyramid of Unas and the Tomb of Mehe-ka, or Mene-kha, or something like that. The former is mostly a lump of sand not really recognizable as a pyramid, and the latter an unremarkable stone building, but both contain multiple rooms and the coolest real hieroglyphics I saw outside of the Egyptian Museum. They depicted all sorts of scenes from Egyptian life, mostly offerings, and were just fascinating to look at. Some even had their original color left.
There were some tourists clustered around that place, but the bulk of them, and they were a large bulk, were milling around the Step Pyramid. There a small temple with numerous columns that you enter to get to the main courtyard where the pyramid sits, and then you can mostly wander around and look at it from all angles, and look at a statue of Zoser that’s encased in stone with two holes to look through. Definitely a cool place, but noisy.
Dashur, by contrast, barely had more than twenty people besides us. It’s about a 15-minute drive south of Saqqarra, and apparently because of its proximity to a military base, the pyramids were closed to the public for some time. There are only four pyramids left standing, but there used to be more, I think. The paved road leads the largest, the Red Pyramid, and you can turn a right angle around it and take a mile of bumpy road to the unusual Bent Pyramid. Around the back of it is a small, rundown pyramid that isn’t interesting but which you can climb up on and get a good view of the Bent Pyramid in front of you and the run-down Black Pyramid a ways off to your right. The Bent Pyramid, for those who haven’t seen a picture of it before, is really interesting because of the way it starts off as a normal pyramid from the base, but then around halfway up the faces, the angle turns inward, creating a “bent” shape. Beyond that, most of the surface area of the faces remains mostly smooth, making it much easier to imagine what it and all the other pyramids must have looked like when they were still recently built.
After taking pictures all around there we drove back to the Red Pyramid and climbed up the face of it to around the middle, where the entrance is, and then descended the 80-meter long tunnel. The guidebook had said this was not for the claustrophobic, and boy were they right, that tunnel was small. At the bottom, there are two connected rooms with strange roofs that slope upwards in steps, and another room situated higher up (they had to build stairs so people could climb up to it) with the same roof structure. From what I’m told, there are no indications of anyone having been buried there, no writings on the walls, nothing. It was built by Sneferu, father of Khufu, of Great Pyramid fame.
So after that we went all the way back up to Giza, the main tourist haven. I was surprised by how close the city has been extended towards it, although it must take a lot of people close by to run the regular tourist services, which include the long strip of cheap trinket stores that line the road to the pyramids. We had made the mistake of telling the driver we wanted to do a camel ride around them without doing our research on which were the better places around there and telling him a specific one. He took us to one run by a “friend” of his, and although the fact that he got a commission off it bugs me, I’m not as annoyed considering the ride was fun as hell and we had the sense not to accept the guy’s first “deal” of 150E£. We paid a little over half that, which was still likely a lot more than it was worth. My camel’s name was Maradonna. Leora’s was Mickey Mouse. :-)
So the guide took our camels in through a far gate, which had the advantage of coming at the pyramids through the mostly empty desert at the south of Giza. The only signs of modernity taking this route are the buildings lining the main road a ways to the right, and Cairo even farther in the distance. It was great to have the Sahara stretched out to my right, and a big desert plain in front of me leading up to the pyramids, with no roads running through or big groups of tourists crowding around. Earlier, when we were driving west through Cairo towards the Sahara, Abdullah had pointed out the Pyramids of Giza in the distance to us. Now there’s enough haze over Cairo to rival LA, but Marianna and Leora immediately made noises like they saw them, and I didn’t see them at all. Eventually, I realized I hadn’t widened my vision enough. I was looking for tiny bumps in the distance, instead of the large hazy triangles that reached above the skyline and looked like the must be sitting in western Cairo. It’s the same up close. This time you can’t miss them, but you keep thinking you must only be a few hundred feet away from them, they’re that big, when in reality you’re maybe half a mile away and approaching.
Basically, we spent maybe 45 minutes riding around and gawking, before getting off the camels for a bit to see the Sphinx. You enter through the Temple of the Sphinx, located kind of at the upper right paw of it, and it’s really just a very simple room with no ceiling, filled with columns in some pretty stone I couldn’t recognize, and floors covered in it too. This was where the tourists were really packed in, because you can go through a small walkway and come out on a large platform where you get a cool side-view of the Sphinx, from about halfway up it. There are a lot of people bustling around the place, so it makes it harder to enjoy, but it’s still pretty damn cool to look at the millennia-old, nose-less face of this statue you’ve seen so many pictures and cartoons of, and heard so many references to. My camera’s batteries had failed at this point, though, so one day I’m going to have to get the pictures from Marianna. I went into a minor panic when my camera stopped working, figuring that with my luck the pictures might all get erased, but all was fine.
After the camel ride, we went up to the roof of the camel-renting place, where you have a great view of the urbanized area on the eastern side of Giza and the pyramids towering over it all. It was weird to think of how the people who live, work and even go to school here are so used to seeing these things. One guy told us he didn’t even look at them anymore.
We were so dead tired and dirty that we went straight back to the hostel, got cleaned up, and rested for a while, before we got a call saying Rami was on his way to pick us up with an Egyptian journalist friend of his. We knew he was coming to Cairo after we were, but thought it wouldn’t be for another day or so, but it was great that he had access to a car, even if it was his friend’s. Saves so much trouble. We went to get dinner in an open-air restaurant on the Nile banks, and then took a felucca, a little sailboat, out on the river. I didn’t describe it before, but we saw a lot of the Nile banks during the drives to the pyramids, and they’re fantastically green and beautiful. Really huge rows of date palms, fields of crops and a few small neighborhoods line the cheaper area near the pyramids, where there’s a smaller branch of the main river flowing through it, and major five-star hotels and fancy buildings lining the more expensive area of downtown Cairo, where we took the boat out. At night, the river reflects some of the light from the hotels and big ships lining the eastern side, where they have permanent upscale restaurants and clubs set up, and so when you’re just gliding around on a sailboat, the river doesn’t just look black but sparkles a bit, which was what I really noticed. The wind was warm, and it was really, really relaxing.
